Chapter 18 School and Education
This book is everything that school has taught me. I went to school for 17 years, including 5 years at SUNY Albany.
This is what school has taught me: these are the principles that my business will follow.
- always be honest and fair
- always do the best you can
- Communicate your ideas with others in a clear manor.
- Do everything completely the first time: pay attention to every detail, try to get A+ or %100
- To assimilate me into the capitalist society
- To teach me empathy towards others, including classmates.
- To take my time
- Accept constructive criticisms
- To talk and behave in a civilized way. To always be polite and to respect other people. All of these ideas are the basis of this book. These are also going to be the fundamentals of my company.
This book is a living testimony of what the purpose of schools are in society. I would be in a very different place if I had not gone to school. I would not have learned about capitalism and revolutionary writers, from whom I have learned so much.
I have finally graduated from school, even thou I do not officially graduated until the spring; I have graduated in my own mind and spirit. I was planning on continuing on to graduate school, but will all the debt I have now, and the kinds of jobs that I want to do, working for myself and starting my own business is what I want to do right now. I admit that I have a lot more to learn, and I pledge to continue learning as much as I can every day until I cannot do it anymore, for learning is crucial to success. I also am committed to graduating in the spring, I am still very excited about many of the classes that I taking now. There are also a few more college course that I want to take in the spring semester, such as chemistry and philosophy. The nice thing about school now, and the way I have always thought about school, is that my grade point average does not matter. I am going to college to learn what I want to learn. I take what I want from every class that I take. If I did not want to be there, then I would now go. I want to learn, I want to gain knowledge of different parts of the world. This is why I went to college. Now I am ready to take all this knowledge of the world and apply it how I see fit. I want to make a difference in the world, and that is what I am going to do.
About the author:
David Whittmore Coon, Born on July 16, 1984
Studied at the State University of New York at Albany, SUNY Albany.
Sociology Major, Philosophy and Psychology Minors
In addition to my academics, I worked at 15 different wage jobs since I was 15 years old. I have 7 years of well-rounded job experience in many different fields. These are all the wage jobs that I have had in the last 7 years.
Hall of Springs, catering service, 1999. I was a dishwasher and handy man. This company would cater out, and my job was to wash the dishes that they trucked home. This was my first real job. $5.15/hr
Maestros’, summer ‘99-summer 2000. Dish washing for a fancy restaurant on Broadway. I worked at this job for a year and a half. $6/hr
CVS, CVS Phototech, pharmacy, summer 2000-spring 2002 I worked at CVS in all departments, cashiering, stocking, facing, photo lab and pharmacy. I did it all for almost 2 years. $6/hr
Babbage’s, fall 2001- spring 2002. While in high school, this was my dream job. I was a game advisor for my favorite video game store. I got to talk about videogames all day, and I got a killer discount. $5.50/hr
Gecone’s pizza delivery, 3 weeks during the summer of 2001. My first pizza delivery job. Unfortunately, I was not very good at it, I was just too young, and I could not find the houses quick enough. $5/hr plus tips
Bavarian Pretzels, one week 2001. It was good while it lasted, not enough time.
Private landscaping and handy man services, summer 2003. This summer I worked for a wealthy Jewish dentist as a landscaper and repairperson. I got to work with my good friend Will Deptolski all summer. We got paid a cool $7/hr.
Regal Entertainment Group, June 2004-July 2005. This was my first collision with the corporate world. Regal is a massive corporate machine with a sickening case of capitalist fever. This company correctly applied all forms of maximizing profits in the book. I learned much about the ways corporations operate while interacting with employees. This job was not all bad; I got to see every movie for free. $6.50/hr
Stewarts, July 2005-January 2006. I busted my ass for this job. This job really taught me independence. I was completely responiable for the welfare of the store. Paid $7/hr
Trio’s pizza delivery, February 2006. Job shifts were 5 pm -5 am. Paid $4/hr, plus tips, average $13 an hour. I had to use my own car and gas, and there are some scary parts of Albany. I worked this job because I had failed at it before, this time I was so much better. There really is not anything that I cannot do.
Babbage’s again, Summer 2006 This time under new corporate ownership, the job was a lot harder. At this point, I was able to do anything. It was not long before I was being called the best Game Advisor in the store. $6.75/hr, plus free games.
Auntie Anne’s Pretzels, Summer 2006. This was the first franchise business that I had worked for. The owner lived in Long Island, and he drove up once a month to work at the store on the weekends. This owner rolled and sold Pretzels once a month and made almost $10,000 a year, just doing it on the weekends. Most of the store’s surplus profits when to the store manager, and the rest to pay the employees. However, the owner, only working one weekend a month made $10,000. This taught me a lot about ownership and employees. The working conditions were relaxed, sometimes busy. $7/hr.
Painting and restoring houses in Saratoga. Summer 2006 I worked for Paint Works, a painting company owned and operated by Roland. He taught me how to restore housing. This was one of the most educational jobs I ever had. I am going to use these skills in all the houses that I buy.
I have also work for many other people, providing many other services.
In high school, I worked a few weekends as a handy man for a schoolteacher of mine. Mr. Leighton. He also wrote me a recommendation for college. He owned two beautiful houses in Saratoga. One that his family lived in and the other had five apartments. I helped him paint and do other tasks around the house. He made a decent living from doing this and being a schoolteacher. This is the kind of thing that I want to be doing.
All these jobs gave me the perspective of all these different employers. Now I am ready to be the employer.
Combined with knowledge from school: studying groups (sociology), individual people (psychology), morals in the world (philosophy), and of course math. I have used the ideas learned from the last 5 years of school to write this book. Now I and going to put the ideas in this book into practice.
I also want to do something that I can help people as much as I can. I want to make a living doing something I want to do. I want to succeed and I want to make a difference.
I am not sure as to where to add this section, but I have to talk about what I have learned from the drug market. I know many people that do and sell drugs. Just so everyone knows, a lot of college students experiment with drugs at some time or another. I have learned much from studying the drug market. And it has taught me a few very important things. First off, even though the sales of drugs are illegal, they are still a valued commodity, and fair business practices must still be used while distributing them. I have learned so much about economics by studying these underground economies. These markets follow all the economic laws, such as the laws of supply and demand, good customer service increases business, accurate bookkeeping and a solid business plan are needed for success. Proper advertising and marketing is needed to keep business afloat. And of course don’t rip some one off or you are likely to get your fingers broken. I think that selling drugs is capitalism in its raw form. And the motivations for most people deciding to become drug dealers is their constant rejection from the traditional jobs. Mostly kids, who have tried to get real work, have been burned so many times by the only crappy jobs that are available to them, that they take it upon them selves to do something useful. They find a service that people need and want, and they fulfill that need. Outlawing drugs will never make them go away; they just go out of sight. I have met some dealers that say that their lives have become much happier and fulfilling since they started doing something that makes their customers happy. Most of these people could be doing some thing more useful with their time, but the system that is in place now, consistently forces these kinds of economies to evolve. I have learned about alterative ways of doing things that could change this for the better. We need a more socialist approach to the way that profit should be distributed to the people that do the work. The current systems forces people that would gladly work for a living to commit crimes because they have no money, because there are no good jobs available to them. When I become the owner, I intend to run things a little bit differently then the way they are run now.
Let me tell you one more thing. This business is going to be Progressive. The world is always changing, times are different now then they were 40 years ago. And they are going to be very different from now, 40 years later in 2047 (I will be 62 years old). I think that someone should put together a new plan on how to run things better. And if nobody else is going to do it, then it might as well be me. Like it or not, it is going to be my generation that is going to run things for the next 40 years. As a society we always want to progress in a way the benefits the most people right?
More to come about the future, coming soon in second edition.
Topics include specific ideas that I have learned in school and how they apply to this business.
Moral Philosophy and Liberty, John Stuart Mills, Utilitarianism, ethics, socialism, Marxism, Durkheim’s work models for solidarity, what psychology has to do with this, independent study proposal and ‘race and work’ research term paper about socio-economics of the working trends of young men 18-24 years old. Please be sure to check out the second editions.
