My employer is big on volunteering. The cynical side of me says they just want to look good to the wider community, but it's hard to knock a program that benefits the world around us, even if most of my co-workers use their time at their own kid's school, chaperoning field trips or whatever parents do in schools. I wouldn't know. Rob and Janice weren't the volunteery type.
We're allowed up to 24 hours of paid volunteer time per year, to be broken down however we want. You could do three 8-hour days, or mix in some half-days, or whatever works with your chosen project. I take mine in 2-hour blocks. One afternoon every month, I pick Shane up from school and we spend a couple of hours talking about life, big picture and small picture stuff, depending on what's on his mind. I told my boss I mentor troubled youth. I left out the part about it being my brother. But he's just as entitled to clear his head as any other random kid, right?
We'll usually grab a bite to eat or go shopping or fire up the PS4 at my apartment. Yesterday we did Java Joan's. It's not my favorite coffee shop, but it's close and it's never very crowded, especially right after school. He didn't believe me that it used to be a massage parlor when I was his age. The happy-ending kind. I bet Rob hit it once or twice. It got closed down a year or two after I graduated high school. One too many raids. The building sat vacant forever after that. About five years ago they finally renovated it, and it became a calzone takeout joint. There wasn't much market for calzone takeout, though. When that failed, Joan moved in, and brought a very different clientele to the neighborhood. Like most of her regulars, Joan's a lesbian. Like most of her regulars, she looks like she could whup my ass with one hand while not spilling a drop from the espresso macchiato she's holding in the other.
Shane pointed out a few visits back that everyone else there probably assumes we're gay, which wouldn't bother me except for the part where I look like some kind of NAMBLA creep for hanging out with a ninth-grader. I've tried saying stuff like, "How's Dad?" when we're at the counter to drop clues that he's my brother, but he just looks at me all confused and goes, "You mean Rob?" He got that from me. He still calls Stephanie "Mom," though. I would too if I were him. She's earned the title. But I knew her as Stephanie before she married Rob, and that's all I've ever called her.
Most of our conversations start with me asking him what's up, and him either saying, "Nothing," or shrugging. But he usually opens up a couple minutes later. Once he does, he can carry on a good conversation. Yesterday he broke the news that Rob is buying a home-safety franchise. He's going to sell and install smoke alarms and fire extinguishers. On the side, while still working at the paint store. I guess it's finally hit him that he's 59 and has no retirement savings built up. So he's "investing" $4,000 in a shady fire-safety business. (More specifically, $4,000 that he's "borrowing" from Stephanie's 401K.)
For his initial investment, he gets some logo magnets to stick on the side of his van (he doesn't own a van, he currently drives a back-firing, 12-year-old pickup that he bought off his friend Donovan for $700), a logo t-shirt and windbreaker, a starter-pack of the company's best-selling line, and exclusive rights to the territory including his zip code and the eight surrounding ones, though there's apparently a clause that requires him to meet certain sales goals or they could re-sell that turf to some other sucker 12 months from now.
Where do I point out that we didn't have a working smoke detector in our house when I was a kid until the fire department came to our third-grade class and talked about safety preparedness? Genius Rob had painted all our existing alarms because they didn't match the white on the ceiling. Even then, it would take him a week to change the battery when one died. Whenever one started chirping, he would take the smoke detector down and bury it under a pillow to muffle the noise until Janice had time to go buy a new battery. I wouldn't trust him to maintain safety devices in a doghouse.
But he gives me and Shane something to talk about, without fail, every mentoring session. And to clarify, I do see him other times throughout the month. I just don't get paid for it. So thanks again to my generous employer, whom I shall refrain from naming for legal purposes. There was a girl who got fired for dropping company scoops on her blog last year. Nothing big, either. No insider trading or anything like that. Mostly day-in-the-life office stories, which apparently the wrong person read and wasn't keen on having the company's name linked to. And I guess she was posting them during work hours, from her work computer, so that crossed a bunch of additional lines. Some people just have no common sense. They need a mentor.
No comments:
Post a Comment