The Secret Life Of Paper Carriers

I know that every last single one of you have been dying to know what it's like to rise up in the middle of the night to work a thankless job. Seven days a week, no holidays, no sick days, no insurance, and no raises even when the cost of gas skyrockets. Honestly, it's pretty sucky. However, thanks to the pre-dawn work hours we haven't ever had to place our kids in day care. It pays for my husband's college tuition and keeps us in the luxurious lifestyle to which we've become accustomed. That's right, clothes from Wal-Mart and marked down meat for dinner. Hold back your envy people, it's a very unbecoming trait on you. As a single destitute woman finishing up her second divorce, my Mom started throwing newspapers to make ends meet, and apparently I'm keeping the tradition alive. I wanted to chronicle (Get it? Like the Houston Chronicle) some of our mutual experiences and then some exclusively of just my Mother because she's the cheekiest, pissiest woman sometimes, and you dare not cross her or prepare to suffer the consequences.

When I was a teenager, my Mom threw our own neighborhood. By that time she had remarried again, and we had reached the pinnacle of middle class success in this area because as you well know society judges your lifestyle status based on houses and cars and we did live in a nice, tree-lined subdivision. Definitely nice enough that you wouldn't expect people to steal newspapers. However, my Mom had a persistent complainer a few streets behind our house. This guy called in constantly to the Chronicle demanding a paper and bitterly complaining about his 'incompetent' carrier who couldn't manage to deliver a freakin newspaper. This continued on for a few weeks before my Mom became obsessively insane about it and decided to play detective and stage an old fashioned stake-out to solve the mystery of the missing paper. Stealthily she pulled her Chevy Blazer into the cul-de-sac across the street from the complainers house, dimmed her lights, and sat there patiently, watching and waiting. Since there wasn't anyone else in the vehicle she had to forgo witty banter with a zany mismatched detective partner or the ever popular K-9 theme. Finally, her tenacity paid off as she spied the neighbor of the complainer in his white dress shirt and tie walk nonchalantly out of his house to the rolled up newspaper lying in the neighbor's grass before looking around, snatching it up and then walking back to his vehicle and driving away. My Mother is a woman of ACTION and she hatched a plan immediately. The next day she wore her black sweatpants and sweatshirt commando gear to her route and she again parked in the cul-de-sac and turned off the lights but this time she came armed with a can of ebony black shoe polish. With her black gloved finger she wrote 'PAPER THIEF' and 'LOSER' in shoe polish all over the car windows of the jerky neighbor.

She never, ever received a No Paper complaint again from that particular customer again.