The truck died on the side of the road somewhere in Oklahoma City with a tank of weed killer in the back.
I was twenty-five, a month into a job spraying lawns, and I got on the radio and told my manager the truck wouldn’t run and asked if somebody could come out.
Nobody was coming out.
What I got instead was him walking me through it over the radio. Pop the hood. Look at this. Try that. I’m standing on the shoulder in the heat with a handset, describing engine parts to a man who wasn’t going to leave his chair.
The throttle linkage had come apart. And the fix — the actual fix, the one that got a company truck running again — was that I took the shoestring out of my own boot and tied it back together.
It worked. I drove the rest of the route.
He congratulated me.
Told me I’d done a great job out there. Sounded genuinely pleased about it, and I don’t think he was being sarcastic. A piece of his equipment had failed, one of his people had fixed it roadside with clothing, and as far as he was concerned the system had worked exactly as designed.
I remember standing there with one boot loose thinking: I am not going to be here long.
A couple of weeks later I told him I’d taken another job.
“All right,” he said. “This is your two weeks’ notice.”
“There’s no two weeks. I start Monday.”
He told me he had to have two weeks.
I said I didn’t care at all. The new place needs me Monday and I’m going Monday. If you want me to finish today’s shift I’ll finish today’s shift, and that’s what you get.
He tried to be angry about it and I watched him try. And there was a second in there — I’ll admit it — where the younger, more agreeable version of me almost apologized.
I didn’t. I have never once regretted it.
That job was a month out of the wilderness year, the stretch after the church work ended when I took whatever would have me. Art gallery, pizza place, lawns, and eventually an insurance office that turned into twenty years of something else entirely.
I’ve thought about that manager since, and what gets me isn’t that he was harsh. He wasn’t, particularly. He was cheap and he was checked out, and those are ordinary failures.
What gets me is the notice.
He wanted two weeks of formality from a man he wouldn’t send a mechanic to. He wanted the protocol observed — the professional courtesy, the proper interval, the way it’s supposed to be done — from a company that had let one of its guys fix a truck with his own shoelace.
I don’t think that ever occurred to him. I don’t think it occurs to most people who ask for it.
I’ve given proper notice at every job since. Two weeks, sometimes more, handoff documents, the whole thing.
Because it was earned, every time.
David Willis 