Lawn Care

Haha. Sorry I had to laugh at this entry as it is an inside joke. But yes it is in fact about lawn care. In you travel back through time to right around 2001 I was 21 years old on the verge of 22. It was summer time and I was going to college for engineering part time and also on unemployment at the time because the whole sale lumber yard I was working at closed down its Columbus location. This actually came as quite a surprise as they had assured us for months and months that they would not be closing the location down.

Like any corporate business they didn't really give a shit about telling us the truth and just fed us a bunch of bullshit to keep us from looking for another job before they ripped ours out from under us. Since I was going to school at the time this was a rather big deal since I was paying for whatever my loans did not cover. I was a bit pissed off so when I got laid off I decided I was not going to make a priority of finding a job quickly. This was good in a way, I was 21 years old, it was summer time, and going to school for a few hours then getting paid to look for jobs at all the local pubs and bars was a great time.

I remember one time I had a calculus test at 6 PM. I met one of my bro's down at the VIP lounge at 4 PM. It was happy hour and drafts of beer were a dollar a piece. I had 10 dollars in my pocket when I started drinking and when I stopped I had no dollars. I then made a bee line to campus, and strolled into my class at the nick of time to start the test. As I sat there looking at the test I felt the strongest urge in my life of having to piss. Nothing like trying to take a test while having a beer piss trying to squeeze out. So I did the only thing I knew how to do, I burned through the test, finished it in 15 minutes, turned it in, then had one of the greatest pisses of all time.

I beat out everyone else by 45 minutes. Yes I am dead serious the next person to finish the test was 45 minutes after me. Now this really doesn't mean shit because you can finish a test in 1 minute and just miss every fucking question. But here is the kicker, not only did I get the highest score in the class, i got the highest score by such a large margin I threw the curve wildly off. This Professor had never taught calculus before and he really was not that good at it so he always had to grade on a curve because otherwise 3/4 of the class would fail. I was not going to school with retards so obviously he was failing somewhere. But yes I threw off the curve by ending up out scoring the rest of the class by 20 points. Am I bragging now? Maybe I am, but then again it is also the truth. There is a difference between being cocky and confident. I am often self depreciating and humble so why not occasionally also point out when I do something really well.

So that was the environment I was living in at the time. Going to a couple hours of classes a day then getting drunk and living it up the rest of the time. The problem with this is that living the life of a man of leisure can be quite expensive and unemployment does not go that far. So what I really needed was some kind of under the table job to supplement my unemployment benefits.

At around this same time I had a good friend I had grown up with that was playing semi-pro football but broke his ankle during a game. This sidelined him from his job as a waiter. He had a younger brother who was also unemployed. Into this mix we somehow put our alcohol infused brains together and came up with a brilliant plan. We were going to start our own lawn care business.

Our first order of business was we bought some used piece of shit lawn mower from a garage sale. We also procured a broom and borrowed a weed whacker. From this humble beginnings we decided to score a few jobs around our neighborhoods and use the money made to buy better equipment. So we fanned out through the neighborhood to find customers. After about an hour of going door to door we found a guy who paid us 45 dollars to mow his lawn 3 times over the next three weeks. If we did a good job he would extend it. Sweet our first customer. Rejoicing we went down to the bar and drank all 45 dollars away in a breeze.

Seriously we stopped after finding one sucker to pay us and then blew through the money like it wasn't even there. Since we spent all the guys money within an hour of receiving it we now how to at least make sure we took care of him as we couldn't afford to refund his money. So a day later the three of us show up at his place to get started.

So there is my buddies younger brother mowing his back yard. About half way through doing this rather smallish yard the mower makes a funny sound and then bing the spark plug shoots out of the mower with such force it actually dents the guys aluminum siding. This was enough of a dampener that we gave up. We left the poor guys back yard half mowed and his siding damaged. We wrote out a note and left it on his door that we had technical difficulties and would return. Well a week later we had still not returned. My buddy and his bro went on vacation and he gave me 20 dollars to do that job myself.

Fast forward a week and I had still not done  the guys yard. I drove past it and it was god awful. Half his yard was so high it looked like a damn jungle. So my buddy was coming back and I really did not feel like mowing this guys yard, especially since I didn't even have a mower. I could of borrowed one but that required just a bit too much effort for me to accomplish.

Then I get a call from a bro down in Texas saying that some European film crew was shooting a documentary down there about a group I was with at the time. So I told him why the hell not, I will jump on a greyhound and go down there and be in the film. So right before I left I went to my buddy's and left a envelope on his porch saying "I ain't mowing that fucking yard, here's your fucking money- sorry" and shoved a 10 dollar bill in there.

By time I got back into town it had been 3 or 4 weeks at this point and all we had down was mowed half the guys yard one time. We ended up rounding up 45 dollars and gave the guy his money back and apologized to him. He was actually cool about it surprisingly. That ended our lawn care business.

Who knows maybe we will revive it one day.