"It was fun and a good learning experience, but I really appreciate what I do now," Landry said. "Not to say that it's a bad job or anything like that, but you'd much rather do something that you're having fun doing."
Fun wasn't the adjective Ngata would have used to describe his work with his father. Ngata said his dad would wake him at 4 a.m. some days to get into the truck and drive to an assignment. After returning to the house at 6 p.m., Ngata would have just enough energy to eat dinner and crawl into bed before repeating that routine the next day.
But Ngata said the monotony of the workday was outweighed by the amount of quality time he got to spend with his father, who died in a December 2002 truck accident.
