Blue Collar and Proud of it

note: This might not be what you think. I was born blue collar but then went to college so that is what this is about.

My wife and I went to see a nutritionist this week. I said I was born blue collar and this sometimes causes problems between my 15 year old and I because she is at a Prep school and likely will head to a very good college or university from there. This is now. I told the nutritionist, "I'm where the rubber meets the road." She said my daughter would need my wisdom regarding thinking this way during her life. I said, "I know. But it's rough right now."

My father was an electrician. But starting when I was 12 he started his own Electrical Contracting Business. He drew up custom electrical plans for each job and installed wiring to make  everything electrical work in homes and businesses. He taught me this business from the time I was 12 (summers) until I was 17. I even took a special course load in my junior year of High School called the 4-4 plan which meant that I went to school for 4 hours and then I worked for 4 hours every day during the week and got credit for working because I was learning a trade. Then that summer I took history which was what I had to do to make it all work. Anyway, I made a lot of money (at that time for someone 16 and 17) and fixed up my 1956 Ford station wagon, my "Surf Wagon" to carry my surfboards and friends and girlfriends to the beach etc. with. We lived in Glendale which is about 1 hour by car from the nearest good surfing beach back then in 1964 and 1965. I usually drove about 400 miles a weekend after I was 16. After all, gas was only about 17cents a gallon then and I was making money working for my Dad.

I began working at age 10 with a Bicycle newspaper route and delivered   bags of newspapers hanging off my handlebars. So, you held onto the handlebar with one hand and threw the paper with the other until you had delivered all your papers.  Though this could be dangerous (dogs trying to bite you and throw you off your bike, bags becoming unwieldy and causing you to crash into something or someone or gangs pulling you off your bicycle and stealing your papers and beating you up, kids were more expendable in society than now, especially boys. I realized pretty soon that if any of my customers didn't pay me in a timely fashion monthly (like never being home or answering the door) I realized that I always took the loss out of my 10 or 15 dollars a month that I made for working 7 days a week delivering papers. But one good thing came out of this job I met my best friend from age 12 through age 20 and beyond when I had to give up my route. He was the kid a year older than I that I trained to take over my route at the Glendale New Press in 1958. So, because of giving him my route I wound up at the same junior high and we skateboarded, went to movies, rode bicycles, then eventually bought cars and did some street racing with cars, went surfing, built a dune buggy and got stuck in a dry wash near Palm Springs. All the really crazy things that young men did in the 1960s (from 1960 until 1969 when he went to Viet Nam as an Air Force Sargent who was a jet engine mechanic.

Since I tend to be an intelligent person like my father I started looking at basic Blue Collar philosophy and liked some of it and didn't like other stuff. For example I liked:
being pragmatic and trying to help all the people you meet any way you can
But I didn't like the idea of:
Work like a workaholic slave until you die.
Since my father was a workaholic and because this didn't look like anything I wanted to be because I just wouldn't do that to my kids, I decided to try something else. I found I liked the college motto which is "Work Smarter Not Harder". So, though I'm  very proud that I can fix a car and survive almost anywhere anyone puts me with a knife and a blanket, I prefer not to have things be that sketchy. Though I love the wilderness I'm now 63. And though I love walking my dogs in the woods I don't tend to take the extreme chances that I did in my twenties and and to some degree in my thirties in regard to traveling, motorcycles, skiing, etc.
Also, just working a 40 hour a week until you die just makes money for someone else. And unfortunately working with a salary is just even worse regarding your free time to live or do anything in life at all with your time that you might want to.

So, I looked at all this and thought, "I want to have my own businesses. Then I won't pay myself a salary or wages and everything will either be profit or loss for that year."
This worked out much better for me because I found working 40 hours a week for someone else to be mostly impossible for me. All I could think of usually was just how much money I was making for someone else but not me. And then after giving your blood to someone else for 40 or 50 years= a gold watch and then you just drop dead because you are so worn out and broke by then that you wish you were dead and then you are.

So, basically I saw working for someone else was just being a slave. It doesn't matter that you are called an employee. Let's call it what it really is. You are a slave to your employer. That's what a job is if you want to keep it. However, I wouldn't necessarily call a person a slave who works for a relative or friend, but that would have to be decided case by case, wouldn't it.

So, if you are tired of being a slave to your employer start your own business part time if you have something you want to sell or make to sell. Especially in these times having your own business might be the only way to stay sane under the present working conditions  here in the U.S.