Out Of Poverty: An Honest Living

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Service with a smile!

One of the free resources available to those with money troubles is Debtors Anonymous. A friend of mine calls it “money school, for free.” It was at one of these meetings that I announced that I was broke and needed a job, like . . . now! A young man told me afterward that he could get me work as a parking valet.

And so, with no better alternatives for immediate cash, I began parking cars for $8.25 an hour plus tips. The tips averaged out to $2.50 per car. A good shift meant 20 or more cars per valet. The prime shifts were sometimes assigned according to seniority, but mostly through unabashed cronyism. The field managers worked the prime shifts with their friends, and everyone else was relegated to slow shifts of five or fewer cars.

It was at this time that I became acutely aware, for the first time, that I was no longer young. One of the field managers told me that he hoped he would be in as good of shape as I was when he got to be my age. Another worker let me know that his parents were ten years younger than I. Comments like these had the effect of making me realize that, while I didn’t view my co-workers as being much younger than I, they viewed me as being a whole lot older than they.

About half of the sixty or so guys who worked for this company were students of one of Chicago’s famous Bible schools, presumably because they were honest. In the valet industry, stealing is as easy as not tearing a ticket. You see, when a car is dropped off, the valet hands the customer half of a ticket and attaches the other half to the keys. Both halves have the same serial number on them. When the client is ready to leave, he hands his half of the ticket to the valet, who then finds the keys by matching the serial numbers.

Each valet is given a certain number of tickets at the beginning of a shift. Each ticket represents the parking fee, which at that time was usually $10. At the end of the shift, the valet turns in his unused tickets plus $10 for every ticket torn. Every ticket you don’t tear means an extra $10 in your pocket.
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Another way of working this grift was to add tickets to your stack. These were supplied by field managers who stole them from the office. So, for instance . . . let’s say you start a shift with twenty-five tickets. But then someone slides you five extras. That way you could make it look like you had five fewer customers than you really did. Thus, you have $50 extra at the end of the night.

I only became aware of this little-league crime syndicate after I had been working for the company for over a year. One of the Bible students who was about to leave the company to take a job as a youth minister in Aurora asked me if I wanted his stack of 1000 extra tickets. I naively asked why I would want them.

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I had a bit of a chuckle thinking of some of the great whistleblower movies — Serpico, Three Days of the Condor, and The Insider, to name a few — and imagining these corrupt Bible-student valets putting out a hit on me.
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I am a people pleaser by nature. So, after he explained, I actually told him that I would think about it, knowing full well that this was something I could never do. I don’t know why, and I don’t claim to be holier than anyone, but blatant, willful thievery is not something I have ever done. I felt guilty just considering it.

But in that moment before I responded, I became aware of several things. First, this explained why I rarely got the really good shifts. Those were taken by the fellas involved in this scam. And secondly, there might be a backlash if I refused. In other words, if word got out that I knew what was going on but that I thought myself too good to participate, then that lack of trust might mean that I would never again work a good shift.

I had a bit of a chuckle thinking of some of the great whistleblower movies — Serpico, Three Days of the Condor, and The Insider, to name a few — and imagining these corrupt Bible-student valets putting out a hit on me. In the end, I made a deal with my co-worker not to tell anyone about what they were doing if he agreed not to tell anyone that I didnt want to participate.

He became guilt-ridden, and proceeded to spill the beans about his thieving Bible school compatriots and what hypocrites they all were. And suddenly I was no longer just an old guy parking cars. I was a confessor absolving this young man of his sins.
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