Ten years ago this month, I graduated from one of the nation's top business schools and soon thereafter scored a gig with the Gannett Corporation, which publishes daily newspapers in cities nationwide. I didn't land in finance or strategy, nor in marketing or accounting, but squarely in operations - and not as a master of logistics either, but as a paper boy, who seven days a week for the following year rose at 3:00 a.m. to deliver the daily news. ~
I may be the only paper boy in the annals of that storied profession to have performed the job in a BMW driven by an MBA. How does a relatively intelligent individual with so much education grow up to be a paper boy? There are no easy answers, but during the years I left Evins Mill to attain my degree, the business suffered severely. This is not to suggest it had flourished under my early stewardship, but the rapscallion we retained to manage the business in my absence drove it further into the ground.
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As the business could ill afford to support me, I cast about for interim sources of income to allow me time to resuscitate its fortunes. I initially toyed with the idea of waiting tables. Though I did after all have some experience in hands-on hospitality, my vanity put the kibosh on this rather sensible approach and drove me to consider more innocuous alternatives, for I cringed at the prospect of groveling before one of my peers.
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When I stumbled upon the paper delivery ad, I knew immediately the job was as perfect as it was pathetic, for what could be more anonymous than flying through the streets before sunrise. If I spent the previous two years mastering such rarefied skills as managing inventory or valuating companies, in less than two hours I internalized the basics of paper delivery, and learned more esoteric aspects of the profession on the job.
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To ensure a paper consistently hit its target for example, I could soon calibrate the strength and trajectory of my toss based on the velocity and torque of my vehicle and conditions on the ground like snow or ice. More than grasping simple technique, I was also reminded of a sobering reality - that around me were scores of people who hitherto were as invisible to me as they lived and worked right beside me, struggling on the fringes just to make ends meet.
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Unlike many of my scrappy colleagues I suspect, my financial situation, while not ideal, was not dire. I may have been cash poor but did possess not insignificant assets against which I could and in the end had to borrow. Catholics might suggest I harbored guilt about this unearned financial cushion and was subconsciously wearing my paper route like a hair shirt. Romantics could say I was acting on some quixotic impulse, tilting at the windmills of my own financial hardship.
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Southern confederates might interpret my route as homage to the lost cause ethos, for in its unrelenting nature, paper delivery carries a heavy whiff of futility. As for futility, the philosopher Camus might explain my job choice in terms of existential angst, rolling my papers each morning just as Sisyphus, that unfortunate figure from Greek mythology, rolled his boulder up a hill - only to watch it roll down again, requiring him to repeat the task for all eternity - and finding life’s meaning therein.
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However one cares to interpret the fact I took this turd of a job, I remain proud of the experience. That I would feel pride should come as no surprise, for at the end of the day, it was pride, more than hair shirts, windmills, lost causes or existential angst, that led me to this humbling opportunity.
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