the paper route

As per my post about my newspaper route that I had as a preteen, I couldn’t resist this Tyee story featuring excerpts from the book Wages by John Armstrong.

This story describes the pain and suffering of his preteen experience of enduring a newspaper route forced upon him by his mother. I can totally relate to awakening each morning after a night of fearful sleep in anticipation of what lay ahead at the crack of dawn: travelling through rain, wind, biting cold, sludging through muddy pathways, slipping on icy patches, wading through knee-high snowfalls and rushing home to get ready for school, all before 7 a.m..  I was not one of the lucky children who had parents chauffeur them in a cozy, heated car to and along their route. No, I had to do it all on foot with a noisy metal cart dragging behind me. The sparks ignited by the wheels as they scraped the cement provided no extra warmth or speed to get home faster. And being a 15-year-old girl in the 80s, I needed sufficient time to blow-dry my feathered hair and apply blue shadow up to my eyebrows. This was more important than quality newspaper delivery service, but it was enough stress to cause fortuitous panic attacks. I have recurring nightmares to this day that I awake late and miss deliveries.

Now Armstrong understands my pain. Unlike him though, I did manage to get fired. I guess the slave drivers at The London Free Press took their customer service more seriously, and also because the very last customer on my long, winding route was one of their managers waiting with his stopwatch timed for 7 a.m. sharp for the precious paper to be placed gently on his doormat while I bowed down to his arrogance. If it came one minute later, he was on the phone complaining to my supervisor. I had his paper delivered no later than 7:04 a.m.

Although Armstrong’s tale captures all of the gloom and anxiety involved in a carrier’s career including mid-route fear-induced bowel attacks (which thankfully did not happen to me), he didn’t mention the creepy homeless people and staggering drunks coming home from partying the night before that would try to steal your papers or make bumbling conversation with you. And there were people who would run out of their homes across the street from where your bundles lay and steal a paper before you got there, which of course, you’d get blamed for not delivering. I’d have to choose which unlucky customer would not receive his paper that day – it had to be a different one each time. There was no way I’d leave it for the stop-watching bitter employee who had to get his paper dry and pre-warmed, his favourite sections cornered, ready to read.

Ah, the joys of teenage jobs. How they play on your naivety and eagerness to make your own cash and have your own career. How they exploit the fact that your parents cut off your allowance because you’re old enough to become gainfully employed, but too young to get a job with the benefits of indoor dignity.  And I could empathize with Armstrong when he describes his parents’ work ethic:

“Not that I ever said so: my personal philosophy didn’t matter a damn. You got a job and you kept it, until you died or the company fired you…. In their experience, everything other than a bad job was too good to be true and so by definition didn’t exist, or was at the least criminal. The working life and the example of their own parents had warped them to the extent they couldn’t imagine anything other than a rotten deal; if a situation was truly lousy, then it must be solid, honourable employment.”

 The Catholic system still lives on: if you’re suffering, it’s all good. More points in heaven that way.