Attribution: Hmcarreiro, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, allows the keeper yet one more opportunity to use a personal experience to make a Labor Day related point: the occasion was when the keeper quit his student dish-washing job after the proprietor of a small Madison eatery chased the chef out through the kitchen door waving a butcher knife and shouting curses.
This being long before the bankers grabbed all students by their financial privates and handed them lifetimes of miserable indebtedness, so the keeper did not have that borrowing option. But he needed an income to stay in school. His next job was in an unheated cluttered “factory” on Madison’s near east side putting together parts for the mechanical barn cleaner the proprietor claimed to be “inventing.” That job ended when the “inventor’s” wife fired the freezing-fingered keeper for slow production.
Phyllis’s experience with early employment has her remembering how she quit her job at the Saskatoon “Nut House” after a management change at the nut and candy store debased women.
Like Phyllis, the keeper went on to other student jobs, finally falling back on his earlier experience as a “filling station jockey” where he understood the world of dirty car windows, oil sticks and gas at three gallons for a dollar.
Many present-day students obviously work jobs to keep themselves in classes, and the keeper and Phyllis cheer them on and suggest more work and less student loans: memories, even those involving a waving butcher knife or a gender insult are better than a banker’s lifetime anchor around your neck.
Comments