My eighty-nine-year-old friend Bob has often said that he never had trouble getting a job. He described a job interview he had once as a young man. The employer asked him what kind of work he was looking for, and he said, “Anything you tell me to do.”
The employer said, “I like that attitude. But … what if I asked you to kill someone?”
Bob replied, “Well, I know how.”
The man said, “What?” And Bob explained he’d been in the Marines, trained in hand to hand combat. He assured him he really had no intention of taking that sort of job but was otherwise willing to do anything. That was good news for the employer, because what he needed Bob to do was shovel a lot of horse manure. 
After Bob had been working for a while, the barn owner asked, “How do you stand the smell?”
Bob told him that his summer job in high school had been on a farm with sixty cows, so he could get used to anything. If you paid him, he’d do the work.
This leads into the next story. In Philadelphia, shortly after getting out of the Marines, Bob was, as he put it, walking on the wrong side of the street. A man came up close and shoved a gun in his ribs, demanding, “Give me your money.”
The way Bob describes it. “For some reason I wasn’t scared. I felt like I was in control. The robber made a mistake, getting the gun too close. He didn’t know what he was doing.”
Bob twisted the gun back at him and asked, “Why do you want to do that?”
“I need the money,” the would-be robber replied.
“Then get a job.”
“I’m desperate. I don’t have time.”
“Yes, you do. Have you got time for the trouble you’ll get into if you keep doing what you’re doing?”
The guy left.
Two years later, Bob ran into him in a bar. “You gonna stick a gun in my ribs?”
“No, actually, I did what you said. I got a job. I was starving for the first week until I got paid, and then I ate like a hog for the first two days that I had money. But now I’m doing fine. Thank you.”
Or that’s the way the story goes.
Amber Foxx Mysteries 