Sunday, February 16, 2014

JOBS: The Ongoing Series

5th Job: Detailing Cars for My Dad's Friends, St. George, UT


Let's see, where were we? 

When last we discussed jobs, I had just finished up talking about my job cleaning up The Boulders building project for my Dad. The sequel to that job was in detailing cars for my Dad's somewhat well-to-do-friends.

I started off on my own on this little entrepreneurial endeavor, but added my sister, Hillary. We both needed the money, which if I recall was $20 a car - a pretty decent deal by today's standards, plus I think Dad's friends let us clean their cars every 2 weeks or so. So there was a pretty significant amount of charity going on here.

Still, that put gas in the tank, and we got to drive around in a Mercedes Benz and whatever the 1992 version of Escalades were. We would drive them to our house and wash and wax them and then pretty thoroughly detail them inside. Today I want to say that each car took about 3 hours? Possibly? 

Our biggest ever 'score' came from one of the guys let us detail his ski-doos. That was a big money job, although I found it nearly impossible to clean ski-doos. They were already clean-they lived in the water, after all. So washing them just felt like I was being too ironic for my own good. But we washed them and then tried to wax them, but the was didn't really do anything. They seemed to be made out of an odd plasticy material. At the time I guessed fiberglass, but I strongly suspect it was closer to 'completely normal plastic.'

Today I would absolutely clean those ski-doos with some kind of hard water remover, and I would try to find a special wax that would actually do something other than just make them all slightly slipperier ski doos that nonetheless look identical to how they looked 10 minutes ago. There's got to be a special product for that. I would also probably advertise, so I could get more clients than 2 of my Dad's friends. It was around this time in my life that others probably realized I was not exactly destined for greatness.