BIG BUCKS THE EASY WAY

John G. Hubbell

"You ought to look into this," I suggested to our two college-age sons. "It might be a way to avoid the indignity of having to ask for money all the time." I handed them some magazines in a plastic bag someone had hung on our doorknob. A message printed on the bag offered leisurely, lucrative work (" Big Bucks the Easy Way!") of delivering more such bags.

"I don't mind the indignity," the older one answered.

"I can live with it," his brother agreed.

"But it pains me," I said, "to find that you both have been pan-handling so long that it no longer embarrasses you."

The boys said they would look into the magazine-delivery thing. Pleased, I left town on a business trip. By midnight I was comfortably settled in a hotel room far from home. The phone rang. It was my wife. She wanted to know how my day had gone.

"Great!" I enthused. "How was your day?" I inquired.

"Super!" she snapped. "Just super! And it's only getting started. Another truck just pulled up out front."

"Another truck?"

"The third one this evening. The first delivered four thousand Montgomery Wards. The second brought four thousand Sears, Roebucks. I don't know what this one has, but I'm sure it will be four thousand of something. Since you are responsible, I thought you might like to know what's happening."

What I was being blamed for, it turned out, was a newspaper strike which made it necessary to hand-deliver the advertising inserts that normally are included with the Sunday paper. The company had promised our boys $600 for delivering these inserts to 4000 houses by Sunday morning.

"Piece of cake!" our older college son had shouted.

"Six hundred bucks!" His brother had echoed, "And we can do the job in two hours!"

"Both the Sears and Ward ads are four newspaper-size pages," my wife informed me. "There are thirty-two thousand pages of advertising on our porch. Even as we speak, two big guys are carrying armloads of paper up the walk. What do we do about all this?"

"Just tell the boys to get busy," I instructed. "They're collegemen. They'll do what they have to do."

At noon the following day I returned to the hotel and found an urgent message to telephone my wife. Her voice was unnaturally high and quavering. There had been several more truckloads of ad inserts. "They're for department stores, dime stores, drugstores, grocery stores, auto stores and so on. Some are whole magazine sections. We have hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of pages of advertising here! They are crammed wall-to-wall all through the house in stacks taller than your oldest son. There's only enough room for people to walk in, take one each of the eleven inserts, roll them together, slip a rubber band around them and slide them into a plastic bag. We have enough plastic bags to supply every takeout restaurant in America!" Her voice kept rising, as if working its way out of the range of the human ear. "All this must be delivered by seven o'clock Sunday morning."

"Well, you had better get those guys banding and sliding as fast as they can, and I'll talk to you later. Got a lunch date."

When I returned, there was another urge call from my wife.

"Did you have a nice lunch?" she asked sweetly. I had had a marvelous steak, but knew better by now than to say so.

"Awful," I reported. "Some sort of sour fish. Eel, I think."

"Good. Your college sons have hired their younger brothers and sisters and a couple of neighborhood children to help for five dollars each. Assembly lines have been set up. In the language of diplomacy, there is 'movement.'"

"That's encouraging."

"No, it's not," she corrected. "It's very discouraging. They've been at it for hours. Plastic bags have been filled and piled to the ceiling, but all this hasn't made a dent, not a dent, in the situation! It's almost as if the inserts keep reproducing themselves!"

"Another thing," she continued. "Your college sons must learn that one does not get the best out of employees by threatening them with bodily harm."

Obtaining an audience with son No. 1, I snarled, "I'll kill you if you threaten one of those kids again! Idiot! You should be offering a bonus of a dollar every hour to the worker who fills the most bags."

"But that would cut into our profit," he suggested.

"There won't be any profit unless those kids enable you to make all the deliveries on time. If they don't, you two will have to remove all that paper by yourselves. And there will be no eating or sleeping until it is removed."

There was a short, thoughtful silence. Then he said, "Dad, you have just worked a profound change in my personality."

"Do it!"

"Yes, sir!"

By the following evening, there was much for my wife to report. The bonus program had worked until someone demanded to see the color of cash. Then some activist on the work force claimed that the workers had no business settling for $5 and a few competitive bonuses while the bosses collected hundreds of dollars each. The organizer had declared that all the workers were entitled to $5 per hour! They would not work another minute until the bosses agreed.

The strike lasted less than two hours. In mediation, the parties agreed on $2 per hour. Gradually, the huge stacks began to shrink.

As it turned out, the job was completed three hours before Sunday's 7 a.m. deadline. By the time I arrived home, the boys had already settled their accounts: $150 in labor costs, $40 for gasoline, and a like amount for gifts—boxes of candy for saintly neighbors who had volunteered station wagons and help in delivery and a dozen roses for their mother. This left them with $185 each—about two-thirds the minimum wage for the 91 hours they worked. Still, it was "enough," as one of them put it, to enable them to "avoid indignity" for quite a while.

All went well for some weeks. Then one Saturday morning my attention was drawn to the odd goings-on of our two youngest sons. They kept carrying cartoon after cartoon from various corners of the house out the front door to curbside. I assumed their mother had enlisted them to remove junk for a trash pickup. Then I overheard them discussing finances.

"Geez, we're going to make a lot of money!"

"We're going to be rich!"

Investigation revealed that they were offering "for sale or rent" our entire library.

"No! No!" I cried. "You can't sell our books!"

"Geez, Dad, we thought you were done with them!"

"You're never 'done' with books," I tried to explain.

"Sure you are. You read them, and you're done with them. That's it. Then you might as well make a little money from them. We wanted to avoid the indignity o having to ask you for ... "