This piece describes issues I experienced in my younger years. I started working when I was 14 years old learning to build custom cars. By the time I was 18 I was good at it because I paid close attention to the old timers I was learning from. From the very beginning I was paid a flat rate, and because I was good, and fast, I made a good wage, but the work was not full time.

When there was no work I'd take an hourly wage job. If the job was doing custom car or body work, because I was young I was told I had to prove I could do the work, and promised that if I did prove that I'd get a raise, but the raises never came, I got excuses instead.

In all of those cases the person I was working for made a lot of money off of my work, but just couldn't bring themselves to keep their promise of paying me what I was worth after I'd proved I could do the work.

Everyone of those cheapskates despised me for demanding they keep their word and pay me a journeyman's wage, and despised me for quitting.

I got real good at quitting. I'd wait until they bid a job to do custom metal work and took a down payment and then I'd demand they keep their word. But their greed was far more powerful than their sense of their situation. In two of those cases I later found out they were spending the money I was making them on cocaine. Looking back, I think there were probably others that did the same. I called those "the blizzard years" In most of them they went out of business because they took on a job they didn't have the skills to complete and/or snorted all the money.