The Ides of Spring Break


School's out this week and Luc took his family up north to Quebec for a vacation where they still have some snow.

When Dan called to reactivate my paperboy status as Luc's replacement he mentioned that there had been a few changes: they've doubled their customer list to over 300.

"Don't worry, Uncle Jim," he reassured me. "I pretty much deliver all the papers now. You just have to drive and bag."

Indeed, at 15 Danny's developed some long legs. He's already 6'2" and still growing. Luc, an uncle on his mother's side of the family, was having a hard time keeping up. It turned out to be faster for Dan to do almost all the running.

In order to keep their respective earnings equitable they added a large country route to the one town and two suburban circuits they already service. Unlike those routes, the new one doesn't require door to door delivery. Instead they throw the papers from the truck onto the driveways of their customers. So Luc has a lot more papers to bag while Dan gets to sit down for half an hour.

I'm not as fast a bagger as Luc, probably because I have too many fingers. (He lost the four on his right hand in a punch press accident in his first job out of high school.) To compensate we start a bit earlier, getting on the road just after 5 a.m. Which felt like 4 a.m. because of the recent switch to daylight savings time.

Sleep has been a problem, partly because I was in Toronto last week, keeping rather late hours. And then there was an incident yesterday which kept me up all night.

Just after midnight I got a call from one of my other relatives. He'd been in a car crash and wanted me to meet him at the hospital. I could hear over his cell phone the arrival of the police and paramedics. I told him I was on my way and to go get help.

It took half an hour to get to the hospital in Windsor, imagining all the while the worst case scenarios. As it turned out he'd suffered a nasty cut on his forehead that took 20 stitches to close. The people in the other car weren't hurt, although there was a lot of damage to both vehicles. After a few hours I was told he was going to be okay so I headed home. At which point I discovered that I had in my haste grabbed the wrong keys and locked myself out of my apartment.

Dave, Dan's father, has a spare key to my place, but I didn't want to wake him up at 3 in the morning. Instead I parked at Luc's and waited for the papers to be dropped off. Then I bagged for an hour until Dan showed up. I was a bit disappointed this only enabled us to shave 20 minutes off my best time. They really have discovered the most efficient way to get the job done.

Posted: Thu - March 15, 2007 at 09:12 PM          

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