The One Day Job

What with the recession that everyone is talking about, I wonder if I will find a job. But I finally land a job putting fliers into doors. This isn't a bad gig in itself, except that it takes a lot of time to hit all of these doors with hundreds of fliers in the space of 5 hours. Also, I would have to find my way to random far-flung suburbs by eight o'clock in the morning. 
This particular morning, I have to be in Gresham. Planning on riding the bus, but, as usual, I haven't given myself enough time to make it, so I bike down Division street at 7:30 in the morning. The lovely morning sun lights my day even though I am really tired. 
When I get to the parking lot where we are supposed to meet, there is a SUV with the hatchback open and stacks of thousands of fliers are neatly stacked. What most surprises me about the group of people who are milling around is that they are mostly hippies. Dreads, beads, goatees and such. The thing about hippies is that they are generally easy going and take it all in stride. I figure that they are probably on the road or crashing somewhere and just making some extra cash so that they can get what they need and not be flat broke. 
The guy who is running operations is a friendly fellow. As we are all getting ready to go back to our neighborhoods, he says to everyone, "okay! Don't double flier doors! don't throw them away, I have people who can find out, I know the garbage men around here, they tell me, I got people in the neighborhoods looking out." It didn't even occur to me to double flier the doors, but I'm sure that some people thought that was a good idea. The people who I rode with into the neighborhood had a minivan, and it looked like they had just finished with their paper-route, based on the stacks of newspapers in those little plastic bags piled up in there. 
So, I am walking around Gresham and putting fliers on doors. The interesting thing about this line of work is that you can really see what people are doing with their houses. An incredible amount of houses had "no trespassing" signs up, some had "keep out" and some had "private property" signs. The houses with these kinds of signs were usually the dumpiest. Like, why would I want to break into your trailer? Some houses were nice and modest, but some nice houses had piles of stuff surrounding the front door. Talk about bad feng shui. I can only imagine what their garages looked like. God, stuff piled up everywhere bums me out.  
When I get back to the parking lot at the end of the day, I still have a giant bundle of fliers that I didn't manage to place on doors. But I have in my backpack. The guy says, "good job, how many did you throw in the trash can, how many did you double flier?" Actually, I say as I pull out the other big stack of un-passed out fliers, I didn't throw any away. He is sort of surprised, and says, "Thanks for being honest." He pays me in cash, about 35 dollars, and I tell him that I think I should concentrate my energy on getting a job instead of making 6 dollars an hour and riding my bike into the suburbs at seven in the morning. But it felt good to actually do some work and have someone hand me some cash instead of feeling like nothing is happening while I email cover letter after cover letter and resume after resume with not so much as even a rejection letter.