See The System

Now I know I am apparently sidetracking from the explanations of  the third form of punishment (which was where we were going with this thread) as I am relating a few incidents of the deliberate criminal actions, which have haunted my past. My own poor choices I admit. It is important however, before we get into the complexities of the third punishment form, and the further decision by my father in the most recent of punishing engagements, to understand the importance to us, as children in this household of ours, of our personal finances. We didn’t have any. It was that simple. So, earning anything for doing work was important to us. Ways of getting as much as possible, from the few opportunities which presented to a young person, were few and far between. And, let us be honest, they were usually exploitative. So we tried to get what we could.

But the idea of subscribers suggesting that I was deliberately keeping people’s papers so I could sell them on to the local store, never crossed my mind. The way my round worked was simple. I went up one side, and down the other of every street on the rounds. Up the hill on one side of the street, then down the hill on the other side of the street, and back to my bag at the bottom. Along the flat, and then up the next hilly street, repeating the same delivery system. What possible reason could I have had for not delivering a subscribers newspaper? So if the call came in, I had to go back out and take one of the extra papers, delivering it personally into the hands of the angry (and suspicious) customer. It was probably a non-subscriber neighbour, pinching it from the subscriber’s mailbox. Regardless. Losing one, was around twenty five cents less in earnings. Effectively, a cut in my meagre pay.  The extra papers were seen simply as a ‘retainer’ by the company. The ‘bait’ to get us to deliver the papers. And nowadays when I think of the conditions as a young person I went out in, to deliver those papers, it was a pretty pathetic earning. But of course, it built character (sure, it built character, an often cold and freezing character, but hardy). It was a bit like the American pay system that has tipping as a regulation rather than a courtesy, as it is in Australia. The papers were necessary to try and keep us focused. The retainer was needed to maintain that small army of gullible children walking the freezing winter streets of Dunedin. All over the town, young and sleepy people were rising (or usually being dragged from their beds by insistent parents) on summer and (particularly difficult) winters mornings. Heading out into the cold, windy, rainy, and sometimes snowy streets, to deliver the local newspaper to many disgruntled subscribers. On the holidays, since we never got to go away (see blog Sept 9^th 2012), it wasn’t unusual to take on an adjoining route as well, to increase that earning envelope.

(Continued tomorrow)