* Since the last Post was getting too busy - with too many bells and whistles, that is, I have decided to move the story itself forward to a new Post, which will, I promise, contain only the primary story, and maybe a couple of pics. Promise.
This Post will stay on the front page, so to speak, and I will add to the tale that it contains over the next few weeks, if not the entire summer. There is much to the story, and time is needed to tell it, so please do not get impatient. I first want to show what I was doing soon after Law school, and how, through sending my resume out cold, I then stumbled upon my Manager/Paralegal job in the rather curious Extended Warranty/Service Agreement field.
I will also poke around among my past stories and finish some or hopefully all of them up this summer. (And, yes, even the Allstate Interview Story)
If youse want to read all my comments and notes on this Extended Warranty story I am currently writing, please go to my previous post here:
If I add more notes, I will post them as regular comments, so as not to add confusion to the main body of the story.
Anyway, here is the story, a true story, and, like I say, I will be adding and adding to it and editing etc. Hope you like it, and keep checking back.
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NOT COVERED
(The Story About The Motor Vehicle Extended Warranty Business)
(The Story About The Motor Vehicle Extended Warranty Business)
Summer, 1997 : The Cold Call
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There I was, around a year after finally graduating, and at the bottom of the class, from law school, and without any kind of stable employment. During the previous year, 1996 that is, I had found work for around eight or so months with a painting contractor through a classified job posting in the local newspaper: The Long Island "Newsday."
It wasn't hard to get that job in 1996, for it was April, and painting contractors always did most of their hiring in the Spring, as painting contractors always have done and will always do, as they suddenly becme inundated with outdoor painting work.
I was living in Roslyn, New York at the time, along with my parents, in a small, rented house. There was really nothing very memorable about that small rented house, or what took place in it while I was living there. But I do recall that the previous winter, while living there, had brought with it much snow. Tons and tons and tons of deep snow, and it seemed that I was always shoveling, which kept me in pretty good shape, and doing it was rather meditative, at all hours of the night as the snow fell quietly and softly with a sort of low, gentle hiss, muffling the sounds of the slow moving traffic from behind the tall walls which bordered and encased the nearby Long Island Expressway.
When all the snow had finally fallen and then melted away without a trace, and an unemployed Spring arrived with immediate bills, rather than snow, piling up all around me, I picked up the newspaper, as I say, and called in reply to a classified ad for a job as a house painter, which read something like:
Painters Wanted, 5 years Exp. Own Tools. Transportation.
Must speak English. Neat appearance. Call: (631) 123-4567.
The interview for the job was simple enough. I met the painting contractor in the front of a Benjamin Moore paint store in Commack, Long Island. He sat behind the steering wheel of his large box truck, and I stood in the parking lot, and we talked. Luckily, the contractor was friendly, and seemed like a nice guy, and seemed to like my appearance and what I had to say about my experience, and so I was hired provisionally for one-hundred and twenty five dollars a day, or, more colloquially: "A Buck Twenty-Five."
The contractor paired me up with another painter who was working for him already, named Rick, or "Rickey." Rickey had long, curly hair and giggled a lot, and seemed to stare at me once in a while in a sort of odd, lingering way. Rickey had bad teeth as well, and when I noticed that my mind started to assemble and disassemble and then reassemble thoughts of calcium, and milk, and calcium tablets and chalk, and dentures and dental laminates until my thoughts all came to a head and I made a sentence in my mind that went something like: "There must be a way to "fix" that smile.
So off we went, Me and Rickey, or rather, Rickey and I, to paint a house somewhere. In Commack maybe. Or maybe it was one of those condo or co-op "Units" off route 110 that we went to, or behind the wall that encapsulated the Long island Expressway, and hid the view and the noise of the highway from the windows of a different Unit, in the next town further east of Commack.
Rickey had a beat up old car. It was a black car, with sagging suspension, and a bent radio antenna. It was unkempt and unwashed, and had dents, and rust, and dried paint finger smears around the door handles, and the keyhole of the trunk. I viewed the car with dismay as I followed behind in my car, which was an almost new 1995 Toyota Corolla, leased for $212.72 a month for a 3 year term.
As I drove and followed, I continued to think uncharitable thoughts about the car of Rickey, and I could see the eyes of Ricky occasionally peering back at me in the reflection of his rear view mirror.
"It's a stupid car" I thought. "A foolish car, and with a foolish and stupid man driving it. It's a .....a......Bum's car." And that was where my relections concluded. With the word: "Bum."
Except.... there was one more thing I noticed, and which I found somewhat disconcerting. It was this: The car, the car that I was viewing with genuine feelings of waxing contempt by now, belonging to Ricky, the painter that giggled and had bad teeth and a bad smile; the car that I was following in my own leased car, had an odd bumper sticker. It was a chipped an sun faded bumper sticker with faded letters that read:
"I GO FROM ZERO TO BITCH IN 5 SECONDS!"
Ricky was a white guy.
And that was pretty much all there is to tell with respect to Ricky.
Or at least all that was interesting. Interesting to me at least. Or to anyone even interested in reading on into this sordid tale of labor and hot, summer sunshiny cash pay envelope or into the hand steadiness.
Except...though.....for one more thing....about Ricky.
For you see, Ricky could paint. Man oh Man could he paint! He was probably the fastest, and probably the best painter that I have ever seen before, or would ever see for my entire life after.
Ricky was a fast painter. A production man, and Fast! and almighty and everliving and every thing, and ever loving production, get the paint out of the bucket you painter, and onto the wall FAST!
To be continued.
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| My first job after Law School, 1996. Top: Mike, Me, Nino, Nestor Bottom: Jose, Tony, Jesus (Chungo) Taking the Pic. was good old Norberto. I wonder where he is today. |
May God Help My Damned, Indebted Soul
Dear God. Help me.
Student Loans
Cruel and Unusual Punishment
Torture and Horror
No Way Out
My life is never....NEVER going to be
"Allright"
ever again.
