00:00.75 archpodnet Hello and welcome to the crmarcheology podcast episode 266 for June Fourteenth Twenty Twenty three I'm your host Andrew Kinkella on today's show we talk about your host Andrew Kinkella it's all about me. And my life in crm so prepare to laugh prepare to cry and prepare to maybe learn something because the crm archeology podcast starts right now. So welcome to the show. Everybody. Joining me today is nobody. Yeah I am solo and going it alone. So if you're a fan of Chris or you're a fan of Bill. You might be a fan of Doug or you might be a fan of Heather now. Not for you today. Just me so why am I gonna do this well every so often. The co-hosts. You know we might need a moment where we can't record and Chris couldn't quite make it today. So I thought you know what. I'll just do a solo show and I hope in the future that some of the other co-hosts do this as well and what I'm going to do is just go through my experiences in crm archeology they are very. 01:33.47 archpodnet It's a chunk of my life that has a fairly precise beginning middle and end and I thought we could just go through it and learn as we go I'll point out good things that happen to me bad things that happen to me. And kind of what I learned from it as I went through this experience I really do enjoy looking back on that time and I know for a lot of us. We can be kind of grizzled and kind of negative about some of this stuff and you know what I mean but. There are even parts that I miss you know and I am not here to say that Crm has left my life forever because I think honestly it probably hasn't because if we look at jobs. There is going to be a lot more jobs in the coming decade in crm um, and ever less in academia and in that part of the world. So just to jump in what is my life in serum. Well I would divide it up into 3 chunks. Um, the first chunk was at the end of my bachelor's degree experience and I'll give the years of this too because sometimes it actually matters I graduated in 9095 with my bachelors from. 03:02.64 archpodnet You see Santa Barbara and even by then I'd had some experience and it was largely because of a professor of mine who taught crm focused archeology classes. He had a field school that was on Saturdays only and so for my own students I've copied a bunch. From how he taught so I got that skill set in college which was really something that gave me a push forward or an edge on other people I also worked in the archeology lab on campus and this was. A crm angled 1 I got paid while I worked in the lab so me and my fellow students got this really really good experience on top of all that the university at the time was connected to some projects that were. Basically crm projects and so the students could kind of work into that world. So after I graduated I was able to get jobs just based on connections I'd made in class. So that was really great and that was my sort of first stage of Crm which was the learning of that stuff and then my first jobs now I sort of marked this my first stage out of 3 because I had a lot of downtime. 04:34.90 archpodnet So this is in the years when I'm in my what like early to mid 20 s um I was a lifeguard at a local swimming pool I had just sort of odd jobs. The kind of jobs you have right out of college but every so often I would get like a two week C R M gig and in that time it was largely at like local military bases. The gig I think my first gig it's so funny I can't remember my first job. But I think it was at vandenburg air force base and. Which is for those of you who don't know maybe an hour north of Santa Barbara and ah a while after that I also got a job at Camp Pendleton which is the military base down by San Diego it's just north of San Diego so my first forays into crm were on big projects. And excavation shockingly enough, you're like what because usually or often I should say I think we get into Crm we get hired and then our first job is monitoring or something like that. So I kind of went in a backwards way. I was on big projects that were full on excavations. It was very much into Shell Midden and that kind of thing it was long back breaking work and I remember doing as much as a meter a day which is crazy ten centimeters at a time 06:05.83 archpodnet And at the end of the day digging a meter. You know it was a hot tiring I remember at the end of my first day I just collapsed into my hotel room. Basically I remember falling asleep at the foot of the bed I was actually sitting on the floor. At the foot of my bed kind of watching Tv and I just fell asleep for hours just sitting with my head on the side of the bed. So I was really exhausted but as you guys know you get into it. You get into the groove and. Really liked in those early days that I was able to sort of learn the skill set and also get over some of the fears I remember being so afraid my very first day on the job like oh my god I don't know enough. Oh my god am I going to be able to handle this. But. Fairly quickly I realized oh ok, this is very doable as I think many of us. Do we kind of survey the scene right? and you go ok. Ok I fit in here because unfortunately sometimes you'll see fellow crew members are maybe not that with it. You know and not that professional and that's the first thing I learned be a good employee do the basic stuff like get there on time. Be clean now I know you don't have to wear a tuxedo right? We know that but like be presentable. You know what? I'm saying. 07:38.62 archpodnet Shave sometimes you know what I'm saying ah be ready for the job right? have enough water to drink have your lunch ready have your paperwork have a good idea of where the day is going to take you and be ready for that day and I know it sounds cliche. But. I learned early on on those jobs at those military bases where hey if I can just be professional and get up on time and be ready and also be generally a jovial positive addition to the crew. I can go a long way and I do think that the crew chiefs and the people above me didn't notice that I wasn't over the top I wasn't like some go gitter all the time. But I think they just noticed that I was solid and I did good work. You know and. So that helped because even in those earliest days I remember being asked to stay on and you guys know how this goes that first job was maybe in the in the fall. Let's say so it was in the fall I mean I had 1 or 2 tiny jobs in like 1995 by 1996 had this one that was that was maybe in the late fall and I was asked to stay on to work in the lab. So that's like more pay you stay on longer you're part of like the elite lab crew and then I worked in the lab which happened to be in downtown Santa Barbara that experience was very tough. We were really we were in there. 09:10.49 archpodnet All day just weighing and sorting shell. It was. It was pretty damn brutal I would say it was one of the worst jobs I've ever had in archeology. Oddly it was one of those companies where they had barely any. Basic field people like me and my friends there were only 4 of us in the lab but they seem to have a lot of higher ups in the office and it seemed like all the higher ups in the office did was spend time figuring out how fast we were going and i. Got to the point even in my young brain where I was like why don't you guys stop doing this and get a seat next to me and sort some shell to and I had that job maybe for a couple weeks and then at the end I remember getting fired. And this is also what happens to all of us inerre now not fired in a bad way just like hey don't come in next week kind of thing and I remember that the higher ups who came in to talk to us made up some Bs story. It was like dude just tell us you don't have enough work. They ah so at that point they only kept on 2 people. So I was able to make it all the way through looking good on the crew good enough to be working in the lab. But then I wasn't quite good enough at the very very end I didn't make the final cut right? I was in the final 4 but I didn't make it to the final 2. 10:38.64 archpodnet And I think they made it so the 2 who actually still had the job had to lie to us and say they were fired too and I ran into one of them a couple weeks later and he was going to the job. You know it was just it's so silly. There's another learning experience just be honest just be honest people appreciate honesty um like I would have totally got it if they were like hey look ah the work is dwindling because I knew it was dwindling. We all knew it was dwindling. You can see the baggies of shell get smaller. So. I got let go which was fine and that overall experience was ah was one of a lot of learning after that again I had other gigs I would get these like ah 10 on and 4 off gigs for maybe two weeks maybe three weeks but then that would be it. Like six months will go by and I wouldn't have it at all. So again, this first stage which really takes me through maybe 1998 or 1999 the first you know, fourish years of my Crm experience was just nothing nothing. Nothing. Oh hey, there's two weeks you want to come. But it was it. It was a time of learning I remember going out to blythe which is on the border of California and Arizona on a survey so this wasn't ah excavation I'd already done that in in the sierm world and that's great. So now I got to do survey in the cerm world. 12:07.67 archpodnet This was desert survey. It was between blythe and Yuma Arizona and again I think I was out there for two weeks you know maybe two and a half something like that. It was short but that was a great learning experience too and it was more the same of like just be professional beyond time know what you're doing. Um. Work well with the crew members. So ah I really again learned learned a lot on that. How to even just pace yourself in a desert environment. You know you have to kind of come up with that pace. That I think we all know who have done it. You can't start out super fast. You will just wear yourself out. You start to learn how to conserve your body in various serum worlds. So after that. I got to the point in my life where I'm like you know what? I think I'll stay in this world I think I'll get a master's degree and so I started my master's degree right around that time too and so there's 2 years there Ninety Eight Ninety Nine or so where I was really in school a lot so I didn't really do too much crm. But then near the end and we all know this if we've gotten ah a master's degree. There's the point after you take your classes where you're only working on your thesis and so you have a lot of free time and so at that point which was let's say it's in early two thousand I was like all right I need money. 13:41.13 archpodnet Umm, going to go into crm like full time. So I cold called one of the crm firms a new one that I hadn't worked for before by that point I'd worked for several firms and I kind of knew that I preferred small firms to big ones. At that point in my career now. There are pluses and minuses to both of those and I think we've even done entire shows on this podcast. You know the big firm versus the small firm There's there's a lot there to kind of unpack and discuss. So. I'm not saying that small firms are best or whatever. But for me at that time in my career. A small firm was better. So I'd heard really good word of mouth about this one firm and I just cold called them and I was like hey so I'm an archeologist you know. I'd like to send you my resume and I was wondering if you had any work and foolishly I started to brag about oh and I've worked in Belize you know 5 times or whatever I had at that point. Ah because that's what my academic masters thesis and all that kind of stuff was on. I think I just kind of had that on my brain a lot and they were like yeah that's great and all but ah, do you have any local experience. You know and then I'm like oh yeah, and then I talked about my cm experience and specifically my experience back at you see Santa Barbara with my professor and that it was. 15:11.15 archpodnet I can tell you it was the professor's name that I could drop plus that I'd had several field experiences and that's what got me into the door and they were like yes and your resume and then soon after I was in it right? That was the second. Stage of my 3 stage cm process where at this point I'm a full time crm archeologist I for about 2 years there that was 40 hours a week plus overtime depending and this was monitoring. So I came to monitoring a bit later now in terms of what that job was like and what I learned we'll talk about that when we come back.