There are a few thankless jobs where the customer usually doesn’t realize the service they get unless they’re missing their shipment or product, and a newspaper delivery person has to up near the top of that list.  As one of the few print newspaper subscribers left in this country, I was reminded of my delivery person last week when my newspaper bag included a holiday card with their address on it.  It’s a blatant solicitation for tips, but I really don’t mind mailing a check to the person for a job well done.  The only reason I sometimes hesitate, since I know a job like this can have a high turnover ratio, is that chances are the person who delivered my paper for a majority of the year probably isn’t delivering it now.  That’s the key if you deliver papers; make sure you’re employed in November and December in order to cash in on some tips.

Think about it – the newspaper has to be delivered 7 days a week, without fail.  Holidays, bad weather, feeling sick – the paper must get to the customer.  That being said, I just KNOW my delivery person, who is like most of the southern pusscatores down here, didn’t deliver the paper last week when it got into the upper teens for temperatures.  For me, cold weather is not an excuse to not deliver my paper, especially not the New York Times which costs $1 Mondays through Saturdays and $5 on Sundays with no discount.  Thankfully whenever my paper isn’t delivered, there’s a web site to either get a replacement paper or to have your account credited.

Yes, it’s a crappy, under-appreciated job, but if you sign up to do it you’ve gotta do it rain or shine.  Back in college, I was in charge of the weekend student cleanup crew (emptying of all garbage cans in each dorm).  Since I had to go through each dorm to make sure the job was done, I also was given the job of putting the Chicago Tribune in each mailbox of students who subscribed.  This was an easy $30 a weekend on top of the decent wage we got for doing the crap job of emptying the dorms of their garbage.

People wonder what possesses one to haul trash every Saturday and Sunday at 5 or 6 AM and the reason, like most jobs, was the money.  For what was anywhere from 45-90 minutes of work, we got paid for 6 hours, regardless.  Plus, as the team lead, I got an additional 9 hours of pay simply for walking through the dorms to make sure the job was done.  The job was passed down to me from another Delt, so in an odd sense the Delts at Bradley were a nascent version of the mafia – being in charge of “waste management” and getting paid a lot to not do much work.  And of course I only hired other Delts.

Doing that job was definitely one of those underappreciated jobs referenced above.  For anyone that’s gone to college, 5 or 6 AM is “going to bed” time, not “getting up to go to work” time, thus they had to pay us that rate as incentive to do it.  Drunkenness was measured by how many times you used the water fountain on each floor.  We all took a sick sense of satisfaction, if a garbage can was full of beer bottles, to empty it as loudly as we could, thus waking up the drunk partiers. 

Periodically you’d run across some odd items, like the one time someone had tossed a lactating porn mag on top of the trash can.  It’s safe to assume it’s not every day you can see a mag full of women squirting their milk on guys’ faces and mouths, as if they were a baby bird with their beaks open wide.  One person threw out Madonna’s sex book, which was $50 at the time.  Every once in a while we’d encounter the Not Yet Asleep And Still Giggling Drunkard in the hallway and they would always want to strike up a conversation.  That’s when you hand them the lactating magazine to distract them while you sneak to the next floor to finish your work.