When I was fifteen, Dad cut a deal with his friend and our vice-principal Mr. Arcieri, to get me a job. I was to work at Flynn’s Hardware on West Delaware Avenue in downtown Pennington as a clerk on Saturdays. I would get paid $1.10 and hour. Because Dad was not a handyman by any sense of the word, he was never able to show me anything about any of the items in the store, so I learned a lot there. I learned how to thread pipe, cut glass and screening, and glaze and repair windows. I also learned how to fill out invoices and make change. Making change was a little hard to learn at first, particularly with someone of my math aptitude. But once I learned how to do it, it was a magical way to give customers the right change, ensured you did it right, and made your cashier drawer balance at the end of the day. For those of you who don’t how to do this, it goes like this. Let’s say the person bought a screwdriver for $1.89 and they gave you a five. You would put the five dollar bill on the ledge above the till, open up the register, and then grab a penny, a dime, and three dollar bills from the till. Then you would ask the customer to extend their hand. You would say to the customer as you give them the penny, “one dollar eighty-nine plus one equals one ninty, pus ten equals two dollars.” Then you would give them a dollar at a time, “Three, four, and one makes five dollars.” Then you would place the five in the till and close the cash drawer. “Thanks for shopping at Flynn’s.” It’s a lost art, really. An older kid Billy Groth worked with me, and he knew everything. He would walk around the store on his hands and mess around at the end of the day. During that time, I was much more interested in playing music with my rock band. Old Mr. Flynn was a very nice man and ran the store with his rather bossy wife. The problem was he was hard of hearing, and as such, usually mumbled when he talked to me. He would say, “Marc go upstairs get that reedergliffen for me.” I’d say, “what?” He’d say “Reedergliffen. you know the jabberlimstotter we used last week?” After time went on I used to say, “okay.” I would wander upstairs and see if something looked familiar from last week. I was stunned when I found was he was looking for, but usually he would get annoyed and go up and get it himself. Periodically his wife would say, “Bob you’re mumbling. The boy can’t understand you because you need a hearing aid.” To which he would reply, “no thanks I already had lunch.” She would roll her eyes and walk away. I lost the job because I opted to go to a “Battle of the Bands” audition in Princeton, which we won. He was looking for a kid who could drive and deliver parts anyway. So my first exposure to the work world was a failure. I learned though that there was an actual application to the math I was learning in school, and that there were a lot of things I didn’t know about tools and hardware. Things that would end up costing me dearly in the decades ahead.

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