The summer after I graduated high school, I held down a job working in the radiation exposure monitoring division of a large company. That sounds like the sort of cool, sci-fi job that would entail frequent visits from Iron Man, but it was quite the opposite. You know how when you get x-rays your dentist puts a lead apron over your goodies and then runs out of the room to turn on the Cancer-Tron 5000? When he does that, he’s wearing a badge that measures radiation exposure which he would mail in to us at the end of the month. We’d process it, then either tell him that he was in the clear or that his kids were going to be born with flippers. We were like a Fotomat booth for the medical industry. Continue reading