This morning I have been thinking about a lot of things---kind of nostalgic---but I am 61 years old and have worked 53 years of that. I started young because my parents owned a store and they worked me and my threee brothers so they knew where we were. I also worked for my Grandpa and he paid me well (when I was working for him he paid me the same salary he paid his men $20.00/Day).
He was a cattleman and had lots of steers in feed lots around the country. He would take me with him to the feed lots and while he was talking to the owner it was my job to follow the workers around the lot and look at the steers and listen to what they said as we walked from pen to pen. I was just a kid---right---so they would talk about a lot of things as we moved through the yard---but mostly they talked about how they were taking advantage of Grandpa. Part of the job was to get the weekly gain slips for the pen and the weekly feed bills for the pen---the other part was to report out where he was being taken advantage of.
When we got in the car to leave it was my job to tell Grandpa where they were taking advantage of him and what the weekly gain of each pen of steers was and what the cost of the gain was...both of those were simple math...take last weeks pen weight away from this weeks pen weight and you've got the gain---divide that into the weekly pen feed cost and you have the cost per pound gain. If a pound gain is costing you more that the market is bringing you are losing money if it is less then you are making money. You can do a little more simple math and figure how much you are making or losing each day for each pen.
Anyway the reason for this blog is to let you know I didn't have a very physical job working for Grandpa but he damn sure taught me how to pay attention. I still think that is one of my greatest assets.
I CREDIT MY GRANDPA WITH TEACHING ME HOW TO PAY ATTENTION
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6 comments:
Now I am jealous. I would deliver newspapers from when I could first perch them onto my bike, but we only made a dollar a week.
Do you compute the gain before or after the cows poop?
All of the good feed yards run the entire pen of steers across a scale and weigh the pen weekly---they balance the scale before they run the steers in but you get some poop added to the weight by those that do it in the scale and those that got pooped on in the lane to the scale.
I didn't understand the value of my job with Grandpa until I was grown and away from home. Because of the small talk by the men at the yard I save him thousands of dollars when he would call back the feed lot owner and want things changed that I told him about on the ride home....MORAL TO THAT STORY---DON'T TALK IN FRONT OF KIDS!!!!
Tattle tale. ;) I would've tattled for that much money, too. lol
I bet he was grateful to have you out there doing that - I bet you saved him alot since they didn't think much of the "kid" following them around listening to them
I tell people all the time that I got paid to pay attention when I way young.
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