Mowing Lawns as Community Literacy

Working for a landscaping company in the scorching heat of the summer does not sound very appealing for a job.  Bending over all day cutting grass that gets shot into your eyes and mouth makes a person think about quitting pretty fast.  However, most people don't know the inner-workings of this community that made me come back to work every day.  I am going to discuss the discourse of this community and how it changed my view of this job from pity to interesting.

The perception of people mowing lawns for most is that of poor, uneducated and doing hard work for the wealthy.  Well, most people are right and it was no exception for the company I worked for.  Half the employees had to ride bikes up to 10 miles to get to work.  Also, that we wake everyone up at 8am in the morning with that annoying buzzing sound that just never seems to go away.  The customers treat us like slaves, telling us what we missed cutting and that the grass needs to be blown off the street, AGAIN!  What they don't know is that we get the last laugh.

Mowing lawns is only tolerable all day if you make it fun and there are plenty of ways.  If the customer is rude and bossy to the mow crew, mowing their lawns can become quite interesting.  We have mowed 30 foot penises in the front yard.  We lost that house contract soon after.  If there are objects in the way such as baseball bats and trampolines, we put them in obscure places or hide them with the cuttings of the grass.  First learning the ways of the so called "mowing technique" was very different than I expected.  My boss took it very seriously and trained me for weeks before I could mow a customer's lawn, which I ended up destroying.  The longer I worked there, the more respect I had for the workers.  It is not as simple as everyone believes it to be and the conditions only make it worse. 

Another component that I had to learn was the name of the equipment and mowing terms.  Some were easy to pick up and others took a while.  One that was universal known and used often was, "LUNCH TIME".  These guys were lazy and they didn't care either.  As time passed it all become second nature and we repeated the process close to 20 times a day. 



By: Garrett Couche