My first job was a paper route, a long, long time ago, when I may have been eleven or twelve, but don’t quote me on that. You have no evidence, you can’t prove anything.
At that time there were prepaid subscribers and collect. Something tells me “collect” isn’t an option anymore. At the time, you’d love those prepaid subscribers, because you didn’t have to go to their houses and rough them up for money. No eleven or twelve-year-old kid should ever have to break someone’s fingers for $8.67.
It seems weird to have preteen kids going door to door to collect money for your service, and asking them to leave horse heads on the porches of the deadbeats, but things haven’t really changed. We still ask similar things today of kids much younger, with all these school fundraisers. I’ve been threatened many times by irate second graders. Except in the case of the newspapers, people owed you money, and it was awkward dealing with their evasions. And nobody wanted to see anybody get hurt.
Newspaper delivery is a shady business, conducted under the cover of earliest morning, and I there was a time that I fell under the suspicion of the police. It was a day when I had split up the route with my sister. I had completed my half with deliveries to an outlying stretch of houses and was running home, because it was cold and I wanted to go back to bed, and that’s when the cop car pulled up.
“Hey, Kid. Whatcha’ doin’?” he asked. Probably not like that, but he was curious why I was running and what I was doing out so early. “Paper route, huh? Who is that down there?” He pointed triumphantly at my sister who was about a half block away, and carrying the paper bag, clearly more legitimate-seeming. But he accepted my explanations, and didn’t arrest me as the peeping Tom he was looking for.
That’s it.
What? Maybe you were hoping I’d say something like, “If only he knew I was actually delivering meth for my science teacher, Mr. White?”
Sorry. This is just a little story about a little kid.
But now I have something to deliver to my subscribers today. I’m glad you guys are all prepaid.
