HOM: MoreWards

Sometimes we were asked to haul off the old furniture after we delivered the new stuff. One such item was a big old gold couch, and since we need one at the house Mark & I went out and stowed it in my living room. There was some item he was given and wanted to drop off at his sister's house down by the Stillwater in Evergreen. I was okay with that till I had a look at the rickety old bridge I had to go over to get to her place, and I chickened out. I had a vision of trying to explain how I managed to drop the truck through the bridge. I delivered a new range to a distant relative's house and was asked to take out the old one. In the process of doing so we tore their new vinyl flooring. I felt bad, and Wards refused to pay for it as we were not obligated to remove the customer's old units. One of the worst jobs was delivering carpet. It was in big, awkward and heavy rolls and Wards, in the infinite wisdom of its local mismanagement, decreed that all the carpeting must be kept on the top floor. Since the only practical access was via the service elevator and said elevator was about half as long as the carpet, getting the rolls up and down meant wrestling them into the elevator and standing them on end. We had to haul them upstairs for display, down for delivery. Either way sucked. The very worst job was doing repo's. The very worst. A repo meant going into the home of a down-on-their-luck family and hauling away whatever they were behind in their payments on. When it was their only refrigerator or stove and they watched you with tears running down their faces, I hated my job. A hard and fast Ward's rule was that the people had to sign a form when we confiscated their stuff. Since they always refused, I always shrugged and walked away. I figured that if the managers wanted the autograph, they could come collect it, I wasn't going to. Yeah, I had a few problems with the management. And vice versa. TBC (Me) (Blacktail Books)