Sep 25, 2010

Paperboys

It's 6 a.m., and you're pissed because you had to wake up so early for work. You put the coffee on, think about adding a shot of Bailey's, but decide to be professional today and so have just the coffee, and then you check the front porch for the morning news. You know it will be there, because someone has gotten out of his warm bed even earlier than you: the paperboy.

If half this blog is about what will go away when newspapers do, then we can't ignore this most noble of professions. Being a paperboy is almost a rite of passage in a young man or lady's life (even though some were girls, everybody was still considered a paper*boy*). When I was a kid, I wanted to deliver newspapers. But my parents decided to move three miles outside of town, and I was unwilling to bike all the way there and back every morning. And it didn't even matter anyway, because one family in town had a monopoly on the paperboy business, and it was impossible for anyone else to break in. I would have been good, though. I would have been really good.

It just won't be the same, waking up to coffee and the sound of your old Windows 98 booting up to check Google News. Plus, without the responsibility of having a steady job, young kids who were once destined to be paperboys in a pre-Internet society will probably turn to the streets selling heroin and sleeping in opium houses.

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