This I Believe by James K.
Last summer, I had a job at a mowing and landscaping company that was owned
by my good friend Hunter. It is a small business and he was just starting out. He didn’t
have his own building so everything was kept at his house. There were only me and
two other guys working for him at the time.
During the second month of me working for him, he was going on vacation for 2
weeks. He decided to put me in charge of the mowing for those two weeks. That was a
lot of responsibility because I’ve never done that by myself. I was a little nervous, but I
was confident in my abilities and that everything would go well.
I had a lot of trouble getting to some places because he didn’t have all the
addresses written down. That was tough at the time because we had to call him
constantly while he was on vacation, just to find where the places are. I was the one
mowing so I was really focused when I was working. All the people we mowed for knew
that Hunter was not there, so most of them would come out and tell me if they were
satisfied or if I missed a spot and needed to go over it.
The only problem was that some of the lawns weren’t done right. I either
accidentally missed a whole section that I didn’t know was part of the house, or I didn’t
cut it short enough. The purpose of lawn care is to take care of the lawn, not cut it too
short that you kill it. So, I never understood why customers would want it cut so short.
I thought I did good on all of them until Hunter came back from vacation. When
he came back, he had me landscaping while he and someone else were mowing. When
the workday was over, we met at his house and he told me that he lost some jobs. I felt
terrible because he’s a small business and that set him back a little bit. Customers were
disappointed because of the mowing and the weed-whacking. After that, he showed me
some tricks and had me mowing while he weed-whacked. He did this because if I made a
mistake he was there to show me how to fix it.
A few weeks later, he did not work for a week because he wanted to hunt, so he
put me in charge again. This time was different because we didn’t lose any jobs. I
believe that you shouldn’t mourn over your mistakes and instead overcome them.
Hunter made mistakes by not being organized and we made mistakes with the mowing.
In the end, we overcame those mistakes. Since then, we haven’t lost any jobs and he
learned to write all the addresses down on a paper.
