The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #64523 Message #1059526
Posted By: Uncle_DaveO
23-Nov-03 - 04:10 PM
Thread Name: BS: being late for work
Subject: RE: BS: being late for work
When I was an early teenager, I had a morning newspaper route. The rules were that all the papers on the route should be delivered by 5:30 a.m.
To make that schedule I'd have to get up at 3:30 a.m. I'd set the alarm for 3:15. When it went off, I'd reset it for 3:30. At 3:30 I'd reset it for 3:50, and so on. And on. And on. At 5:30 the distribution manager would call me on the phone, which I'd run downstairs to answer, and now I was up I'd get dressed, go get the papers, and deliver them. They would be delivered by maybe 7:15.
This happened EVERY DAY!
I kept wondering why I didn't get fired.
Then I got a summer job in a hospital (6 days a week, 48 hours, and I was 13, but this was during WW2, and any warm body was employable), and gave up the paper route, which I'd been doing for about two and a half years. Just before going-back-to-school time, I happened to run into the newspaper distribution manager who had had to call me all those hundreds of mornings. He asked what I'd been doing during the summer, and I told him about the summer job, and mentioned I was leaving it to go back to school. He asked if I'd like my old paper route back!
I expressed my surprise that he'd be willing to take me back under the circumstances. He said yes, he hadn't been too wild about calling me every morning, but he appreciated that I did get the papers out every day, come hell or high water, torrential downpour, deep snow, or ice (this was in Minnesota), and that I stuck with the job for so long, when he normally had a terrific turnover of paperboys.
Well, the upshot is that I took the paper route back, and he put up with my lateness for another nine months.
There must be a moral there some place.
Dave Oesterreich