Good help is hard to find

But find it we did. Actually, our contractor friend, Lee, found it. He found a first-generation immigrant working at McDonald's who was looking for extra work and was not afraid of hard work. Lee's been using them for laborers, and we hired one of them to dig out the barn, since Steve keeps getting distracted by other more pressing projects. There just don't seem to be enough days off for him to get it all done (that's an observation, not a complaint). Anyway, Lee brought his laborer out this morning, and introduced me to a very small young man from Honduras. Now, I have known other small men who can outwork a larger man, so I wasn't too concerned by his size. I was, however, a bit dismayed to see that he had no water and no food with him. It was HOT here today. That's OK - I can supply a water jug, and a sandwich for lunch is not going to put me in the poorhouse. So, I took him out a couple of hot dogs (don,t look at me like that. It's what I had, and they were all meat quality dogs) and a handful of grapes at noon, and refilled his water jug. I was impressed with his progress at that point. He'd dug almost as much in 3 hours as Steve had in 6. At the end of the day, I went out to pay him (yes, we pay the laborer by the day), and was very very impressed. In 6 hours, Steve had cleared just a little over one shovel length. We now have a full 3 1/2 shovel lengths completely cleared of buildup. In 8 hours, this little fellow had dug twice as much as Steve was able to remove in 6. I was concerned that he wouldn't want to come back tomorrow, because it was hot, dirty, stinky, back-breaking work, but instead of complaining, he thanked me repeatedly for the work and promised to return in the morning, with his own food tomorrow. We are very spoiled in this country.