Barrett Cruz-Chesnut

I currently work at the Ace Hardware store in Staples, Minnesota. I mainly do everything I did previously at the Frattallone's Ace Hardware store in Minnetonka, Minnesota. The reason I am working here currently is so I can make some money while I go to college for the heavy equipment operations and maintenance program at Central Lakes College, which also happens to be located in Staples, Minnesota.

I started working for Lake Area Roofing and Construction/Crane Service once I graduated from high school. Mainly because, at the time, they were re-roofing the very high school I just left. So I started off mainly laboring, shoveling rocks, and fetching materials to complete the project that needed to be done. About halfway through that project, I moved down to the ground and started helping the crane operator set up the crane and hook up materials, such as polyisocyanurate (ISO), otherwise known as roofing insulation; ethylene propylene diene monomer (EPDM), a type of rubber; and other various palletized materials to send up top to finish the roof. As weird as this sounds, for the majority of the time, I stayed in the dumpster as the crane operator landed bags to me to be unhooked, full of the old roof material that we just tore off of the old roof. The main reason I was in the dumpster is that I would organize everything, making sure there were no air gaps between materials, so that we would maximize the space in the dumpster to make sure we got our money's worth. Shortly thereafter, I started running the forklift on-site, offloading trucks, and organizing materials so we knew where everything was. Once I got my class A commercial driver's license, I started running trucks as well whenever it needed to be done.

I started working at Frattallone's Ace Hardware midway through my junior year in high school. At the time, I did not know much about products, or really anything going on, because that was, in fact, my first actual job. As I progressed with product knowledge and work experience, I moved away from the cashier's till and stocking items. To primarily working in the shop, which mainly consisted of repairing screens and windows, along with cutting various bulk items for customers. Shortly after that I started to run forklift offloading mainly palletized items off of both flatbed and dry van truck and trailers.