It would be fair to say its pretty tough finding a fulltime gig that will provide enough dosh to enable Mrs P to remain Briscoes' favourite customer.
In fact, I think they should just make her the next Briscoes Lady and be done with it. It would save me all that money she spends on petrol driving to the store each day. That's before she's even gone in and succumbed to the latest red-hot bargain.
I mean how many electric kettles do you need?
Anyway. I'm looking for work and resigned to the fact it might not be fulltime and just a little bit of this and a bit of that. Couple hours here and there of whatever sort of thing.
I've had a couple of little things to do but in the main my life at present is filled with the most rejection I've had since the Greymouth Intermediate School disco of 1975.
Until my phone rang on Wednesday afternoon. A friend wants me to put some bathroom blinds up before her guests arrive on Friday.
Minutes later it rang again. Would I mind helping with some deliveries tomorrow?
When it rang a third time and I had agreed to help the Boomerang Child do a flyer drop around her suburbs I started to picture me and my granddad standing waiting for his regular London bus a million years ago. Naturally, our ride home to my nan was late.
When the N29 to Wood Green (I think) did turn up it was in a line of three all going the same way at the same time.
"Typical," Granddad would say. "There's never one there when you need it, then they all turn up at once."
So, the sudden improvement in my job situation was a "London transport issue" or, as I say now I'm all grown up: It never rains but it pours.
But now the deluge of employment has given me a headache.
There's a bit of time pressure on the flyer drop. Cutting a long story short, to slot it in means I am going to have to deliver them late tonight if I am to meet my other work commitments.
So I grab a mochaccino from the Wild Bean, makers of the world's greatest coffee. One day I'm sure they'll take the hint and sponsor me and drive over to where the Boomerang Child is waiting with her flyers.
Now, I'd expected a couple of hundred. I'd also expected it might take me a couple of hours tops and I'd be back home in bed before the icicles had a chance to appear on my beard
Wrong. There were 2500 flyers. No wonder the Boomerang Child looked a little sheepish as my enthusiasm for the task ahead disappeared along with the last of my coffee.
So that was me for, well, I've actually no idea how long it took. I just kept going. Up and down, round and round. In a bit of a daze by the end of it truth be told.
It would be fair to say I was a bit tired by the time I'd finished my other jobs at the end of the week and lay on the couch wondering what just happened and where the past 48 hours had gone.
Now I've had time to think about it, I'd actually quite enjoyed my pavement pounding adventure in the peaceful wee small hours.
As I lay there contemplating, I allowed myself a little sleep deprived thought.
What if the flyer drop thing did branch out into a fulltime job? There'd be a little bit of money in it and who knows I could end up running the whole thing and employing people to do what I had just done.
Maybe I'd turn it into some sort of delivery franchise.
Maybe I'd be so successful I'd be featured on the cover of some business magazine or even on telly. And when they asked me how I'd started I'd tell them how I'd had a difficult first day but it had all turned out right in the end.
I might even say my new career had got off to a flyer.
• Kevin Page is a teller of tall tales with a firm belief too much serious news gives you frown lines. Feel free to share stories to kevin.page@nzme.co.nz
