You Are Fired - Go Home

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You Are Fired - Go Home I promised that I would post about the time I got myself fired. It was a really new experience for me. But the memory of being fired from a good job stuck with me afterwards, and so it was probably a good thing to have happen to me when it did. I was 14 years old. Working on a real job for the summer away from school was a super deal. The place where I worked printed large graphic displays used mainly by the clothing patterns industry. Back then, lots and lots of people sewed their own clothing at home. Companies sold them paper patterns which were pinned to big strips of cloth, and the homebodies used scissors to cut out the cloth pieces with which to fit together for the wearable clothing. Our displays were used at the retail stores to advertise and help to sell those patterns. The paper on which our displays were printed was quite thick and heavy - not quite as heavy as cardboard, but close enough. After the ink dried on the printed displays, they were folded by hand, stacked into piles of 50 or 100, placed into boxes, and shipped to the customers. We would all stand there at the long folding table, fold each display piece, and place the folded display onto the stack of them in front of us. It did not take long before our stacks of folded displays got tired of being stacked and would tip over. The thick paper had no mercy on us in that respect. We got weary of forever putting our stacks back together every time they tipped over - and they tipped over just about every time. One of our bosses said, "I'll fix that problem." And then he disappeared into the back workroom. We heard the band saw sawing, a hammer hammering, the boss grunting. Finally, out he came. In his arms was a wooden contraption, about two or so feet tall. It had a square board underneath, another square board on top, four wooden corner posts, cross braces between them, and a sealed can of paint in the middle of all of that, sitting there on that bottom board. Our boss said, "There. That will keep the piles from tipping over." (One pile?) And, my goodness, what kind of overkill was this gadget? A plain stick of wood could have worked as well as this complicated invention... I broke up laughing - really going after it, I was. I laughed so hard that I wound up on the floor, just breaking up like the dumb kid I was. The other boss came over to me there on the floor. He looked down - not smiling, either. He very politely spoke to me, "When you get through laughing, my boy, come see me in my office." * * * * * * * * * * Image source: Pixabay dot com