When I was growing up my dad didn't believe in the concept of an "allowance". He told me at a very early age that in the real world people only gave you money if you did something to earn it. My dad was a paint contractor so he figured I could learn HIS trade.
From the age of nine whenever I needed money I put on my painters whites and earned money as I learned the construction arts of dry wall installation, painting and applying wall paper. Dad's deal was pretty straight forward, initially he paid me minimum wage, but eventually my salary went up as time went on. I spent part of every summer, many weekends and sometimes some evenings doing jobs with my father. The summer of 1985 he came to me with a deal I couldn't pass up as he wouldn't give me a choice. There was a HUGE job at a hotel that was coming up and it paid more than he did. Dad's jobs were small commercial properties like strip malls and office parks but mostly residential. Residential was dad's bread and butter. This was different, he wasn't the contractor on this one, he was just another guy applying wall paper and he'd gotten me a job as an "assistant".
There were only two painters assistants on this job and our job was to sandpaper dry wall and later to clean up excess plastic tarps and wasted wall paper. The other "assistant" was the supervisors son. Unlike myself he showed no enthusiasm for the job. He was a quiet blond kid who had a permanent look of disinterest on his face. It was a large building and there were several crews operating at once on different floors. I mentioned to the boss' son that if we separated we could get more done, that is I'd take the odd floors and he the even. He dismissed that idea and said that the day would go by faster if we worked together.
Initially I thought I'd made a new friend, but then I realized that aside from being the same age and on the same job, we had absolutely NOTHING in common. We had no conversations of substance. He didn't want to talk about music, girls, politics, school or anything other than the car he wanted to buy how drunk he liked to get, how much weed he could smoke without his dad finding out and when we were either going to lunch OR getting off work. I soon realized WHY he didn't want to work apart from me. When we were "working" I was doing the lion's share of it. He did as little as possible and only seemed to want to work as hard as I was when he saw his father on the periphery. He did that act once when I stopped to go to the bathroom and his father showed up, he pretended that he had done all the work on our floor and of course who do you think his father believed. Other painters would later come to my defense but it was still a pain.
I was on this job for a month before they told us that most of the hard work was done and they didn't need two assistants anymore. Guess which one of us was let go? Here's a hint, it wasn't the blond kid with the casual work ethic. I took the money I made and saved it for school clothes and didn't give the job a second thought until two weeks later when my dad told me that the supervisors son had quit. Supposedly he told his father that he'd gotten tired of being on the site and that it bored him. I laughed because I knew that he finally had to do some work for a sustained period of time and didn't have someone else for whose efforts he could take credit. He had to sink or swim and sank.
I worked harder than he did and we made the same money, but when he had to do exactly what I'd been doing for a month he folded like a card table. Maybe he was smarter than I am. He figured out that all he had to do was show up and do the bare minimum and he'd still get paid. He even took three "sick days" which he informed me were days when he was "sick of working." Whether he was a con artist or a malingerer I'll never know but he taught me three valuable lessons that summer: 1. Hard work is good for one's self esteem as you're either going to take pride in what you do or quit. 2. It's not WHAT you know, but WHOM and 3 and this was the most important lesson, every lie ever told eventually is exposed. You can only maintain subterfuge for so long before it's ultimately discovered and you're revealed as a fraud.
Regardless of my opinion of my former "co-worker" (I use that term ironically) he did at least show up on a job. Little has changed as there are still young people working on summer jobs, but many more who simply wait for mom and dad to hand them what they want. I can't help but wonder, when did an entire generation stop equating work with rewards?
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