I work at a seaside resort on an island. We have a beautiful protected cove and a marina here. Last night, we were attacked by pirates.

There is a boat I’ve seen in our harbour a few times. It’s about a seventy-two-foot sailboat and it’s not in good condition. There are tarps and junk all over it, and it flies a pirate flag. Apparently, it has no insurance, so it isn’t allowed to tie up on any of our docks. Also, the owner and his friends are a bit sketchy, so they aren’t allowed on the resort grounds, either.

Last night, whiskey was the drink of choice on the pirate ship.

Two men from the boat stole a neighbouring dingy and rowed ashore, onto the beach in the cove just south of ours. They came in through the dark and tried to wake up a girl they knew on the docks, but she wasn’t having any of it and told them to leave.

They then came to the front desk at guest reception in our Lodge, which was closed at the time. When guest reception is closed, there is just a sign on the counter with an emergency number to call if a guest needs assistance in the night.

We sell cigarettes from the front desk, and they are kept in a locked drawer behind the counter, along with the float ($600). Last night, these pirates, drunk on whiskey, broke into the drawer and stole the float and all the cigarettes. They did this directly on camera, which they even looked at while performing this plundering of our treasure.

Alas, as is the fate of most dumb, drunk pirates, they were arrested today in their beds, woken from their slumbering hangovers, the loot piled on their bedside tables.

Not a good time to be a pirate.

The local marina will store your boat and perform a “spring tune-up” by a certain date for a reasonable rate.

One guy who does not use the service puts his boat in the water but cannot get it started. He storms into the shop on that first nice spring day with a crowd of shoppers and barges in front of them.

Customer: “Get a mechanic to follow me down to the water and start my engine! Now!”

Me: “Sir, please wait while I finish serving these people.”

This only ramps him up and makes him yell louder. Sensing how this might escalate, I pick up a wrench and a screwdriver and walk down to the boat.

While the guy is still ranting, a screw is turned, and the engine sputters a few times and then settles into a smooth idle.

Me: “That’ll be $20.”

Customer: “I’m not giving you any $20 for just turning a screw. I could have done that.”

At that point, the screw was turned again. The engine sputtered to a stop, and we separated.

One hour later, the man came back into the shop and offered $20, up front, for someone to start his engine. The cost was now $40… for two trips.

I’m enjoying the sun and resting on the deck of my boat in the harbour when a young woman and her husband yell at me. This is a “Mandrake” where all visiting boats dock, get water and electricity, and enjoy the city. We are tourists, like the majority of the boats. 

Woman: “I want to hire a boat.”

Me: “Well, this boat is not for hire; it’s our sailing boat and we are tourists here.”

Woman: “But I need to hire a boat. There are boats here. Can’t you take us somewhere?”

Me: “No. This is not a commercial boat. I can’t do that.”

Woman: “But I’m told that there are boats for hire around here!”

Me: “Well, as I told you, I’m a tourist, this is our own boat, and I don’t know where you can find a boat to hire.”

Woman: “Why can’t you take us somewhere? You don’t seem to like being busy.”

Me: “Good day!”

I just stopped answering her. She yelled some more and then left. 

Her husband was looking on in despair.

I work at a rental boat marina. A customer is going over the boat while I explain how it all works.

Customer: “Where are the brakes?”

I handed him over to my manager as I couldn’t in good conscience rent him a boat.

In my late teens and early twenties, I worked as a marine and small engine mechanic at various marinas.

One marina I worked at had a real scammy boss and owner. The dealership dealt with high-end speed boats and snowmobiles in the winter, and it was a really popular place. I thought was going to be a good gig. I was newly married, naive, and a good but not great mechanic, but I loved doing that stuff.

It started off with me getting the job and being offered the small apartment above the store to live in. Accepting the apartment was the first mistake (besides taking the job). I soon found out that it put me on unpaid call twenty-four-seven, and it was minimum wage to begin with. I moved out four months later to a small apartment in the next town over.

There were five of us that worked in the shop: two helpers, the boss’s son who was the head mechanic, the boss’s wife who ran the store and did the books, and me. In the summertime, the boss would hire a couple of students to help out.

I was the lazy worker putting in only sixty to seventy hours a week. The two helpers worked eighty to a hundred hours a week, and the boss’s son came and went as he pleased, barely putting in forty hours a week. By the way, he hated me. The only thing I could figure is that I was a threat to him because he was a useless mechanic.

As always, at first, it seemed great. Lots of hours meant good money… for a while. Then, the novelty of working in a new high-paced place soon wore off. Come the wintertime, we were laid off to collect unemployment insurance, but we were still expected to show up every day and work for next to nothing “under the table”. It was a hundred bucks here, fifty bucks there, etc., as my boss said we were getting paid by the government, so anything he was giving us was pretty much a bonus.

About halfway through the second summer I worked there, things went really bad.

My boss came flying into the shop at around 9:00 am on a Friday morning in a frenzy explaining that he’d forgotten about two boats that needed to be ready for Saturday. (He rarely wrote anything down.) Rigging up these high-end speed boats from scratch is no short-order item.

All of us dropped everything and started working on rigging these two boats. At 4:00, pm the students left. Shortly after they left, the boss came in fuming and informed us he could put off the one customer, but the other boat had to be ready first thing in the morning. We worked past midnight just to get the boat ready. Even the boss’s son stayed until we finally put the boat in the water to fire it up and make sure everything was working fine.

We were all dog-tired and dragged our butts to our cars to go home. The boss yelled across the yard that he would see us in at 5:00 am to get the other one done. We thought he was joking from his tone.

Needless to say, every one of us rolled in at our usual 7:00 am the next morning, including the boss’s son. We were greeted with screaming in some colourful language about being lazy good-for-nothings. We were all too tired to argue with him and basically ignored him as we went to work on the second boat.

At not getting a rise out of us, the boss abruptly turned on his heel, marched over to the store/office, and told his wife, “They come in when they feel like it, then pay them when you feel like it!” She wasn’t much better than him.

The next thing I knew, my paycheques were getting later and later, to the point that I had to start asking him for gas money at times to make it to work. He would give me fifty dollars here and there. I was slowly starting to go into debt. I also heard later that he complained to the two helpers that he thought I was pissing my money away on booze and drugs.

It got to the point that I couldn’t afford to stay there, and I couldn’t afford to leave. Unemployment takes a dim view of quitting for almost any reason.

I finally quit. I had no idea of my rights. I explained the whole thing to the Unemployment Insurance Board. I guess they must have believed me a little because, instead of the eight-week penalty for quitting, I only got four weeks of no money coming in. I had a pretty lean couple of months before getting back on my feet.

Karma came not long after. Even as I was getting close to leaving, my boss, who was a shady character, to put it mildly, was looking to expand his business into manufacturing a copy of the high-end speed boats we were selling. How he got the American company to give their blessing, I don’t know the particulars. Anyway, he needed more capital and brought in a “silent partner” to help finance this new endeavor.

What my former boss didn’t realize was that the “silent partner” was an even bigger crook than he was, and my boss eventually got pushed out by his partner and lost everything — the boat manufacturing, the marina… everything.

This was forty-plus years ago, so I’m guessing he’s dead now. His son is a nobody marine mechanic at a tiny little no-nothing marina, last I heard.

Sadly, I got out of any kind of mechanic career after that and haven’t picked up a wrench since, but I’m close to retirement with no regrets about getting out of that.