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A retired foreman at my first job in Toledo handed me a notebook on my last day and said fill it up
Back in 1998 I was a grunt at a warehouse outside Toledo, and a foreman named Ray who was retiring after 34 years called me into his office on my last day there. He gave me a spiral notebook with about 20 pages already filled with notes on forklift repair, vendor phone numbers, and who to trust on the floor, then said the rest was mine to fill. I was 22 and dumb, so I shoved it in a box and forgot about it for a decade. When I finally dug it out during a layoff in 2009, his note on page 3 about always asking for the maintenance schedule before accepting a job saved me from taking a terrible offer. Has anyone else kept a notebook like that from an old boss, or am I the only one who still writes stuff down by hand?
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richardharris11d ago
Wait, so you had a handwritten cheat code for life sitting in a box for a decade and just forgot about it? That's like finding out the lottery ticket in your junk drawer was a winner the whole time. I mean, Ray basically handed you a map to avoid every bad job in northwest Ohio and you went "cool, I'll store this with my old pay stubs." Idk, maybe it's just me but I would've taped page 3 to my bathroom mirror. The part that gets me is the maintenance schedule tip, that one line probably saved you more money than the notebook cost in the first place. Dude was out here giving you 34 years of hard knocks in 20 pages and you needed a layoff to finally read it.
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