Even if you don’t believe in fate, it certainly is funny how
life works out sometimes.
Hollister – Even if you don’t believe in fate, it certainly is funny how life works out sometimes.
One day when he was 18 years old, Shane Parks was driving home from basketball practice in his truck, a standard transmission 1982 Toyota 4X4.
“That truck was about as old as I was at the time,” he laughed.
Coming up to a stop sign on a hill, he stopped – or at least he thinks he did – rolled backwards a bit, and continued on his way.
“I don’t know where the cop was hiding, but he saw me and said I ran the stop sign. I still don’t think I did. If I rolled back, I must have stopped first, right? Anyway, he gave me a ticket,” Parks said.
Parks, who was studying sports medicine at a community college in Fairfield at the time, was forced to get a job to pay for the ticket.
He soon found a job at the Lennox china store in nearby Vacaville.
“I don’t know what made me walk in there in the first place, but I did and I got a job,” he said.
When he started off as a part-time sales rep, “I thought I was only going to work there for like a week (to pay off the ticket),” he said. But six months later, Parks was promoted to assistant manager. Six months after that, he was promoted to manager of the Lennox Gilroy outlet store.
Now, at 24 years old, he’s been the manager of the Gilroy store for four years, and is raising a family in Hollister. He and his wife, Jennifer, just had their first child, a son named Jacob, in August. In the next few years, they’d like to have a daughter as well.
In the meantime, Parks sees himself staying with the job he had originally gotten to pay off a traffic ticket.
“I enjoy it. I get to work with people and make my own schedule, and I make good money. I’ll keep working there as long as they pay me more than anyone else does,” he said with a grin.
Jessica Quandt is a staff writer for the Free Lance. Reach her at 831-637-5566 ext. 330 or at [email protected].
