I'm not sure which I started doing first, babysitting or a paper route. I guess I was 12 or 13 when I started doing that. When I was 14 I got a summer job detassling corn. For those of you who didn't grow up in the Corn Belt of the United States, that means you work 12-hour days in the cornfields, pulling tassels off ears of seed corn so they don't cross-pollinate, or something like that. It was a really sucky job and I hated it. Since it was Iowa and it was July it was unbearably hot and humid most days - and when it wasn't it was pouring down rain. I wanted to quit, but I had begged my parents to let me do it so I felt like I had to stick it out so they wouldn't be able to say "I told you so."