Work for Hire

While enjoying a rare victory by the Phillies and an even rarer quality start by Jamie Moyer on Tuesday night, my phone rang, and by answering it, I invited a giant headache that has consumed the past two days of my life.

On the other end was Skinny, who you may remember from my Spring Break trip to New Orleans a few years ago. He last earned mention in this space for his ability to hook up with a bartender in Chattanooga, Tenn., to save us over $100 on a bar tab. Recently, he earned a position working as a personal assistant for a lawyer in downtown Metropolis, a position I too interviewed for. He was hired, and has been working for him for close to a month.

However, due to the verbose nature of this lawyer, the long hours he has been forced to work, and the mandatory dinners he attends with the lonely bachelor have put him well behind in a summer class he is making up in order to graduate. The course, Introduction to Macroeconomics, is a requirement for graduation, and he is failing after scoring a 42 out of 100 on the first exam. He called to ask if I might be willing to complete a few homework assignments for him and help him catch up.

I made a living freshman year taking exams and doing homework assignments for two kids who spent their time playing poker on line. They each paid me $250 an exam and $100 per homework (mind you, they were in the same class, so all I had to do was take one exam and I got paid double) and I helped them lift their failing averages up to Bs. I had taken a strong interest in economics after taking the AP courses in Micro and Macro in high school, and I got them through it for two semesters.

Knowing this, Skinny called me up.

“Carter, I need a favor. The Lawyer is killing me at work, I’m failing Econ and if I don’t pass they’re going to fire me from this job.” Great I was thinking, will they then hire me?

“I’ll give you $80, I need three of them done. One by tomorrow [Wednesday] and the other two by Thursday.” The price was considerably lower than what I used to command, but in true confession, I ripped those two kids off. I would log online, hack into their Blackboard accounts, do the homework, and the other kid would sign into his and copy it in. I am not working this week, and I could use any spare cash for Europe, all while helping out a friend in need. I agreed.

Skinny drove to my apartment to drop off the book so I could complete the assignment. After traipsing up the stairs, he looked like he was working for George Steinbrenner. His hair was cropped close, his baby face gleaned from the work of a razor and his shoes would have made Andy Dufresne jealous. He then launched into a long speech about how awful the job was, how The Lawyer forced him and the rest of the team to go out to dinner and drink with him and often how he did not get home till past 10 o’clock each night, all of which made me feel better that he was the poor slob that got stuck with the job, even though unemployment still sucks.

While he rambled on about how hard the class is, how he never has time to go and often is not allowed to leave work to attend class, I flipped through the book and wondered how in God’s name he had not passed intro Econ yet, and why he chose to take Macro, the harder of the two options. It wasn’t until he uttered the words “problem set” that my attention snapped back.

“Wait, these homeworks aren’t online? On blackboard?” I asked.

“Well, yeah, I’ll give you my password, you can log in and print them out,” he said as he began flipping 20s onto the table.

“Shit, these aren’t multiple choice questions, they’re like calculating GDP and unemployment and all that crap?” I moaned. “Skinny, I haven’t done this shit in years, my father has a PH.d in this shit, I don’t think even he could do this off memory.”

“They’re not that hard, I did the first one, and did pretty well,” he countered, explaining the fourth one was due as scheduled on Wednesday, and the other two were several weeks late, but he had talked his way into an extension. “I just don’t have time to do them, and if I don’t, I’m fucked.”

Guilt-ridden from his pathetic state but smiling inside from the money jangling around in my wallet, I relented. See, Skinny is a fun guy to go out with. I had a lot of fun with him in our younger days, going out and getting drunk, chasing after different groups of girls, listening to him retell his tales of conquest in the morning. But I began to realize as time went on that he was a bit of an ass, and not just to the girls he never bothered to call back. He has a horrible talent of “never having time” and often needing a favor. And after he lived in a satellite house with my former roommate BC, I learned of his spoiled inability to clean up after himself or be considerate to the needs of the others in the house.

Skinny asked me to complete the homework, but since he wouldn’t have time to come back to State College Town in time to collect it, copy it into his handwriting and turn it in to his teacher on time, he asked me to scan it and e-mail it to him. I recently purchased a new printer complete with scanning capability, so this would not prove to be a problem. I took his money, the book and he went on his way.

Wednesday morning dawned, I undertook my normal routine of dishwashing, breakfast, SportsCenter and news-gathering, wrote a weekly column I’ve been doing for a local state representative and then set in on the homework. The homework was as I feared, long, annoying and requiring a great deal of calculations, and I began to regret the assignment. Many of the things looked familiar, but I could not recall without a healthy reading of the text how to complete the questions. After spending three hours on the first one, I decided I would leave the next two till Thursday, since they were already late.

I booted up the printer, and placed the first page on it and prepared to scan. But, only an error message appeared, telling me to attempt to scan from the computer. Now, I’m not great with computers (it is the reason I spent all that money on a MacBook, which has proven incredibly idiot proof), so I attempted to find the instructional manual, but all the printer came with was a basics guide, requiring me to download the full manual from the printer’s Web site. It was there I learned that to take advantage of the printer’s scanning capabilities, I would have to download the software it came with. Unfortunately, the object’s resting place was a complete mystery to me. So, I called up Skinny and explained the dilemma to him. I tried the campus library, but being the summer, it’s copy shop had already closed. I was in no interest to trek to Kinko’s and pay the exorbitant price to fax everything to him, seeing as how it was unlikely I’d ever be reimbursed that sum, and I had spent enough time on the project and was frustrated over the amount of time it took me to complete it.

I had glanced at the syllabus and saw the class met on Wednesday nights, and offered to just hustle over and drop it off. But Skinny was terrified the teacher would recognize his handwriting (despite only taking one test and turning in one homework to that point, and that he has missed so much class it’s unlikely the teacher even recognizes his face) so that wasn’t an option. I told him he’d have to come out to State College Town to pick it up himself then, and to call me when he got here.

The night went on, and I soon forgot about it. At around 11, Skinny calls me.

“Carter, you got to do me another favor,” he demanded. “Jill [his ex] has a scanner, which she stupidly never told me.” - because that’s high on a dumped girl’s priority list, “I’ll give you her number, call her up and give her directions to come pick it up. Oh, by the way, she’s pissed.”

Well of course she is, asshole. After getting her on the phone, I learned she was studying for her own exam, and had been plagued by his badgering all night. She asked if I could make the trip to her, which I agreed, taking pity on her, and she huffed her way downstairs to pick up the homework and send it off. Mission accomplished.

But Lee Corso stuck his ugly catch phrase into my life about 45 minutes later.

“Carter, what is this? I can’t read any of it.” It was Skinny. He couldn’t manage to figure out what was what, likely because Jill was forced to remove the staples from the papers in order to scan it to him, and all the answers were out of order. I calmly explained to the best of my memory the labels I had used and the order it should go in, all while he whined about the horrible situation he was in and how no one had the flexibility or back strength necessary to save his ass.

With my frustration rising and Audrey trying to sleep, I again hung up the phone. But ten minutes later, my phone rang once again.

“I can’t figure this out, none of it makes sense. I’m driving over now to pick up the book so I can make some sense of it.”

In no mood at this point to deal with him, I told him I’d be in bed by then, left the book on my coffee table, told my roommate he was coming over, and bid him a good night.

But, like the Cowboys draft room, no one had cleaned the shit off the fan for day two. I was rudely awakened this morning by not one, not two but three phone calls. The reason? Skinny had inexplicably taken the book from my apartment, the one, you know, I needed to do his dastardly homework, and failed to return it to my apartment. Rather than inconvenience his self any further, he left it in the possession of Jill, instructed her to return it to me in the a.m., but could not sufficiently give her my address. So, I was awoken to learn I not only had to do more of his bidding, but I had to traipse all over campus to accomplish it. Worse, Jill had tried to drop it off, but couldn’t find where I lived, and had headed off to study, probably because he had interrupted her the night before.

Skinny continued to pester me throughout the day while I attempted to do the work as fast as I could to get on with all the things I needed to do, like, look for full-time work so I would never put myself in this position again. He would call to find out how much progress I had made, if I would be able to get it to him this time, since he was so greatly inconvenienced the night before and to ensure I was working on it

Because my scanner didn’t work, and because I had no interest in jumping through the hoops once again, I elected to do all the work on the computer, so I could easily e-mail the document to him and be done with it. Well, even that wasn’t good enough. Since the word document robbed me of the ability to draw graphs, I simply wrote out an explanation on how they should appear, giving him step-by-step directions on how to draw them, since he had to copy all my notes by hand any way.

“Carter, why didn’t you finish it?” was the rude greeting I received upon stupidly answering his phone call for the 15th time inside of three days.

“What are you talking about? I just fucking e-mailed it to you. It’s done. Leave me the fuck alone.”

“I don’t have time to draw these graphs out. I paid you $80...”

I lost it.

“Fuck you and your $80. You want to calculate that $80? Lets see. I began the assignment at 2:30 p.m. yesterday, finished it by 5:30, tried to fax it till six. So that’s three and a half hours. Then I dealt with your bullshit till midnight, so that’s another six hours on the clock. You then woke me up at nine to tell me I had to traverse the campus to track down the book I needed to finish your shit, worked on it till two. So that’s around 13 hours I’ve been on your clock. Migrant farm workers earned more than me in that time.”

“Well, I would hope as a friend...”

“Don’t give me that bullshit. This is your assignment, and I did it for you. You contracted me for work you can’t complete. That means you couldn’t do it. You then don’t get to tell me how the fuck to do it. It’s done. If it isn’t satisfactory, take it up with customer affairs.”

“Carter, I can’t have The Lawyer seeing me drawing graphs at my desk. I need this or I’ll fail and lose my job.”

“But I suppose he’s ok with you picking up your cell phone 12 times an hour to bug me?” I said as I hung up the phone.

The irony is that Skinny had me work on economics homework, all while failing to understand the simple theory of opportunity cost. Had I properly weighed out the costs of this job, I would easily have seen they would have exceeded the pittance $80 salary and laughed in his face. He should have thought of that before he hired me; hope my performance was better on the homework than in deciding if I should have done it in the first place.