My Criminal Memoir, Part Seven. Liars, Cheats and Frauds. Louis Shalako.

The leisure suit, ladies and gentlemen. Aspirational to a certain class of creep.

Louis Shalako

 

Liars, cheats and frauds. I’ve known a few liars, cheats and frauds in my time. Some were worse than others. So, I was at Lambton College, studying little photocopied math booklets and trying to get my Grade 12, and this is how I met I.M. Stoner.

Stoney was there for the same reasons I was, out of work, not too interested in getting a job, and milking those unemployment benefits for all they were worth. Not that it wasn’t a good program and everything, in the end we mostly got jobs and stuff like that. Stoney had four years of English Literature at Western University. His dad had gotten him a job at Polysar, a Crown Corporation in Chemical Valley, eventually sold off to private interests including Nova, Bayer A.G and B.A.S.F. He lasted about a year and a half...

This is where he got into speed, amphetamines, the good old-fashioned stuff, and not all this new-fangled meth shit, what with being up all night on twelve-hour shifts and thinking he was God’s gift to women. Which he was, in many a case, mostly ugly women. Sorry, but that is just my opinion.

Anyhow, he was a few years older. We ended up playing badminton in the gym, skipping out for an hour or so from various classes. He went on to qualify—a nice word, but qualify he did as a stationary engineer. In academic upgrading, in spite of being literate and all, Stoney preferred to buy little slips of paper with the test results all written down by the numbers. Question one, the answer is A. Question two, the answer is D, that sort of thing. With a continuous intake course, people work at their own speed, and the instructor gives them a chit and sends them to the testing centre when they’re ready to write the test on Chapter Four. There were really only three different tests for each chapter. Stoney had a one in three chance of passing any test, and he paid two fucking dollars per test, for the privilege of cheating his way through what passed for Grade 12.

The funny thing is, he did. I have to admit, I was sorely tempted, when I got to the chapter on quadratic equations. Fuck, it took me several tries to pass that section, which was like second to last in the Grade 12 math pamphlets…if you could crack quadratics, after that, it was pretty much all downhill. Here’s the thing. Stoney got into the Stationary Engineer program, (extending his unemployment benefits), based on these marks. Based on his prior performance, Stoney figured out how to buy the test results, and faked his way through the program. He finally got himself hired by Ontario Hydro, getting a very good job down at the old Lambton Generating Station. (A job like that might have changed my life.) Where he was duly checked out by their head operator and found to be incompetent at virtually every aspect of generating electrical power through the use of coal-burning, turbine-generated power…at some point they said the hell with him, only by this time he had made it through the ninety day probationary period and was in the union and everything. He really hadn’t done anything wrong at this point. All they could do was to give him a little ladder, and send him up and down, all over the plant, making him change the light-bulbs in the stairwells and shit like that, presumably in the hopes that he would topple off and fall down like nineteen sets of stairs or something like that.

Fuck, that guy was uncoordinated, and I have to admit, we were friends for many years.

Stoney didn’t have jeans, he didn’t have a pair of running shoes. He pulled off his shoes and socks and played badminton barefoot. He was so uncoordinated, it took him three or four false swings before he could finally bring himself to hit the birdie and send it back towards the net.

Think about that, ladies and gentlemen. I’ve barely hit the birdie and he’s already taken two or three swings at it. He drank like a chimney, smoked like a fish, and at the very least, he had a bit of cash and knew one or two people who could get pot. The truth was, he was intelligent and entertaining as all hell…at first.

***

For safety, no one works alone. His co-worker was female. She had recently broken off with her boyfriend. Not entirely without imagination, Stoney asked her out. He sent her flowers, the only guy I ever knew who had an actual account at a florist’s. He bought her perfume and took her out to the most expensive restaurant in town. I’m tempted to think he fell in love, but he was mostly in love with himself. What I really think, is that this one was at least semi-beautiful. Far more so than the usual one-nighters. That might have been the difference. When she decided to go back to the old boyfriend, a better man might have been hurt, but at least accepted it. Not Stoney.

She might have been fooled, but not for long...

By coincidence, the boyfriend lived around the corner from Stoney’s parents’ place. He went out at four a.m. and stole the bags of garbage sitting on the curb for collection and took them home. He rifled through all that and came up with the carbons—signed stubs from credit purchases, as mentioned in a previous section, you had to sign back then when you made a purchase. All he really wanted was the card number and the name of the service provider.

Late at night, good old Stoney walked to a phone booth in a nearby plaza, fed in a handful of quarters, and phoned into the Shopping Network…this was a 24-hour cable television network. He seized on an idea. And he set to work. This poor guy starts finding packages and delivery notices in his mailbox. It’s addressed to him, of course he opens it and finds that he has somehow purchased a bunch of jewelry, all cubic zirconiums and white gold, and all of this is going on his credit cards. At some point, more of such shit appears in the mailbox. At the end of the month he’s shocked by the credit card bill.

Stoney hated that guy. He told me once the guy was bald—I’ve still got all my hair, says Stoney. The guy had one missing tooth. I still have all my teeth, says Stoney. At times like that we bite our lip, as a friend and say nothing. Quite frankly, no one could have dissuaded Stoney from harassing this guy, and it went on for months…yeah, Stoney was known for stalking and harassing old girlfriends. As uncomfortable as that might be for all of your friends. You know what that other guy had, Stoney? He had a fucking personality, that’s what.

One night, broke, walking home from the bar, he stops in at my house.

He asked if I had any beer. He asked if I had any pot. I scraped up some sort of a roach-joint, (no beer), and just to get rid of him, I offered a ride home. I used Big Frank’s vehicle as he always had to park last, a bit of a quirk that at least saved him from having to move someone else’s car when he went out to work in the morning.

A straight run up London Road to his street, but no—we have to turn left on Indian Road…we have to turn right, into the driveway and rear parking lot of a townhouse complex at the corner of Indian Road and Maxwell Street. He’s peering at lit windows and he goes absolutely ballistic when he sees a certain pickup truck parked in a certain spot.

Oh, yeah, now I’m getting sucked into helping Stoney stalk this lady, and her boyfriend.

It’s easy enough to laugh at the stories, but of course now I knew it was true. And this wasn’t the first or the last woman he treated like that. Not unnaturally, he lost the job at the generating plant. Stalking and harassing fellow employees is definitely grounds for dismissal, and if enough talk got around, someone was probably going to beat the hell out of him anyways, what with the lady being a lot more popular around there than good old Stoney, that is for sure.

This is one of many reasons why I had to cut him off, in about 1993…buddy, you do what you want, but do not drag me into your shit. I do not want to be associated with that kind of behaviour, and with that guy, all was vanity. This is the guy who walked around town, reeking of cologne and aftershave, dressed in a sky-blue, polyester leisure suit, thinking he was Roger Moore in Moonraker—what is interesting is the sheer vast number of women who were fooled by the greasy charm, the slightly British accent, the cheerful ordering of just one more round—on his tab, which got so out of hand that he would be cut off at any number of downtown bars. His prey was the sort of women who hung around in downtown bars—

I used to see him walking uptown, heading to the bars, whenever it was cheque day. He was living at the homeless shelter, and yet there he was, shiny hard shoes, rumpled suit, shambling along like he’d studied Sean Connery’s walk, which he probably had. Connery was a body-builder, Stoney was all fish-belly white pudge underneath the costume.

***

McNuggets, as mentioned before, had gotten himself a trade while serving four years in a federal prison. He even got a little experience at a machine shop up in Pembroke, but he didn’t last long, and soon ended up back home in Sarnia.

A few months of experience didn’t count for much, and probably due to the circumstances of his leaving, he didn’t get much of a reference from his previous employer. Ah, but he had the solution.

He found a big, impressive machine-shop operation out of town—Kitchener, Cambridge, Waterloo. Not too far away, just far enough. He literally wrote a script, detailing in glowing terms his seven or eight years of experience operating plasma cutters, turret lathes, tool and die making, computer operated CNC machines…all the goodies. He paid an answering service, several months in advance. When someone called up the number he had provided on his resume, the well-known, all across Ontario, 'Acme Machining and Tool-Making', asking all about him, the lady basically just read the script.

“Oh, yes, sir, Mr. McNuggets was one of our most valued employees…” Blah, blah, blah. “We were real sorry to see him go…”

And he got the job—

A turret lathe, the modern ones are all computerized...actual experience might have helped.

Yeah, poor old McNuggets had it made, starting off at a much higher rate than some other guy with no experience, no references. Only problem was, (of course), that he simply could not do the work. A bit of training and a bit of light experience was no substitute for the claims he was making.

With a mother working at the bank, a good job and all the best of intentions—guys like that are always trying to get back on their feet, to go straight, to work hard and save their money just like any normal person…anyhow, she got him a mortgage.

He started tearing the place apart, setting up grow lights, setting up drip irrigation, setting up ventilation…he had eighteen pot plants in one room and a couple of dozen in the other. This was down in the basement.

One day at work, under pressure, and having just ruined a $1,600.00 work-piece, a very expensive bit of high-tungsten steel and all of his labour having gone out the window, he made the classic mistake of losing his temper.

Somebody said something, and good old McNuggets grabs a pipe wrench and threatens to pound his head in.

I had to go in with him the next day. We wheeled his big toolbox out to the truck and that was pretty much it for his local career as a machinist.

His unemployment payments were all right, and he had a year or so to get another job. Unfortunately, he’d been putting all kinds of stuff on his credit card—not content to grow dope in the basement, he was ripping up floors, knocking holes in walls, putting in a luxurious rear deck and doing all the things he’d seen on TV. Why, your home is the biggest investment you will make in your life…right. When someone turned him on to the balance transfer offered when you signed up for a new credit card, at three or four percent for the first six months, he plunged just like any self-respecting gambler would.

He and more than one friend ended up with a half a dozen or more credit cards, all with relatively high limits, all of them maxed out and unable to keep up with the monthly payments.

A credit card does not provide a second income. Sooner or later, your time must run out.

You can only buy so much rope on promises and bullshit. His time ran out, and he came to the end of his rope.

Whenever I see him around town—always walking, for cars, insurance, license fees cost money after all, I often wonder, whose wallet’s in your pocket?

This is the guy whose favourite cable television show was Criminal Masterminds, and home renovation shows...

All very entertaining, as long as you don’t identify too closely with the premise of the show…

McNuggets was a very stupid man, when you get right down to it.

I don’t think he ever figured it out.

What surprises me, is that I haven’t seen him in the news, in Provincial Court.

Maybe he moved out of town and tried his luck elsewhere.

END

Louis has books and stories available from Barnes & Noble.

See his works on Fine Art America.

Grab a free audiobook, One Million Words of Crap, available from Google Play.

My Criminal Memoir. (Part One).

My Criminal Memoir, Part Two.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Three.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Four.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Five.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Six.

Thank you for reading, and listening.

 

 

 

The Challenge of Hiring Casual Labour, Part-Time. Louis Shalako

Louis Shalako

I have two days off in a row. The boss and another employee are going in today to make dough-balls.

Tomorrow, a service technician will be coming in, for roughly one hour, to service our mixing machine. This means I will not be able to do the usual tally in my typical four-hour shot. It’s a part-time job. I have a bad back, to the extent that I actually get a small, provincial disability pension. The pension pays the rent, the job buys the groceries and some other small luxuries. 

Like a half-decent vehicle, for example.

We have a problem, in that while sales volume has slowed on its usual, seasonal basis, for the most part, one guy does eighty to ninety percent of all production.

I have thought about getting someone else in there. Here’s the problem. Even with three or four of us going in during the busy season, all working part-time, if you add up all those hours, it represents barely one, full-time job. It’s also a physical job, as a sack of flour weighs twenty kilos or forty-four pounds.

The location is also out in the country. What I would like to see would be a mature adult, one with their own transportation, and an ability to work on their own. They’d be getting $14.00-$15.00 per hour, cash, with basically no other benefits. It’s casual labour, all the way. 

And yet, they would still have to have their own key. They would have to have some kind of personal discipline…I need to be able to trust them with our business and our premises.

And at that point, someone has to train them. Someone has to supervise them. They could, conceivably, be doing eighty to ninety percent of all production…and I know how that feels, physically, mentally, psychologically.

In summer, I might get somewhere between seventeen and twenty-two or three hours a week. In winter, that can go as low as eleven to maybe fifteen hours a week. When you think about it, there’s not that many hours of work there to begin with—one of the reasons I go in for four hours, is all that driving. It’s not worth going in for two hours, that’s only thirty bucks and it’s still the same drive-time. It’s still the same wear-and-tear on the vehicle. I still have to do the same paperwork. With set-up time and clean-up time, it is much less efficient. The labour cost per load goes up, and the math is pretty simple.

With an employee, someone would still have to go in once in a while, just to make sure the garbage has been taken out—routine but important jobs like counting how many bags of flour, sugar, and salt are left.

Someone would still have to call the customer and the distributor, and quite frankly, keep the employee honest. If someone says they’re going in to work Tuesday morning, for four hours, and they plan on doing seven loads, then I would really need to know that it had actually been done. I don’t need surprises. When I do it myself, I know it has been done.

Now, we’re not talking twenty-three hours per week in summer. We’re talking some additional hours, in training, in supervision, in just keeping an eye on things. Our labour costs must, inevitably, go up. As it is, I work on an hourly basis. I make so much a week, a month or in a year. I train my own replacement, and give up so much in earnings. I’d still be waking up at five in the morning—the habits of a lifetime are hard to break, and yet now, I wouldn’t have anything to do. I would have nowhere to go, no real purpose to the day.

While I would like the help, in order to hire someone else, I have to give up enough hours or we’re training them to go in for what, two, three or four hours a week; certainly in winter. At some level, it’s no more worth it for them than it is for me.

This is why I’ve never really pushed for it. (In summer, we do get some help, we scramble, and we somehow make it through.)

And, for the next four days, bearing in mind last week’s order, it really will be some kind of a challenge.

***

Part of the job is washing totes, basically big plastic bins we use to ship our product. No one likes washing totes. So, I figured if no one else wants to do it, then these are my hours from now on. To wash thirty totes would take at least a half an hour, right? And after a while, no one washed totes any more.

This is how I made myself indispensable. No one else but the boss and I have ever called the customer, the distributor, or delivered to the customer. The other people were afraid to get too involved, maybe—oh, they’d take the money for a few hours, but otherwise, they remained unengaged with the business. Getting them in there in the first place was like pulling teeth from an alligator. I don’t know if this is typical, but it’s a family business, which often presents unique challenges.

At some point, I will be writing rent checks and paying the water bill—if I’m lucky, or if I ain’t careful, or something like that.

If I’m not careful, I will end up owning the place.

The last thing I ever expected was to become some kind of a fucking success.

END

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Thank you for reading.

Double Your Income, Pay Off Your Debt On ODSP/OW. Louis Shalako

Louis Shalako

Over the last three years, I have almost doubled my income. Without being facetious, I can honestly say I’m getting up near the poverty line. This is by taking a part-time gig and working it, semi-scientifically, as a business. After so many years on ODSP, this is a remarkable achievement, as the basic provincial disability pension runs about thirty-five to forty percent below the poverty line.

In the last year, I have reduced my credit card debt down to approximately zero. Last year, at about this time, I exceeded my $1500.00 credit limit by a couple of dollars. Basically, you check the balance online…see that yesterday’s purchase at the liquor store hasn’t gone through yet…nip down there and grab another pile of booze while you still can. The same goes for smokes and gas as well—

Groceries, even, if you’re not getting too many hours at work. And let’s be honest, that happens sometimes.

There is a $25.00 penalty for that, so that I owed, at that time, about $1,527.00. Now, even on that debt, at 28 % APR, the monthly interest doesn’t seem too bad. At the time of the monthly statement, it’s twenty-five, thirty bucks, forty dollars at most. What’s forty dollars times twelve? Multiply that by twelve months and it seems a bit more significant.

That’s a half a thousand bucks, real money when you’re lining up at food banks and wearing God-damned rags all the time.

Now, in order to avoid ‘overpayments’, due to the fact that on ODSP, one can only earn up to $200.00 per month without penalty, I have reinvested ‘excess profits’ back into my business. 

This is money you cannot live on, presumably, this is why the ODSP accepts it.

This involves the purchase of anything from new keyboards, a new monitor, or a reconditioned computer. So, each and every month, I was jamming some new purchase (hopefully a reasonable one in the sense of developing a business), onto the credit card.

At the end of the month, I paid as much as I could scrape up. Even so, somehow, I must have been chipping away at that balance. Two days before the end of the month, (March), I owe $148.00 on the credit card balance. The other factor is the fact that I did not buy anything for the office, for the business, during the months of January, February and March. On ODSP, the guidelines state that all expenses are to be charged to the month in which the purchase was made—it’s not a year-end sort of deduction, such as any other business in Canada might enjoy. A regular human business person could buy a case of toilet paper for the business, and the revenue people really don’t care in which month the purchase was made.

I actually went a bit over the allowable limit for those three months, a calculated gamble.

I have a reason for taking that risk—

So, in the course of about one year, I will have taken my credit card balance down to zero. I will be paying that last bit off Friday morning, a little after dawn, in other words.

What an interesting feeling it surely is—

To have actual control over one’s finances. To have mastered something. Maybe that’s what it is.

Okay, the monthly interest on $148.00 is not much, a couple or three bucks. It’s not going to make a big difference in my life, however, once the balance is down to zero, I can make a major purchase. I want a drafting table for the business. The base might cost $184.00 and the top, a separate item, $132.00. I can make that purchase over two months, use it as an allowable business deduction, and avoid ‘overpayments’ or charges against my Ontario Disability Support Program benefits. Which, after all, is still the major source of my income. 

If I pay off one hundred percent of the charge at the end of any given month, then there is no interest due at all. This is the ideal, and what every first-time credit-card holder brags about, after all.

So, as things presently stand, clients may earn up to $200.00 per month, after allowable deductions. The new provincial government has announced that in future, clients will be able to earn up to $6,000.00 per year, i.e. $500.00 per month. For Ontario Works, clients will be able to earn up to $300.00 (OW means welfare), the rate of claw-back after that will be seventy-five percent. Presumably the same goes for ODSP. I just haven’t seen that in writing. 

I haven’t been able to find anything as to when that takes effect.

In terms of business planning, it’s still up in the air.

Assuming November 1, just as an example, then the first ten months of the year represents $2,000.00 in allowable income, and the last two months of the year another $1,000.00 of allowable income. This seems like a fair way to deal with a transition year, going from one set of guidelines to another as it were.

I could earn up to three grand, and never have to keep a receipt, mileage log or anything.

Thank you for reading.

Louis has all kinds of books and stories on Amazon.

END