My First Job: Aaron Adelstein, executive director

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March 4, 2007

My First Job: Aaron Adelstein, executive director

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Aaron Adelstein

Current position: Executive director, Built Green of King and Snohomish Counties, a nonprofit organization that promotes environmentally friendly homebuilding practices.

First job: My first job was in the construction trades, and it was brutal. I was the grunt worker on a house-moving crew. I'd take a sledgehammer and bash a hole in the house foundation big enough to crawl through. Then I'd crawl through that hole and, amid the spiders and other crawl-space detritusis, I'd dig a level 4-by-4-foot pit while lying down. Finally, I'd haul railroad ties and a hydraulic jack through the hole and set them up in the pit so the house could be lifted off the foundation and moved.

How I got the job: A family friend owned the company. I've never forgiven him – or let him live it down.

What I learned: The first thing I learned was that I didn't want to spend the rest of my life digging holes in crawl spaces. I also learned that there's nothing wrong with a little hard work. Good time management can take you a long way, unless you want to spend more time than you need to hanging out with dust and spiders.

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