SELLING DRINKS 3 of 4

Just 1 more day of selling drinks after this one, come on you can handle it

Roll mental camera...

To make the best money selling drinks you had to know how to cheat the system. You see you were given a huge stack of cups at the beginning of the game which you filled yourself and sold. At the end of the game the soda boss would come and count how many cups you had left. If there were 30 cups missing then you owed him $30, a dollar for every missing cup.

I have always been a quick study and quickly figured out how to minimize my payout. During the 4th quarter of the game I stopped selling drinks and focused on collecting cups that people had discarded. I could usually collect 15 or 20 cups by the time the boss man came around. But first I had to take them to the restroom and wash them out and dry them and return them to the stack of unused cups.

I am truly sorry to any OSU football attendees in 1990 that may have happened to buy a drink served in a used cup. Sure that cup may have been used for a spit cup or an ash tray but it was rinsed thoroughly. What you didn't know didn't hurt you (I hope). But hey I got to pocket alot more money thanks to your unknowing sacrifice.

I tried to apply that same reasoning to many thing in life, cutting corners or cheating the system. But it only succeeded in selling drinks. In any other real life experience where I have cut corners it has come back to bite me. So I learned pretty early on that paying your dues and doing it right the first time is always the best policy. My entire foundation in ethics based on used pastic cups, who would have thought.

Was there an instance in your life where you remember learning what ethics really means?

How about the time you learned to cheat the system?

Did it come back to bite you?