Name:   Lifer - Subject:   WELL SAID MY FRIEND!! Date:   10/1/2014 9:34:52 AM (updated 10/1/2014 9:39:45 AM)

I love this post Steve.  I couldn't have said it better myself.  Noone can that hasn't walked in your shoes.  Elsie couldn't walk in your shoes.  Hell, she couldn't even put them on in the morning without written directive and a "white paper" explaining how and why, and even those would bloated and wrong since they would have been written by a beaurocract.  Reading this set me to thinking about our relationship/freindship and how it really started after I made a comment to you that anyone with a business at stake should shy away from the politics/turmoil that is the "OFF TOPIC" forum.  That started an email chain that turned into the 'great cadillac ride' that developed into one of my deepest and most treasured friendships.  Through the years many forum members ( and lurkers for that matter) have gotten to know you through the forum and by extension your business, but I have grown to know you, and your family, on a more intimate level than most of those.  Knowing you as I do I will say that I have nothing but the utmost respect and admiration for you and what you do, as a freind, as a colleauge, as a businessman, as a family man, and as a Christian.  I have never known anyone that gave of themselves as freely as you do, especially when it comes to offering advice and counsel on inoperable machinery.  Notice I didn't say boat motors cuz I remember the tiller.

As for Elsie's post, it was meant to belittle and diminsh me.  You see in her eyes working for you meant that I couldn't be any more than a petty functionary doing menial work that wouldn't even qualify me as a 'wage grade' in her world.  She has no idea what I did.  When or for how long.  What I was paid or even if I was paid.  She just wanted to try and shame and belittle me.  She doesn't know that I started out doing something that I enjoy doing anyway but you were able to pay me to do, at a time when I had way to much time on my hands so it was a win/win for us.  Of course circumstances eventually expanded my role but she wouldn't know that, or care for that matter becuase I was still nothing but a wage grade in her world.  She has no idea what takes place in any business on a daily basis. 

You see in her world I never had a "career" because I didn't spend my entire life punching a clock and drawing a check from somebody else.  But escuse me, Elsie was quick to inform me once she not once ever "punched a clock in her life", that is so blue collar. She or somebody on her behalf filled out a time sheet, but she never touched a nasty time clock.  She wouldn't know that federal law prevents one from getting paid without a record of when one worked.  At least that is the law that the great usnwashed have to live under, but probably not in her guvment job.  She doesn't think my 3 1/2 decades of working, managing, owning small businesses count as a career.  Meeting a payroll! To her that is just opening an envelope every month.  In her world even when the owners of the business she worked for (taxpayers through their representatives) closed the business and sent the workers home for a few weeks they still got paid when they came back.

You spoke of looking for leaders.  I feel we are beyond needing a leader, we need a Hero.  A true Hero, not someone on whom the title is to easily bestowed because they wore a uniform, or 'served' the country in 'public service'.  A true hero that worked and earned the title through action, not rhetoric.

As for me, I agree with your family that you are a Hero.  You walked away from a relatively steady, stable but stressfull 6 figure income to dive head first into an unstable economy to pursue a high risk venture.  You had the strength of you your convictions and took what had been a part time hobby and turned it into if not always a  profitable, but at the very least sustainable business.  In doing so you provide through your hard work housing, food, clothing, transportation, education and all the other intangibles of life for not only your own, but several other families.  

That my friend is what Hero's do.