April 11, 2007
Of Lord of the Flies & Paper Routes

Bad jobs.  One does their best to keep a positive outlook alive and well in the cranium but come springtime it’s a goal not always attainable.  As in when pushing a lawnmower. 

Lawnmowers, irrigation sprinklers, tamarisk removal, dandelion eradication and the resulting itchy eyes, stuffed nose and constant “kachoo-ing” combine to cause my personal “Bah Humbug” to be saved for April and the dreaded (seemingly only by me) first signs of spring.  

Not that today’s meanderings are going to result in another Maynard kvetch about distaste for the chain gang like drudgery of yard toil causing one to miss, or at least delay, experiences unique to our pretty part of the world.  Coming immediately to mind are late afternoon golf, early morning pedals to Palisade, solitary workouts in the gym (everyone else is doing yard work), monument hikes up the Serpents trail, spring skiing and morning jogs around the Connected Lakes.    

Last week, sneezing and weeping my way through another weekly grass cutting, and don’t give me any “oh you poor baby,” lip as I’m well aware the mow-able landscape at our abode is so minute it might take twenty minutes on a slow day, irregardless of time span, pushing a lawn mower ranks high on the crummy job list. 

It’s also true I’ve had very few really, really bad jobs.  First off thirty years in radio meant three straight decades of avoiding heavy lifting.  Summer jobs in college involved the usual, working on a railroad section gang, running a jackhammer for a road construction company plus waiting tables and bartending.   

The most unusual of the short-term occupations involved laboring in the freezing room of a Rock Island, Illinois ice cream plant.  The dead of summer found me in 40 below temperatures stacking cases of ice cream that arrived in the freezing room on a conveyor belt direct from packaging plus loading the ice cream trucks heading out to make their deliveries. 

Originally I was a bit offput by what promised to be not the best of working environments but it became quickly apparent the boss truly detested cold.  Talk about a stress free workplace, you’d be amazed how short boss/employee conversations are when the head man is wearing a short sleeved shirt, you’re snugly dressed like an Antarctica explorer and the temperature is 40 below.  

But in my memory bank the all time worst job involved having a newspaper route.  No, not the actual after school paper delivery, it was the every Saturday spending hours trying to collect.  Today’s dailies just send out a bill. 
Decades ago it was the paperboy doing the receivables, weekly. You can’t fathom the lengths people would go to avoid coughing up 35 cents.   

Late in the educational process the assignment was to read “Lord of the Flies”.  This was followed by a class discussion of the book’s central theme, humankind, when left to its own devices, is the pits. 

I expressed the opinion it wasn’t necessary to wade through a novel about young British snots stranded on an island where they kill pigs, each other and set the woods on fire just to prove mankind was pond scum.  Anyone who ever collected for newspapers was well aware of the fact.  Evidentially the prof hadn’t a paper route in her history.   She gave me a C-.