It’s a sad fact of life that our first jobs usually aren’t the best paying ones, even if we really know what we’re doing.
I mean, why do people want to underpay the kids watching their younger children?
OP was 15 and looking to parlay his affinity for fixing things into a job.
I have always been interested in electronics and did a lot of reading and studying on my own, and I was very good at buying things at swap meets and repairing them and reselling them as a teen.
My first real paying job, a friend of my mom knew a guy who ran a place that supplied answering machines to businesses. They were new tech back at that point in time.
She said he was desperate for someone who could fix them as he had ones with issues spilling over the shelves. So I went to see him.
He proposed an hourly amount, but his new boss offered to pay by piece instead.
It was an interesting meeting, a middle aged businessman and me, I was gees, 15 or so. We kind of eye each other and he asks me if I can fix them.
I was pretty sure I could, and when he pulled out the service manuals for them, he had a couple that were based on the same base, I was quite sure.
So he asks me what I wanted an hour, and I was used to getting $3 an hour for watching the kiddo next door on occasion so I asked for that.
He pondered that for a minute and made me an offer I could not refuse: $10, cash for each one I fix.
I quickly agree and agreed to stop by after school the next day with my tools to dig in.
OP was a quick learner.
The next day I show up and he takes me in the back and sure enough he has a couple big sets of industrial shelves overflowing with the things.
I start pulling them off and looking at them, He gives me a smile and drifts off and leaves me to it.
I quickly discovered this guy had no tech skills whatsoever. None, nada.
Most of them had a brainlessly simple problem: The outgoing message was kept on a big loose loop of tape with a metallic splice at the end/beginning that went past two posts and that told the thing the tape had went all the way around and to stop and turn on the cassette recorder for the incoming message. The splices and the posts got dirty and did not make good contact and the tape would just go on forever.
About 3 minutes with some alcohol and a Q tip cleaning those parts as well as the other things in the tape path not only had them going again but sounding like new.
I cleaned the front panels up with some spray cleaner and hit the wooden cases with some lemon pledge and they would look like new. I spent more time carefully coiling up the power cords than repairing them, but when I was done they looked and sounded like new.
His boss ended up paying him quite a bit more than if he had taken OP’s offer.
The owner came back to check on me a couple hours later to see if I was going to be able to “crank one out for him that night” and I pointed to a pile of 5 or so and told him to check them out.
His eyes just about popped out of his head. I got near 10 done a night for a while. It did slow down a bit once I got the easy ones knocked out, but I just kept picking the low hanging fruit and learning more and more about them, and getting deeper and deeper into them.
He also had units coming in all the time so I did still have some easy ones mixed in with the bunch.
I thought he was going to soil himself when we settled up at the end of the first week, I had spent like 3 afternoons there and got near 30 of them fixed.
It was a really good payday. He was not super happy with our agreement but he had proposed it and he had someone who was kicking butt getting them fixed, so he was cornered into honoring it.
It was not lost on him that he could have been paying me like $12 a night and I would have been happy with that, but he thought he would get the better of me.
Reddit has to love this!
The top comment say the owner was getting a bargain.
But he was definitely worried the kid would fail.
He sure didn’t have a reason to be mad.
We just love it when things work out.
It didn’t turn out too badly for either of them.
This is one of my favorite malicious compliance stories.
It’s so wholesome and happy.
If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.