Ways to Make a Living

I'm takin' what they're givin' cause I'm working for a livin'! Yeah, that's a song lyric from Huey Lewis, and I have to be honest, in my life, they aren't really giving anything so bad. But one thing I love about travel is seeing differences. Here in Puebla, I've seen a few ways of making a living that aren't like those I've seen before. Here are two examples.

The Bus Counter and Change Giver

At one of the bus stops not too far from where we live, there sits a woman in a plastic chair. She must bring the chair herself. This isn't a bus station, just a stop on the side of the road. But it is near the Walmart parking lot, so it is a major stop that lots of the different buses stop at. As far as I can tell, this woman is doing two things: She seems to be keeping track of the buses. You know at a baseball game, some enthusiasts keep a notebook and write in codes for each pitch and hit, the outcome of each play? She seems to do something similar, though she isn't recording strikes swinging or how many are left on bases. She seems to be recording which buses stop. I don't think she is counting how many people get on the bus or get off the bus. If she is, she has great visual acuity.

Her other job is making change. She has lots and lots of coins. When a bus driver has been paid in bills too often, he starts to run low on coins and high on bills. So he stops at this particular stop, calls out to the woman, and she steps on the bus. He gives her some bills and she gives him an equal value in coins. Eventually, she would have to run out of coins, or so I would think. I don't know what happens then. Maybe that's when it's quitting time.

There doesn't seem to be just one bus company here. There is one that is run by the city, but there are many, many other bus companies. They all pretty much agree on prices, but they all have various routes, even if they end up in similar places. So I am not sure who pays this woman to do this job. Is it the city of Puebla? Is it a conglomerate of the bus companies? That I don't know, but she is making her living with her notebook and plastic chair and a whole lot of coins.

The Traveling Knife Sharpener

One day, Alrica and I stopped by a taqueria that we like. Parked on the sidewalk just outside was a motorcycle. And on the back of that motorcycle was a machine that grinds and sharpens knives. There is a man who comes to a restaurant on his motorcycle, talks to the chef or owner, and then takes a few knives at a time and sharpens them. Not the table knives (which you don't tend to need at a taqueria.) I mean the knives that the chef uses.

Sharpening on the sidewalk

Throughout our meal we could hear the grind grind. Then the sharpening man would come back in with the knives he had just done. If the chef wasn't satisfied, he would take the knife back and do it again. When he was finished with a few knives, the chef would take those and give the sharpener man another few knives to work on.

This continued through several rounds of knives until the chef was happy. All the knives were done. The chef got out some cash, paid the sharpener man. And then the sharpener man climbed back on his motorcycle and rode away, presumably to another restaurant whose knives had gotten a tad dull. I don't know how he finds the places. I don't know if they call him. But isn't a relief to know that he's out there, somewhere, keeping knives in proper condition?

To paraphrase another lyric, this time Dolly Parton: Working knife to knife, what a way to make a living!