Ahora que Dave’s Used Car Lot, Marina, and Weed Arboretum is cleaned up—however temporarily—I felt encouraged to thin out the Jungle whose purpose is to screen the view from my front window so I don’t have to see that dump.
Gerardo, aware of this winsome craving, came by the other day and observed that it was time to clean up the trees and shrubs. “Claro que sí,” I said, in some sort of English. Before long he had three dudes out there, cutting, trimming, digging up, and hauling. “No fútbols,” said I, meaning I did not wish to see trees or brush shaped like soccer balls. “Of course not,” said he, in some sort of Spanish.
They hacked and they heaved, they nipped and they clipped, they filled Gerardo’s truck chock-full of thorny life-threatening limbs.
“You’ve let these things go too long,” said Gerardo, in some sort of Spanglish. “They should’ve been shaped properly a long time ago.”
“Yah, don’t I know it,” I said, in hypereducated English. “Jes’ do the best you can.”
They shaped and they trimmed and they dodged and they hefted. They packed impossible amounts of stuff into Gerardo’s truck. Three hours later, they had the yard looking pretty darned good. Gerardo, after all, does know how to prune desert plants so they stay looking like desert plants. You just have to say to him, “Keep your eye on that guy and that guy and that guy over there, ’cause you’re the one who knows how to do it right.” And then he sees that they do it right.
After all this heaving around, they whipped through the property and performed their regular monthly ablutions: blowered up the leaves and raked the gravel and cleaned up all the pavement and carried off the leaves and debris. As they fired up the truck to drive it, groaning, off to the dump, Gerardo presented his bill: $110.
!Dios mio! I couldn’t believe it. Gerardo’s regular bill is $75. That meant he charged, for all that extra work, $35. That’s something like ten bucks an hour, for three workers.
How does the man survive?
How can you pay such a man? For sure, the Christmas bonus has to be a gigantic gift card to Home Depot (assuming that outfit has no strings on its cards that will rip him off). Better yet, though: M’jihito has decided to punt on the scheme to xeriscape the Investment House, since we can’t afford desert landscaping just now, and instead to cultivate the devilgrass (Tejano for “bermudagrass”) to form a lawn of sorts. Between now and spring, I’ll hire Gerardo to put in a winter lawn, which will keep him busy until the heat comes back up. If he’s smart (which he is), he’ll prepare the ground so the bermuda will take right over when the days grow long, and then he’ll have another job to add to his clientele.
You have to love cheap labor. We don’t like to admit it, but excellent service and low prices makes a winning combination. Just ask Wal-Mart. They know what’s up!
Possibly a part of the issue is that we ALL tend to sell ourselves too cheap. Gerardo probably isn’t fully aware of how much is services are worth.
Yesterday I met a new, obviously affluent client. When he asked for my rate, I said I’d do his (extremely easy!) job for $25 an hour. He said that was too low. I said I really aimed to get $60 an hour, and he immediately replied that was what he’d pay, and he indicated that he still thought it was low.
It’s hard to find out what other people earn. Unless we all know what everyone else is charging, for what services, we have no way of knowing what our work actually can earn.