TC recently mentioned that her first job was as a checkout chick back in the days when you paid, and got paid, in cash.
My first job was as a paperboy. I’d get up at the crack of too-early-to-be-out-of-bed, ride my bike across town, pick up 100 newspapers, ride to a different part of town, deliver them, then ride home and get ready for school.
Summers were great because between 5 and 6 am was the coolest part of the day so it was a bit of relief from the heat and you could do without a t-shirt in the hottest part of summer and nobody was really there to see you.
Winters weren’t so great because between 5 and 6 am was, as you may have guessed, the coolest part of the day. So yeah… “pretty cold, was it?… yeah..”
I used to rug up in about 4 layers; I’d wear gloves to get to and from places but you needed the dexterity to be able to get the papers out of the bag, fold them and put them in the letterboxes. It made the gloves almost pointless so they got left at home a lot. So some very frosty fingers were not uncommon. I’d get home and mum would run a sink of hot water (I couldn’t turn on the taps by this stage) and I’d stand there, hands in sink, thawing.
And it’s funny isn’t it, that the jobs we had as kids, we use as a yardstick to measure how well kids today do stuff. I bet checkout chicks are always checking that their milk doesn’t get packed on top of the bread; burger flippers make sure no special sauce is leaking from their beef-patty sandwiches; and I… I’m always muttering about the delivery standards of today’s newspaper couriers.
We get the weekend papers delivered. But here’s where I get tetchy because my definition of “delivered” involves placing a newspaper in a receptacle designed for their delivery. I used to painstakingly fold every newspaper one-handed, ride past a letter box and stick it in the round hole, or the little roof part, while I was moving. And if I missed, I’d turn around and go back and do it properly.
Today, it seems “delivered” can be defined as having said object thrown from a moving vehicle, landing somewhere in the vicinity of your abode. With the main papers (Oz, Tiser, Independent) I don’t mind quite so much, as they’re rolled up in that mostly-waterproof plastic wrap. My grudge with these guys though is that whenever a different guy drives the van, we have to hunt for the paper. Living on a corner, I’m never sure if it’s going to be somewhere near the letterbox, by the path at the side of the house or (of all places) way up the back, somewhere near the driveway.
But the worst are the kids that deliver… sorry “deliver” the Messenger (free, crappy, weekly adsheet, full of personals and classified ads and stories about new roundabouts written by work-experience journo students). What irks me is that these kids deliver them on foot, so access isn’t a problem, but they just walk past the house and drop them at the base of the driveway. My driveway isn’t sealed so if it rains, it just gets sodden with mud and water and turns to a big ugly muddy log, resembling a big turd.
To me, this isn’t delivery, it’s just plain littering.
Funny thing is, that because I live on a corner, I get the turd left at the back, on the driveway but another one at the front of the house, put neatly in the little roof part of my letterbox.
Must be two kids doing it… surely.
