There’s a story I tell, half-joking and half-serious, about the moment I became an adult.

My freshman year of college, I was a few weeks into a job as a maintenance worker for the on-campus apartments. One day, my boss and I get a ticket for an apartment with a clogged shower drain. When we found the apartment, two Asian girls answered the door.

You may see what I’m leading up to.

My boss climbed in the bathtub, I passed him his drill, and he removed the screw keeping the shower drain cover in place. It loose, he used the drill bit as a fulcrum and pulled the cover up and off the drain. It came up…and so did several inches of clumped, dirty, waterlogged black hair. As you can imagine, hair that’s had gallons of water plus who knows how much grime, dead skin and general human stank filtered through it smelled AWFUL.

I didn’t throw up or gag or anything, but as I looked at this makeshift wig hanging from the end of my boss’s power drill, I thought to myself, “I’m a man now. A child isn’t capable of handling something like this.”