{"id":5752,"date":"2010-08-06T23:19:32","date_gmt":"2010-08-07T04:19:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/seanthorenson.wordpress.com\/?p=5752"},"modified":"2016-01-16T21:50:10","modified_gmt":"2016-01-17T02:50:10","slug":"paper-route","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thorenson.com\/inklings\/paper-route\/","title":{"rendered":"Paper Route"},"content":{"rendered":"

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One of my first paying gigs as a kid was delivering the local paper.<\/strong> For maybe a year or two I shared this responsibility with my older sister and younger brother. I still remember the delivery truck dropping our route’s stack of newspapers at our doorstep before sunrise. From there we rapidly tuck-rolled each paper and like cords of firewood filled the front and back pouches of the canvas delivery vest. It was a relatively easy route; four cul de sac streets, a couple apartment complexes and some outlaying developments \u2013 still a fair amount of work for kids (and helpful parents) willing to earn a dollar.<\/p>\n

I didn’t mind the delivery, it was collecting subscription fees that really stunk. I still remember going door-to-door with that ring-bound book of perforated date tabs printed on index card-sized pages each bearing the subscriber’s name and address. I recall knocking timidly on all those subscriber’s doors awaiting an answer and simply uttering the word ‘collect’ when someone did. Looking back I think they despised the whole process as much as we did. In fact, I would bet that many simply didn’t answer to delay having to pay for the paper. I really didn’t care if they did, because it made the unpleasant task much shorter.<\/p>\n

As miserable as delivering fish wrap was, it did require a lot of values that I wish to teach my boys. I don’t know that I’ll ever encourage them to don the canvas delivery vest anytime soon to hoof through the neighborhood during the wee hours of daybreak, but a good dose of responsibility beyond doing household chores would certainly prepare them more for the adult responsibilities of employment… On second thought, do households of delivery boys get a FREE subscription?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of my first paying gigs as a kid was delivering the local paper. For maybe a year or two I shared this responsibility with my older sister and younger brother. I still remember the delivery truck dropping our route’s stack of newspapers at our doorstep before sunrise. From there we rapidly tuck-rolled each paper […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[62,134],"tags":[556,409,555],"class_list":["post-5752","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-memories","category-money","tag-delivering-papers","tag-newspaper","tag-paper-route"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3XRuE-1uM","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thorenson.com\/inklings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5752","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thorenson.com\/inklings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thorenson.com\/inklings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thorenson.com\/inklings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thorenson.com\/inklings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5752"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.thorenson.com\/inklings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5752\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8333,"href":"https:\/\/www.thorenson.com\/inklings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5752\/revisions\/8333"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thorenson.com\/inklings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thorenson.com\/inklings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thorenson.com\/inklings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}