Marla Jo Fisher writes the Frumpy Mom column each week.
My 26-year-old son has just started a new job. And, yes, if you insist on counting, this is the 175th job he’s had this year.
This time, he’s driving a delivery truck, so if you see him flinging a package onto your porch with great velocity, please remember that they have to deliver hundreds of packages a day. Seriously. A day. I’m wracking my brain trying to think of an analogy for this, but the only thing I can come up with is “Jeepers. That’s a lot.”
I’m glad to say he’s working. After he got into a horrific scooter crash last year that landed him in a wheelchair and put a metal plate in his wrist to hold it together, he couldn’t work for a year. And when he did go back, he discovered that he wasn’t able to work anymore as a massage therapist, because it turns out that you actually need a non-bionic wrist for that.
He messed around for a bit with different modes of employment. One job started off well, but soon degenerated into sitting in a sweltering hot parking lot all day, yelling at people who tried to park there. Not really his dream occupation, especially for what was basically minimum wage.
Then he worked hard and completed his national personal training certification, which made his Mom proud. He spends every spare moment working out in the gym, so he might as well get paid for it. As I’ve told him all his life, “If you love what you do, you never work a day in your life.”
He got a job immediately at a gym, only to learn that it takes a long time to build up your roster of personal training clients and until you do, you don’t get paid enough to spit in a bucket. (I don’t know what that means either.) This was obviously frustrating to a guy who’s still riding the bus everywhere since his scooter got wrecked.
This might be hard to believe, but after the accident left him bedridden with a broken pelvis, shoulder, ribs, wrist and a collapsed lung, he ended up after 14 months with an insurance settlement of $1,800. Not kidding. For real.
That’s not enough to buy a car, so, yeah, he’s riding the bus and enjoying it ever so much. Our mass transit system around here is just fabulous.
Lack of folding money is why he decided to go for this delivery job, because it’s full-time with overtime thrown in, and he’s a former track runner. For this surrogate Santa job that counts, because he has to sprint back and forth all day, plus toss packages into yards like throwing a shotput. OK, I don’t actually think he’s tossing packages. I’m sure the company frowns on that. But I’m sure he’s still demonstrating champion speed racing skills.
I’m just happy that he has a job and actually wants to work, because there are some young people who seem to do nothing but lie around on their parents’ couches, taking breaks from their exhausting napping by playing video games.
I’m not exactly sure why the parents put up with it. I remember when Cheetah Boy turned 16 and displayed no interest in getting a job, I took the door off his bedroom and told him he wasn’t getting it back until he was employed.
I bullied him into making a résumé, and then I drove him around the mall with a stack of them, telling him not to come out until he had a job. Believe it or not, he got hired the first day, even though he refused to wear a tie as I’d instructed.
Nowadays, kids insist that they can only get jobs by applying online at sites like SnagAJob, but actually, that’s not true. You can still do it the old-fashioned way, by meeting the managers in various stores and then applying online. Or applying online and then dropping by to meet people at the store where you’d like to work. Persistence pays off.
This is tremendously difficult for young people to understand because they just can’t grasp the concept of making personal contacts. They just want to lie around in their pajamas, applying for jobs on their laptops and then complaining when no one calls them.
Curly Girl also went to work when she was 16, and allow me to point out that I have the honor and distinction of having had both of my children fired from the very same Wendy’s restaurant, at different times. I think about this every time I drive past.
Remember, I didn’t say they were perfect. Just that they work. I inherited an electric cattle prod from my rancher father, and they know I’d use it on them if I ever saw them lying around on the couch when they were supposed to be at their jobs.
If you need to borrow it, let me know. Otherwise, I definitely recommend the door removal system. I told one friend about this and she immediately said indignantly how much her son would hate that. Um, yeah. That’s the point. Removing electronics and changing the WiFi password also assist in encouraging productivity.
Let me know how it goes.
Want to contact me? Email me at mfisher@scng.com. I especially love it when you tell me what I’m doing wrong.
