Merle Wayne Sneed's History of Employment - Part 1

 

 This praying mantis stopped by for a visit this morning.

 Mrs. Sneed's retirement has given me cause to recollect some of the jobs that I have had and some of the stupid stuff that has happened at those jobs.

The first real job that I had was house-to-house delivery for a small newsletter that my father wrote and edited.  My brother and I delivered the newsletter once a month to several hundred homes in our neighborhood.  My father was very specific that each copy be inserted behind the storm door of each house.

I don't know how much my dad was paid for writing, editing and assembling the newsletter, but I know that my brother and I made $4 a month for handing it out.  Two bucks each, which we thought was big money in 1961.

One downside to this job was that if you didn't finish delivery on the appointed Saturday and thought that you were going to the baseball game in Omaha with your friend Frank and his family, you weren't.


I had a job as a fill in paper boy for a kid who lived down the block from me in Bellevue, NE.  I would take the route when he went of vacation or was sick. 

Mostly what I recall about that job was dragging a sled loaded up with the Omaha World-Hearald through the bitterly cold darkness Christmas morning 1962.  The papers kept toppling over and off the sled and I had to constantly stop to pile them back on.

The World-Hearld had a policy that every paper get delivered to every porch, which meant slogging up every front stoop, which sucked.

The regular paper kid was gone to Denver over the Christmas holiday and I filled in for two weeks.  Some families took trips and some families had dads who spent potential vacation money on beer, leaving his kid available to deliver papers.

I scored way more in Christmas tips than I was paid for delivering the papers.   The regular kid asked how much in tips I received and deducted my very low estimate from my pay when we settled up.

The regular kid came to our house one night right after the new year, and said that his dad said there should have been more tips than I claimed.  He was under the mistaken belief that I had money to give him.  I didn't.

My dad, who no doubt had a six-pack or two in him, told him to get lost and send his dad down if he had further complaints.

Of course, my days as a fill-in paper boy were over, but that's okay because we moved to Hooterville a couple of months later.


Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgmental and cranky