papers? pish!
My mother ran a leaflet delivery company. Every morning before school, at weekends and during every school holiday I had to help deliver leaflets. 1p per leaflet. If i hurried I could get about 150 done before breakfast. Yeah. £1.50. That was in and around 1990, when £1.50 was worth only slightly more than £1.50 today!

Every winter since I can feel my shoulder ache where the bag strap used to be. I can't even claim for damages as it's my mum I'd have to take to court.....dammit!

Oh, and as we "couldn't afford" a warehouse or other storage unit, our house was used instead. Feckin boxes of stuff everywhere - even in our bedrooms. When we had samples to deliver, we just couldn't move around the house.

And then there were the deliveries. We lived in a Victorian terrace on a busy main road. Imagine the fun then when a 7.5 tonne lorry arrived, laden with boxes and with nowhere to park. we had to climb onto the truck, dismantle the carefully packaged pallets (no forklift, remember!) and then carry each box to the house, where they were stacked, counted and checked. By me or my brother and sister. If we were lucky the delivery would arrive in the day whilst we were at school, but as my mum would be out delivering and organising people, she tried to arrange all deliveries for first thing - no breakfast and then straight to school, late.

And then there were the night times. I'm sure that you have all received bundles of leaflets through the door. Well they don't bundle themselves together or arrive in little convenient packages. Oh no. Muggins here, along with anybody else that wasn't quick enough, had to sit in the lounge bundling the leaflets together. Not just enough for what I was to deliver in the morning. Ohhh nooo! If there were 10 people delivering, say, 300 bundles each then we would have to fold together...all together now...3000 bundles. each bundle could have 5 leaflets which means that i would have potentially 15000 papercuts by the end of the evening and arsecramp after sitting in one spot for 4 hours.

You want stories about exploited kids? I could go on. Honestly, I could.

Thank you, kind B3ta people, for allowing me the space to get this into the open. I'm going to get some counselling now. Cheerio!
(downhill without brakes . It was the worst day of my life, Fri 17 Feb 2006, 13:36, Reply)