When You Work For Your Dad

Now that summer is here, Connor has decided to hang out with his good friend Severin a few days a week.  The big catch is that Sev has a summer job.  He's been hired by his dad to work down at the family shop so he can earn a little money for scout camp.  Sev's Eleven, so as you can imagine, the sort of work he's doing is probably everything the real workers don't want to do...sweeping, weeding, cleaning out the gutters-grunge work.

On the days Connor spends the night he gets up and goes to work with Sev.  And while Sev gets paid, Connor's working for free on a "help-your-friend-with-their-chores-so-you-can-go-and-play-sooner kind of deal.

Sev's keeps an official time card to keep track of his work hours and when Connor goes down to help he can't resist tracking his time too:

The thing gave me a good laugh.

At first they started out working nice even hours.  On June 16th they both put in a solid two hours of work.  But then the next day they only put in 1 1/2 hours.  Did they get more efficient? Or just plain sick of working already?

Then, I think they realized actually counting up hours was doing MATH and realized that math should not be apart of any 11-year old's summer vacation.  So they switched to the method of simply listing the time they clocked in and out without trying to figure up the figures.  They'd just as soon leave that for dad...he's not on summer vacation.

Next I wondered what started happening on June 17th because they began to clock out at uneven hours.  They both showed up to work at 11:30-a nice even number.  Then they suddenly quit working at 2:13pm.  2:13pm?  I figured Sev's mom must have called them in for lunch or something.

But my favorite entry of all are Sev's last two entries when he clocked in at 8:55am one morning and 9:03am the next.  That's the serious perks that come from being employed by your dad.  You can show up at 9:03 and nobody's gonna fire you.  And even better than showing up at three minutes past any hour, he can leave at 11:52 just because he feels like it.  Perhaps he got hungry, thristy, or just because it got too hot outside and he decided he'd rather go home and swim in your pool than keep weed whacking.

That's my kinda job.

I only hope Sev's dad majored in math since he will need to rely on these skills to figure out what to pay his son.  He's gotta figure out what to pay a kid who worked 2 hours and 57 minutes on one day and 1 hour and 40 minutes the next.