job series part 1-deliveries unlimited

today i woke up at 11:00 and distinctly remember looking at the clock and feeling proud for being up so early. I am really painting myself into a corner here;* I mean I can't work at a bar forever but i am working on 5 straight years of waking up around noon so I don't know what would happen if I for some reason started working a nine to five job again.

i have been thinking about work lately so perhaps I should go over every job I ever had as an exercise in making myself write blog entries again and possibly gain insight into potential career directions. Starting with.....


First Job: Deliveries Unlimited: Flyer Delivery

I delivered flyers from age 11 to 15. Our parents had no problem putting their 11 year old twins to work and in fact told us later that paper or flyer routes are a popular way for parents to introduce their children to the expectations and responsibilities of paid labour.
Twice and sometimes 3 times weekly Ben and I would go to every house in our neighbourhood and drop off a flyer bundle we had previously folded together in our rec room while watching television. Sometimes our parents would not let us watch television because we needed to understand that work isn't always fun.
I think we understood.
I believe we received two cent per flyer per house for the first flyer and one cent PFPH for each additional flyer. A typical week would feature flyers from both of the grimsby grocery stores, a couple of randoms, and a Canadian tire flyer which was usually the largest and as such folded in half to make a kind of sleeve for the smaller flyers.
Folding would take between 20min and an hour depending on the quality of television program. Delivery would take between 25 min and an hour each depending on if we were racing and also how stringently we followed the "no lawn" policy.
Best case scenario math for our pay looks something like this:

(one flyer @2c +3@1c)x100 houses/2 underage workers = $2.50 daily wage


The "no lawn" policy would be the first to fall in what would be a series of failed lessons about positively integrating into the working world.
It was simply much faster to walk across the lawns from mailbox to mailbox without travelling back to street level. Eventually this led to hurdling imposing hedges and killing the occasional flower. Since we could never really agree on an equal route our races were kind of pointless but at least out faster delivery time was pushing our hourly wage into the mid 2s.
Following this victory was the blurring about exactly when the flyers were to be delivered.
One was supposed to be on Saturday and one one i think Tuesday but since this was before common Sunday shopping there really should be no difference to the consumers we were delivering to between Saturday late and Sunday morning. In fact once again if the stores don't open until 11 on Monday then Monday morning would be fine as well.
The trouble with this is that if we were delivering on Monday morning (occasionly after school) then we were just 24 hours (occasionally 14) away from going right back out with our Tuesday mid-week flyers.
While it took longer to fold in all of the weekend and Tuesday flyers together into one weekly superbatch we were of course cutting our weekly delivery time in half(it was already going pretty well since we had grown into the ability to vault shorter fences). So far so good but would we learn a workplace lesson about (sometimes literal) shortcuts?????

Kind of... then not at all.
Now in toronto if you were to take a cross section of houses you would probably find that at least half would have a "no flyers please" sign. In my route there was exactly one "no flyers" sign (we were told to deliver to them anyway) and it seemed like the rest of our lower-middle to middle class homeowners seemed actually excited to be receiving information about the various deals offered to them from grimsby's Big 4 (Can tire, IGA, Dominion, and Shoppers). We shouldn't have been surprised when a shopper from our area called deliveries unlimited to complain that her weekend flyers had been routinely arriving the following Thursday. There was actually a few complaints and it seemed like they always came from the same houses. The epiphany came one Saturday when Ben and i wanted to go play baseball and were just about to screw over Saturday flyers in favour of Tuesday-Thursday superflyers when we remembered that 32 lakeside had been complaining so we figured at the very least we should drop off a flyer set to them and a couple other squeaky houses and then the rest we could drop at our leisure.

We didn't actually have a hard copy list of houses that "needed" to receive flyers as much as we had a rotating system of service which provided some of our pickier clients %100 service while averaging near %30 for others. I was too young to really understand that I was having a moral dilemma but sometimes I would deliver as many as %75 of my entire assigned houses because it felt like the right thing to do.
I remember our mother finding nearly 400 Tuesday/Saturday flyers in our garbage one time but have blocked out her reaction. We met the kid who was in charge of the neighbourhood next to ours when he was dumping the flyers for his less complainey residents in an unused cement storm drain. With 45 houses and only 1 complainer he explained that his main concern was that the drain would eventually fill up.
I can still picture Ben and I and that kid looking down the dark storm drain trying to make out how high his flyer pile had gotten- The three of us making a combined $30 per week yet somehow not earning it.


Next week : Danger Boy in the Kitchen.




*i pretty much just jam in semi-colons randomly so apologies to anyone who attended grade 7 or higher.