Saturday 2 March 2013

Part Time Job


For three years now, Perran has been doing a paper round.  In fact, for most of that, two paper rounds.  Huge discipline is involved in getting up at 6:45am seven mornings a week and then cycling to the paper shop a mile away, performing two paper rounds and then back again to shower and change into smart school clothes, then walking back to school, a mile away. It doesn’t pay well but Saturdays are consumed by dance classes, and in our house, Sundays are special, so he doesn’t have many options.

Carenza shares a Saturday job with a friend, meaning she works every second Saturday.  Hers is a legendarily cushy job in an up-market card shop.  There is only so much straightening of cards that she can do, allowing her time furtively to memorise French vocab or scan a history article. However, she does have a good one-liner for every anniversary and birthday now. 

When it is a sunny Saturday, and Carenza has already spent all week in school, I do wonder whether sitting in a shop is the best use of her time.  When Perran is working late into the evening, I worry about his early start. 

However, there is no better way to learn to value money than to earn it, so I can only trust that the sacrifices they are making now are worthwhile in terms of life skills learned.

1 comment:

  1. I really like your everyday morning. When I was a student it was really difficult for me to get up in the mornings. Probably it was because we did not have all of these services where you could buy custom essay papers online freely. So I had to stay up all night working on my assignments (well, you know exactly what life of an average student looks like). So, I was so tired that I could not make myself get up earlier and go for a run or something like do. Or maybe I was just too lazy to do this. But I wish I was more like you

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