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I’m going to hell…

When I was 13 I was desperate to earn money so I got myself a job paying £4.90 per week. I was a paper boy. Every night (bar Sunday), I’d deliver copies of the Bristol Evening Post to households in my area. (Which conveniently, is Bristol.)

Now I struck gold with my paper round, I could do the whole thing in under 15 minutes , the route was flat and the houses were nice enough that you’d get a couple of quid out of them at Christmas. But £4.90 wasn’t enough for me. Oh no, I had a habit to support. That was, copies of Thrasher, RAD, and Skateboarder magazine. These magazines took up the vast majority of my income (I did get about three-quid a week pocket money, but I was encouraged to ‘save’ this). So I needed a second revenue stream.

I got another paper round. Not a morning round – or indeed a Sunday paper round (that always seemed quite lucrative, until I saw the size of the Sunday Telegraph), no, I got myself a job delivering the now defunct, ‘Bristol Journal’ at the time, it was a competitor to the ‘Bristol Observer’, a free paper full of estate agent adverts, dodgy car repair centres and adverts for sheds and things.

The rate? 2p per paper. The number of papers to deliver? 500. Although you would get paid an extra penny per paper if it had a leaflet in it (some advertisers wanted their own inserts). I remember once, one edition had 3 leaflets in it, making it a massive 5p a paper!

Two problems though. Firstly, you had to stuff the leaflets in the paper yourself (this was part of the extra cash you were being paid. Secondly, being 13, I didn’t have a car and wasn’t (and I’m still not) strong enough to carry 500 papers in one go.

Having struggled with these papers for a couple of weeks, diligently putting leaflets in all of the copies, making numerous journeys back home to get more papers and eventually finishing my delivery a day late but ensuring that everyone on my route has a paper. I’d had enough.

Whilst I was earning between £10 and £20 a week extra, to go with my £4.90 and my £3.00 pocket money the level of effort involved just wasn’t worth it.

So I started dumping the papers. I got away with it for about a month before I was ‘caught’ and sacked, and grounded.

Apparently, what I did was wrong.

Can you forgive me? Can the people of Bristol forgive me?

Or, as I fear, am I going straight to hell. I won’t pass go, I won’t collect £200
( JeffTheDogFucker Can you dig it?, Fri 12 Dec 2008, 13:07, 2 replies)

ditto
I did a similar paper round each Sunday. It took between 3-4 hours and reqiured 3 trips. That's walking back to my house twice to get more papers.

One week I thought sod it and didn't deliver the final 10-20 papers required for the final run.

However this street was full of old crinkleys with nothing better to do than complain that they didn't recieve their free paper.

Cut to paper company not paying me that week due to 'a large amount of complaints' - so I did 2-3 hours work for free and didn't get paid because of the minimal dumpage at the end.

(it was literally 10-20 papers) twunts. i quit.
(Chojin doesn't know what day of the week it is, Fri 12 Dec 2008, 13:21, closed)

ditto again
... only I got away with it for much longer as I used to deliver to only the old biddies and a few random ones in between...

And I didnt dump em either. I just collected them in the garage... till there was rather a lot of them...
(SillyMoo, Fri 12 Dec 2008, 13:41, closed)