Did You Inherit Your Job From Your Parents
By: Brian Dickens Barrabee
Tags: Kids, Family, Humor, Sales, Business

My dad owned a diaper service, and a day camp but found his calling in teaching later on in life: my mother was a nurse.

I was none of those things.

Photo by Stiker Male on Unsplash

According to the New York Times: Working sons of working fathers are, on average, 2.7 times as likely as the rest of the population to have the same job but only two times as likely as their working mothers. Daughters are 1.8 times as likely to have the same job as their mothers and 1.7 times as likely to have the same job as their fathers.

These are figures for all jobs. There is a greater propensity for similarity depending on the types of jobs held by the parents.

I trace my own employment history back to the day that my cousin Kit (8 years old at the time ) who was a year older than I and much savvier in the ways of the world revealed to me that we could create lemonade by borrowing my aunt Betty’s lemons and obtain the use of her sugar. Of course, the tap water and ice we used was always free — wasn’t it? We could properly mix all this and make a drink that the neighbours would definitely buy on the hot summer days that the Jersey shore was currently experiencing.

Best of all — the thing that made this whole operation worth it was: it costs us nothing to make the lemonade.

We figured we could get 15 cents a glass for our concoction.

Why 15 cents a glass? We thought that more customers would have 2 dimes than a dime and a nickel and they’d generously tell us to, “Keep the change!”

We figured it would be best to start our little enterprise when Aunt Betty was on an errand somewhere else. We’d have the flexibility to execute our business plan without any adult interference.

She often went on shopping excursions and left us with MiMi, her 75-year-old English cousin, who was generally oblivious to the things Kit and I did.

The perfect day to launch was on a Tuesday when Aunt Betty went to the hairdresser and then shopped until late in the afternoon. MiMi would be busy with her soaps “Search for Tomorrow”, “Guiding Light” and other programs to which she’d recently become addicted.

Opening day was a scorcher. Kit and I carefully set up Aunt Betty’s card table on the corner of Jerome and Wilson. Not particularly a busy intersection but it was the only intersection anywhere in the neighbourhood. We were able to find one of her lacy, girly tablecloths and assembled everything with our

Ice Cold Lemonade

15 cents a glass

2 for a quarter

sign.

We were quite satisfied with what we had done. My cousin and I had prepared for an onslaught of customers with all 3 of Betty’s pitchers filled with our inviting drink.

Surprisingly, people we knew in the neighbourhood drove on by — kids in our class at school. Most adults smiled and waved but nobody stopped. The kids hug out of the car windows laughed, yelled and gleefully spit at our stand.

Kit advised me to stand in the middle of the street holding up our sign when we heard a car coming.

After waiting around 10 minutes both Kit and I thought we heard a car approaching.

I jumped out into the street, a sign held high. As the car approached, I thought I recognized it as belonging to Mr Morrisey. He slowed his car as he drew nearer. Each of us engaged in an odd game of CHICKEN.

He stopped about a foot in front of me and shouted something about, “ A fool kid who didn’t have the brains he was born with.”

I never liked him or his kid Larry who was a bully like his dad. I went over to the side of the road anyway.

He drove on after giving me an exaggerated, “THAAAANK YOUUU!”

Kit and I had been at it in the hot sun for a couple of hours and hadn’t sold one glass of lemonade.

Nobody even stopped.

We were getting pretty discouraged!

Just then we heard a loud rumble of a powerful engine coming from far away. As it drew closer, Kit and I speculated on what it could be.

It wasn’t a train. The train tracks were closer to my house a block away.

It was too thunderous to be any kind of car.

Almost too loud for a truck, no matter how big.

I wasn’t about to jump out in the middle of the street with my sign for this one.

A minute latter the sourse of the deafing noise roared on by our stand.

And stopped about 20 yards past us.

Three sweaty men jumped off the garbage truck that had pulled to a halt after seeing our stand.

“Whatcha got guys,” asked one of the perspiring men.

Kit and I stared wide-eyed at the three empty pitchers on my aunt’s lacy covered card table. Lemonade having been drained by the parched men.

Even more impressive were the three $10 bills the garbagemen left on the table as they departed telling us to, “Keep the change.”

The verbal contract Kit and I made with those guys to stop every Tuesday (garbage day) for the rest of the summer proved to be very lucrative for us.

That’s when I decided to have a career in sales.