Pace Yourself Kid
Life Lessons
09.12.2008
Just after I turned 14, I joined the Parks and Recreation Department. I was one of the teens known collectively as “the summer kids.”
I arrived on my first day eager to prove my work ethic. Asked to rake a baseball diamond that had been covered by branches during a recent storm, I worked madly to complete the task in under an hour. When I returned sweating and beaming, my supervisor was both amazed – and annoyed.
“Done ALREADY? What the hell am I going to do with you now?” he said. He paused from watering the infield of an adjacent baseball diamond, a task he’d been doing for several hours already. (Hard to imagine in Raleigh’s current drought, I know, but in the Great Lakes region water is plentiful and cheap.)
Clearly, my irritating insistence on working hard made a troublesome employee in his eyes. In less than an hour, I had twice forced him to manage my activities. He was clearly exhausted by the effort. After some deliberation, he came up with another task, pruning some small trees. Again, I completed the job in 40 minutes or so.
When I arrived to inform him that I was done with that duty and ready to serve again, he was clearly exasperated with me.
“Jeez, kid, ya gotta pace yourself. Or you’re going to drive me nuts!”
Finally, it dawned on me that my work ethic was completely at odds with the three goals of public employees in my town: 1) avoid doing anything strenuous; 2) stay below the radar of political VIPs; and 3) leave work at the instant the clock struck 5 p.m.
As punishment for my persistent desire to earn my paycheck, I was equipped with some basic gardening tools and an order to weed the flower boxes that stretched across the entire quarter mile of road occupied by the municipal buildings. There were about 35 of them, each exactly 16 feet by 8 feet. It took me about a week and half to finish. I found out later the traditional time to complete that assignment was by summer’s end, or about two and a half months. My supervisor was furious when I showed up less than two weeks later looking for more. Clearly, I was a moron in his eyes.
