Here is the first part of us actually workamping and camping at the pumpkin lot.
For those that don't know Palo Alto, CA it is in the midst of the Silicon Valley. Most houses here have seven figure price tags. Companies such as Yahoo, Google and Hewlett-Packard make their home in the area. Palo Alto is an old town but has its newfound fame and money lots of it. This area is loaded with Internet geeks and they make a ton of money. There sits our pumpkin lot right in the midst of all this.
The first year we were there we thought it was funny because during the day nanny's would bring their kids to the lot to ride the rids and then at night the parents would bring the same kids back to ride. Our rides were not cheep. Each ride was $3.00. We had 2 bouncy houses these had a 5 minute time limit. We also had 2 slides these were priced at 5 slides for the $3.00. We sold a lot of different merchandise: Indian corn, corn stalks, mini corn, mini pumpkins, and 8 varieties of large pumpkins, and various types of gourds.
The first year we were lucky in a way, they wanted to set us up and have us open on a Friday. As things happened or didn't happen at other lots they didn't get us ready to open until the following Wednesday. Looking back it was a very slow day. We may have done $200 in business. The lucky part for us was that we got a chance to learn. As newbies we didn't even know the names of the different varieties of pumpkins that we were selling. Nor as we found out could we make "voids" on the cash register. I did most of the register running and of course I made mistakes. Day two found me remaking the register tape after hours to make it right after making so many mistakes that we could only wonder at my ability. If we had opened as we did in year two on a Friday we would have gone nuts trying to keep up. I'm not sure that we would have made it through the weekend.
The owners and ourselves thought that an attendant at each ride and a couple of "lot" attendants would be sufficient to allow us to "manage" and run the register. The reality was for most of the first year we only had attendants on two of the rides and no lot attendants. This meant that my wife and I spent most of our time hoping that nothing happened on the unattended rides.
We hired a high school kid to work from 3 to 7 and all day on the weekends. He started with us as a ride attendant on the very first day promptly at 3pm. He worked hard for us until 7pm, which was when he was to go home. He asked if he could borrow $20.00 and with an "I'll see you tomorrow" off he went. Wellguess what? Next day he doesn't show. Now on day two of the missing worker I'm reading the morning paper and there is an article about this high school boy that went to a party, got into a fight and they proceeded to beat him nearly to death. I read the name and was very surprised to see that it was our missing employee. He did return to work near the end of the month...needless to say he seemed to be a much-changed person, although still a good worked and he did pay the $20 back.
It isn't over yet!
