COLUMN: Working Can Be a Job

By Tobin Barnes
Rocky thought it’d be a good summer job for me.
   
He was more than right. It was perfect. And it would continue to be perfect for four summers when I was a kid. But I didn’t know it yet.
   
Rocky, a local car dealer, and my old man were buddies. They’d known each other from boyhood. My old man liked Rocky because Rocky remembered when my old man was a great athlete even though everyone else had forgotten or never cared.
   
My old man also liked Rocky because he was a BSer just like him. Neither could out-BS the other no matter how much they tried. And, man, they tried. But it was a draw, except in one area.
   
My old man would drop in at Rocky’s office on a whim, and they’d go at it...verbally.  It’d be thick and heavy, and it’d be about everything, whether they knew anything about it or not. I’d sit there amazed, dazzled at their total lack of regard for facts.
   
Only advantage one had over the other that I could ever see was that sometimes my old man would end up driving off Rocky’s lot with a new car. My old man always thought he was getting a deal, and Rocky always knew he wasn’t.
   
Gotta admit, though, Rocky did steer my old man into the best deal of his life. Talked him into leasing a motel. That’s when my old man was quitting his latest job, so he was desperate, didn’t know what to do. Didn’t have any money to do anything other than look for another job.
   
Rocky said he ought to lease this motel. The motel was owned by Rocky’s old man’s corporation. Rocky’s old man was loaded, but he needed someone to take on a motel.
   
Now my old man at the front desk of a motel wasn’t a picture you’d envision if you knew him. He was a big, burly, barrel-chested, former pro football player with a buzz haircut and usually a day or two’s growth of beard, who sported bibbed, striped, Osh Kosh B’Gosh overalls and a white t-shirt. Sometimes, on a hot day, he didn’t wear the t-shirt.
   
My old man standing at the counter of a junk yard with a mangey, nicked-up, wild-eyed dog at his feet would have made sense. My old man charming guests at the front desk of a motel three blocks north of “The World’s Only Corn Palace”? Not so much.
   
But, huh, it worked. Turned out that traveling salesmen (no joke coming here) liked to BS, too. Who would have thought? And it also worked because my mom was there to handle the details.
   
I was only seven at the time, but that was the beginning of my work-a-day-world. There would be many chores I would perform around the place.
   
For example, a box of printed hand-bills advertising the motel had been left in the office. My old man thought they shouldn’t go to waste, so he had me take a goodly stack every day three blocks south to “The World’s Only Corn Palace” and put them under the windshield wipers of tourist cars.
   
It was an ignominious job for a shy kid. I soon discovered that travelers didn’t necessarily want some strange little kid putting stuff on their cars. But although I got shooed away plenty, I’m sure there was a tourist or two who upon reading the hand-bill said, “Gee, Marge, now that we’ve enjoyed looking at the world’s only corn palace so much, let’s drive three blocks north to this fine motel.”
   
But only a tourist or two. Thankfully, there wasn’t enough evidence to justify the cost of another printing, so this excruciatingly painful introduction to the world of work mercifully ended.
   
Blessed, little, parochially instructed innocent that I was, it never occurred to me that I could have just as well tossed that stack of ads every day, waited an hour or two somewhere enjoyable, and then showed up back at the motel afterwards.
   
Nope, I was destined to be a truthful, respectful, and responsible worker there at the motel and in my future perfect summer job that I will surely get to next time. But, then, truthfully and respectfully? Maybe not.