Story time:

When I was younger (12 - 17 years old) my father and I were building our house. Yes, it took 5 years from start to finish. He literally did every step. He’d work on it every day after his midnight shift at work at the brewery, and I’d go every Saturday, Sunday, school holiday and every day during the summers. My entire high school life was building a house with my dad.

We’d always stop at Pop’s footlong hotdog for breakfast on the way out. So the 1974, “Ole Blue” Ford F-250 pickup truck (with 36” tires) sat in the parking lot loaded with brick laying paraphernalia, wheelbarrows and water barrels. I can’t even recall how many times someone would stop my father as we left breakfast asking, “Are you for hire?”

He’d alway reply, “No, we’re not for hire.”

This was in the mid 1980’s. Before the internet and “order your custom stickers here” websites.

Flash forward a few years and I recall seeing construction trucks out on the job sites that had stickers on the side reading, “NOT FOR HIRE”. It was the first time I’d ever seen the actual stickers.

It always made me think, “Man, I bet dad wish he had those stickers years ago. Would have saved so many parking lot conversations.” Basically, it’s saying you can’t hire that specific person / vehicle for an individual job. They are part of a company. Etc.

Now, every time I see the sticker on a vehicle, it reminds me of those mornings driving with my dad to work on the house.

Flash forward another 20 years. After 20+ years working in the corporate world and banking, I was feeling like I was in …. Well, let’s just call it “prison”. I refer to it all now as “Shawshank”, if that gives you any idea. I was trapped. Yes, they “hired me”, but now the whole concept of being “hired” felt more like a prison sentence. Hired and subsequently imprisoned.

As we all know now, I finally escaped (in 2017).

Soon after I escaped Shawshank and I was a free man (leather crafter) I saw one of those “NOT FOR HIRE” stickers on a construction truck going down the highway. It made me smile. I remembered my dad, and I knew that I was no longer “for hire”. I’m a free man now.

Since then, I’ve put that sticker on my “company car” (seen previously).

Well, one of my stitching ponies has now been adorned as well. To constantly remind me, I’m a free man (as well as a wink and a nod to my hero, my late father.)