MINNEAPOLIS–At a Monday meeting concerning second-quarter double-sided-tape sales, 3M account manager Rick Belbol fondly recalled the day he and his college roommates spent the day hanging out on the roof of their house.
“You know what this weather always reminds me of?” Belbol, 28, said to a group of account managers and coordinators. “This great day when me and a bunch of my buddies climbed up onto the roof and spent the whole day just drinking beer and cranking U2 and soaking up the sun. Man, that was awesome.”
Staring past the product-order spreadsheet in his hand, Belbol, a 1993 graduate of the University of Minnesota–Duluth School of Business, pieced together the details of the day for the benefit of his coworkers.
“It was sometime around the beginning of summer, after the end of the school year, probably May or June,” Belbol said. “It was definitely ’92, because Chris and Steve-O were there, and they graduated a year before me. Plus, I remember that Achtung Baby, which I think came out in late ’91, was still pretty new at the time, and we were playing it non-stop. But whenever it was, we were nuts to have gone up there, especially considering how drunk off our asses we were by the time those cops passed by and told us to get down.”
“That was a great house we had over on Grant Street,” added Belbol, who for the last several weeks has worked 12-hour days updating the 3M database of wholesale-distributor orders to Microsoft Access 2000. “We had the entire second floor to ourselves.”
Belbol, along with wife Sara and their 9-month-old son Aaron, lives in a condominium in Pinewood Hills, a recently built subdivision in the Minneapolis suburb of Eden Prairie.
“We were all being total wise-asses, yelling shit at people as they walked by and trying to get girls to come up and join us,” Belbol said. “These three girls in bikini tops almost came up, but then they got scared off when Jake made some stupid crack about having a gang-bang. We were like, ’Jake, you fuckin’ idiot!’”
According to Belbol, the roommates could only access the roof by climbing out the kitchen window and boosting themselves up using the ledge of the neighboring house. Despite the difficulty, he and his friends managed to get a number of items onto the roof that day, including two cases of beer, three lawn chairs, and a set of speakers still connected to the living-room stereo by 25-foot wires.
“We ordered pizza and made the delivery guy hand it out the window to us,” said Belbol, who worked for two years at Smart Solutions, a St. Paul direct-mail-marketing firm, before joining the 3M team in 1995. “I also remember that the next day, everybody was so totally sunburned. Especially Pete.”
“We had these big plans how we were going to get a throwaway couch and hoist it up there so we could hang out up there all the time, but we never ended up doing that,” Belbol continued. “In fact, I don’t think we ever even went up there again. I don’t really remember why.”
According to Belbol’s coworkers, this is not the first time he has recalled an idyllic day from his college years.
“I’ve heard tons of them, like the weekend everyone went rock climbing, the time he and Chad skipped out on their big Statistics 140 exam to go to the Twins home opener, and the time he quit his part-time job at the grad library just to spend the day with a girl he’d met the night before at Bullwinkle’s,” promotions manager Dale Rogers said. “And I’m sure there’ll be plenty more to come.”
Belbol ranked the hanging-out-on-the-roof day second on his list of college memories, bested only by the time he and about 20 other people piled into the back of a rented U-Haul truck and drove to a BoDeans concert in Fargo.
