I was in the bar one day, and a stranger came in and started buying drinks for everybody.
I finally got close enough to him to thank him and asked him "Why?"
He explained to me, "I am a backhoe operator. A backhoe is a heavy piece of equipment that digs ditches for sewers, gas lines and the like. I was digging a trench down by the clinic to install a new gas main, and I cut into a telephone cable and knocked out all the service to the clinic. I've been looking for an execuse to go find a better paying job, and my boss just fired me!"
A couple of days later, he was back again, buying rounds again, and when I got a chance, I asked him "Why?"
He explained this time, "The boss called and told me that the telephone cable was not where it was supposed to have been, so the company did not have to pay for the repairs to the cable. And then asked me to come back to work."
I told him "I'm going to go find a better paying job", and the boss gave me a pay raise!
If I would have messed up something at work, instead of getting a pay raise
I would have had to go to work for my youngest son in that restaurant, back to peeling and mashing potatoes!
Home mortgage loans at our bank were seven percent, secured loans nine percent, signature loans thirteen percent, and credit cards rates were nineteen percent. A telemarketing firm called for our bank and offered a check for two thousand five hundred dollars, no paperwork required, just sign and cash.
I was thinking about doing some remodeling on the house, so I told them to send it. When the check arrived, I read the small print:
Annual percentage rate: TWENTY-NINE percent.
Needless to say, the remodeling waited until I had the cash!
I went into the bank to cash a check for twenty-five dollars. The teller stamped it, dated it, did some other paperwork on it, entered it into her computer, and then asked me how I wanted it.
I told her two hundreds and a fifty, figuring I'd get a smile.
She reached into her drawer, got the money, and then looked at the check!
The boss was a dedicated Lincoln man. He said there was nothing that rode as well as a Lincoln, nothing that handled as well as a Lincoln, and nothing that felt as good as a Lincoln.
His Lincoln was piling up the miles, and things were beginning to go wrong with it, so he went down to get himself a new Lincoln.
He came back to the shop with his old Lincoln, and told us that he never got sticker shock, he said that he got electrocuted by those prices. He told us that he would just have to get his Lincoln fixed and keep it a few years more.
He thought about it though, and he realized that as the miles added up, there were going to be more and more repairs, and while his Lincoln depreciated the prices of the new Lincolns were going even higher.
He decided to go looking for some other type of car that he could be satisfied with. He test drove this and that, and he finally found a Mercury that was the same size as the Lincolns, had all the accessories that he wanted, and made his deal.
He said that the new Mercury did not ride as well as the Lincolns, but that was OK, and for the seventeen thousand dollar difference in price between the new Mercury and the new Lincolns, just call him MERCURYMAN!
Our town marshall was also the water meter reader. When he pulled up to your house in his car, you never knew if he was there to read the meter or to take you to jail.
He was a pretty good guy though, and would give you a hand with anything that you needed help on. He helped me bottle my home brew, and of course he helped me drink it. He was the one that put the sugar in the bottles of that batch that blew up out in the garden!
The town deputy was also the town carpenter. He also was a real good guy but dumb as a rock. He used to sneak out to beer bridge, confiscate beer from the teenagers, take it home, and drink it himself.
A couple of kids were fishing out there once and they spotted the deputy coming. They hid their fishing gear, and while the deputy was sneaking down one side of the bridge, they snuck up the other side. He of course had left the keys in the car, so they drove it back to town, and parked it in front of the doughnut shop.
The deputy had to walk back to town, and that was the last time he snuck off to beer bridge!
Ray was a mechanic for the railroad. For thirty-five years he had been working on motors, some as big as a house, some as small as his hand. When he retired he said that he never wanted to see another diesel engine. Every one of those greasy, oily, noisy, stinking pieces of junk should be dismantled and thrown in the ocean!
He would, though, if you weren't in a big hurry, repair a lawn mower for you. All he ever asked was the price of the parts that he need for repairing the mower and was even happier if you bought him a beer.
He repaired a lawn mower for one person, who never got around to paying for it. It was always next week or next payday. The mower broke again after a year, and the person took it back to Ray. Ray waited two weeks and then called and told the guy that the engine of the lawn mower was blown and it couldn't be repaired.
He waited another week and sold it to someone else for the cost of the two repairs!
He bragged that since he was retired he would never do another lick of hard work, not even cutting grass, and bought himself a brand new riding lawn mower to cut his lawn. The problem was that there was a steep ditch out in front of his house that he also had to mow. He was out there mowing one day, hit a rock, and the lawn mower bucked him off. He bragged that he got up, caught up with the lawn mower, got back on, and never even spilt a drop of his beer.
His wife saw what happened, though, and she sold that riding mower the next day!
In December 1999, service in the bank got slower, and slower, and they closed the doors until in January. It was all those women who got the Y2K bug.
It's too bad I couldn't have patented the name Milly and charged a fee for using it!
A car salesman used to come into the bar. He would talk to us about the prices and features of the new cars and tell us to come on down to the dealership and he would set us up with a good deal on the new or used car of our choice.
Truthfully though, he could get no better deal than any other salesman down at that dealership. If he didn't make a commission, he wasn't going to waste his time selling a car, and if the company didn't make a healthy profit on that car, he wouldn't have a job!
I met an elderly gentleman who used to work in a brewery in the old days. He said the brewers used to sample the beer, to maintain consistency in taste and mixture. Everything went well and everybody was happy, particularly the brewers until one brewer sampled too much of the product, and fell into a vat. THAT was when the breweries started developing more scientific methods!
October was hot, dry and windy. Other cities have SMOG (SM-oke and f-OG_), well, we had SMUST (SM-oke and d-UST_). The air was so yellow from the blowing dust that you couldn't see the horizon. The sun had a continual golden ring around it. If there was an overnight dew, you had to scrape the mud off the windshield in the morning. The reservoirs ran low, so the town raised the water rates, to encourage water conservation.
The car wash raised their rates, and made a fortune because everybody had to take their cars in once a week to have the mud washed off.
The hair salon also raised their rates and made a fortune, because of the bad hair days caused by the blowing dirt and high winds.
The town, car wash, and hair salon made money off the heat, dust, and wind, and everybody else took a bath!
I also lost on the deal, because while the three inch leaves from the forty foot tall Chinese elm tree in my front yard blew into the neighbor's yards, the twelve inch leaves from the one hundred foot tall oak tree of my neighbor down the street ended up in my yard and fence. I called and offered him free mulch for his garden, and told him I'd even furnish the rake!
When I was in the Air Force, I had a friend who had been a security guard on the flight line during the cold war. He guarded the B-52 bombers that were armed with nuclear weapons, and sitting on the alert pad, awaiting orders for take-off.
To pass the time, once per shift he counted the rivets on the airplane. It took him three months of counting before he got the same tally two days in a row.
Some times he would drop a penny on the tarmac, and drag it around the airplane while counting the number of minutes or paces it would take to wipe Lincoln's face off the penny, or grind off the back side of the coin, and sometimes he would count the minutes or steps it took until the coin completely disappeared.
He said it cost him two and a half cents per eight hour shift to do this which was almost as much as the Air Force was paying him!
When I was a bank security guard, I used to have to stand guard often in one bank that was located in an industrial area. They say that safety lies in numbers and I never felt safer than when I was in that bank, because no robber is going to a bank where he has to stand in line, particularly if he has a hundred people standing around him!
While there was plenty of parking at that bank, there were only sixteen parking slots up against the bank itself, and a hundred cars an hour would try to get into one of those sixteen slots. Twenty-five percent of those cars would try to park in the one handicapped slot we had at the door!
I realized that the police were busy fighting crime, but if they would have written just a few tickets at the various handicapped slots around the city nobody would have come near the one slot we had!
When I was a security guard, I had a period where I worked one hundred and thirty hours in a two week period, without a day off.
It was Saturday, and as the bank was closing, a teller told me that my boss was on the telephone line for me.
I answered the call, and my boss begged me to do one more job, because they were so short handed.
I told him the only job that I would do would be a job where I had to do absolutely nothing.
So he sent me out to a construction site, where all I had to do was sit in my car and watch the equipment, smoke cigarettes, drink coffee, and work crossword puzzles!
I knew some guards that drove vans with radio, television, and even had kitchens they could use if there was a power outlet.
That was the reason I liked being a security guard. The only job where you got paid to do nothing!
