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| Written by Jono Cono I love lazy days, or rather lazy weekends. No rushing around, no large amount of chores or errands that need to be attended to. Yesterday I went to Costco and did some shopping, as always I saved lots of money, just the way I like it. The place was nothing short of a human zoo, truly an exercise in patience and navigation. I pulled through okay and came home with my bbq tank full and put it to good use, barbecuing some salmon last night, yum!:d
Today in my state of rest, I think back to not even a year ago when I was delivering the Globe and Mail newspaper as a part time job on the side. I only did it for about three or four months and still wonder how I was able to do it for that long.
I was already working full-time, five days a week, eight hours a day at my “real” job. Delivering papers required six days a week of work and wasn’t so much of an early morning job as it was a middle of the night job. The only day off was Sunday which I normally spent most of sleeping.
Back in my pre/early teens my younger brother had a paper route. Living in a small town it was the sort of route you could either walk or do on your bike. If I recall correctly I don’t think it took any longer than an hour from the time of leaving the house, completing the route and getting back home. Once and a while my mother would try to get me up to help him out (God bless her). No easy task, trying to wake me up is an undertaking best compared to waking the dead. Back then it was hard enough for me to get up for school let alone get up at 5:30 or 6:00 AM to deliver papers.
Now imagine this…my Globe and Mail route consisted of 70km of driving per day (night). I had to get up every morning at 1:30 AM with the help of 3 alarms on my cell phone plus the use of my alarm clock. I would have a coffee and drive to the “drop”. The truck would come in from Montreal every morning somewhere around 2:00 AM with all the papers fresh off the press. After loading up the car it was off to the route, which for me started almost on the completely opposite side of the city. It would take me roughly 3-4 hrs to complete the route and head home. On Saturdays with those massive newspapers it would take longer.
The absolute worst days for delivering papers were the days it rained, a complete nightmare. We were required to roll each and every newspaper and place an elastic around it, this was standard practice everyday. On rainy days this practice was applied with the additional step of bagging each newspaper, a time consuming and mind numbing procedure. You’re sitting in your car surrounded by tons of newspapers choking on the smell of fresh newsprint (you can’t roll down the window as it’s pouring out). There are elastics and bags all over the place, and if you think stacks of newspapers take up room in a car, it’s much worse when they’re all rolled up!:((
Each morning I would arrive home between 6:00 and 7:30 AM, this provided me with enough time for a couple hours of sleep and then it was up and off to the day job. Work all day, go back home and sleep for about four hours and then out to deliver papers. It was a brutal schedule and to make it worse my day job had rotating shifts of which they would not allow me the luxury of one particular shift. These circumstances were inspiration for a poem I wrote during this experience, you can read it here.
I had taken on delivering papers to make some extra money, initially I thought, how bad could it be? It’s basically four hours a day, and those four hours paid me more per hour than my career job. How bad is that? My career job required me to go to school to get a so called education, paying thousands of dollars for said “education, and to have in-depth knowledge on a million different obscure things. Alas as time went on having another job on the side became a compromise of my overall wellbeing, physically, mentally and emotionally. Money isn’t everything and I’d rather be short a couple dollars than live life like that. I yearned to have the time to read a book, go for a walk, watch a movie, hang out with friends, none of which I had anytime to do while working both jobs. Most of all I couldn’t remember what it felt like to have a good night’s sleep, waking fully rested and mentally alert. And so I gave up delivering papers, and have been happy ever since! You should hear about what I was doing on the side before delivering papers, that’s a whole other story which I’ll leave for another day…
It really wasn’t pretty…tired…cranky. At least now you can laze around and you have only the one job. And what a great job it is right…8-| Forget that…you need those two days to sit at home and clear your head of all the junk that goes on during the week. But remember we are “lucky” we still have a job. ;)