“My boots are missing. Give me $200.”

Continuing the story of my unremarkable college career....

I continued to perform just well enough at my job at the college job service to avoid getting fired. As a result of the low pay (I think I was making $4.75 per hour at this point) and my tendency to max out my sick days, I was always short of money. The nice thing about working at the job service, though, was that I could cull many of the better temporary jobs for my friends and myself. Weekend moving jobs tended to pay well, and I always kind of enjoyed raking leaves, because it was mindless work that allowed me to daydream.

There was a bit of a lottery aspect to these temporary jobs, though. Sometimes you would take what appeared to be a gravy job only to spend your weekend pulling weeds in sweltering heat or raking leaves in a backyard that turned out to be a golden retriever’s toilet.

The worst temporary job I ever took was putting up an elderly woman’s storm windows. The job paid $40 total, and I thought, “How hard can it be to put up a few storm windows?” I called my friend Gary and we headed over to this woman’s house one afternoon.

Mrs. Dressler was probably about eighty years old, and her house must have been at least a hundred. Her house was a massive two story Victorian with about forty windows, none of which seemed to be the same size or shape. The storm windows themselves were massive old wood things, so badly warped by weather and age that even if we somehow managed to match them with the appropriate windows on the house, we were sixty years too late to get them to fit properly. We spent six hours hauling forty pound windows up and down ladders, employing a combination of process of elimination and brute force to get them to fit. It was getting dark, and we still had several windows to install, so we knocked on Mrs. Dressler’s door and informed her that we would have to return the next day to finish the job. Then, as tactfully as we could, we suggested that she really needed to get some new storm windows and that maybe $40 split between two people wasn’t quite enough money for this job.

Mrs. Dressler nearly went apoplectic at the latter suggestion. You’d have thought that we had threatened to burn her house down. Gary and I, fearing that the poor old woman was going to have a stroke, backed off our request and assured her that we would return the next day to finish the job.

We returned as promised and managed, with the help of a hammer and nails, to get her the remaining storm windows affixed to her house, if not exactly properly installed. We took our $40 and left. We had ended up making around $2.50 per hour, but we were just relieved that the ordeal was over.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t. Several weeks later, I got a call from Mrs. Dressler one evening. I can remember our conversation almost verbatim. It went like this:

“Hello?”

“Is this Rob?”

“Yes.”

“This is Mrs. Dressler. You and your friend put up my storm windows last fall. There was a bag full of boots in the basement where I keep the storm windows. They aren’t there anymore, and I want them back.”

This was such an absurd string of statements that I was at first speechless. I eventually managed to plead innocent, but no amount of insisting that I had absolutely no interest in a bag of old women’s boots would convince Mrs. Dressler that I hadn’t taken them. There was not an iota of doubt in her mind that Gary and I were a couple of no-good boot thieves. I’m not sure what she thought we had done with her boots; maybe we had simply taken them out of spite and thrown them away, or maybe we had sold them on the thriving black market for used women’s footwear. Maybe she thought we were indulging our foot fetishes, and that even as I vigorously denied her allegations, I was wearing a pair of size six women’s boots on my size thirteen feet. She grew more and more agitated and incoherent, and finally I hung up on her.

The next day I got a call from one of Mrs. Dressler’s neighbors, who happened to also be an attorney. She berated me for hanging up on this “sweet old lady” and then suggested that we “cut the baby in half.” Mrs. Dressler estimated that her boots were worth $200, so she figured that a reasonable compromise would be for me and Gary to each fork over $50 – which would put us at a net loss of $30 each for a full day of hard physical labor. I hung up on her as well.

I’m going to assume that it isn’t necessary to clarify that we didn’t take the boots. Well, at least I didn’t take them; for all I know, Gary still has them stashed in his attic or something. A few weeks later we got a notice to appear in small claims court: Mrs. Dressler was suing us for $200. Gary and I knew the suit was baseless, but it’s unnerving to be summoned before a public official to defend yourself against the accusations of a frail, elderly woman. Maybe she would get a sympathetic judge who would order us to pay for the boots. I didn’t even have $100 at this point. Between my minimum wage job on campus and these temporary jobs, I was barely able to pay my rent. The idea that this horrible job might end up costing me a net total of $30 was profoundly demoralizing.

The trial ended up being an almost comical affair. Mrs. Dressler’s lawyer came along to offer moral support, but as you’re not allowed to have legal representation in small claims court, Mrs. Dressler was required to make her own case – and it still boiled down to “These boys were in my garage. There were boots in my garage. The boots were worth $200. Now the boots are gone. No one else was in my garage. I want them to give me $200.” The judge very patiently informed her that as he had no way to know for sure whether or not we had taken her boots, he couldn’t make us pay for them. And that was that.

We walked out of the courtroom and made our way to the elevator. As we stood there, Mrs. Dressler and her lawyer came up behind us. After a moment, the lawyer said, “Let’s take the stairs.” So she and this frail old lady walked down a flight of stairs rather than take the same elevator as the alleged boot thieves. Small victories, I guess.