I've already talked about being designed to work on the farm. A farmer has kids and while they get to be kids often enough they put them to work. And as one of those kids you're willing to drive a tractor, stack hay or feed the cattle whenever you have to. You might bitch about it sometimes, but adults gripe about working just as much if not more. The inherent problem of being the farmer and putting your young'n to work is that they aren't exactly what you'd call a skilled laborer yet.
Me and my brothers cost the farming operation thousands of dollars over the years. At fifteen or a little older your ability to really think ahead and see potential problems (or just your surroundings) isn't fully developed. My brothers might claim they didn't rack up that big of a damage bill, but they're liars if they do. I myself can remember a number of instances where I tore the shit out of equipment, or didn't pay attention to what I was doing and wasted a days work doing something that would mean I'd have to redo it all the next day, or worse the old man would have to fix what I screwed up.
A small example, I was going to clean out the radiator on the tractor. This is a simple task, you just take a little air jet valve on the end of a compressed air hose and blow the dust and debris out of the radiator. The pump for the air tank was in this little shed and so I pulled up to the shed and was going to stick the front of the tractor just inside the door. I pulled a little too far in and the tractor's exhaust pipe caught the top of the door and broke right off. It's a simple mistake that a normal person would make, but a teenager is a bit more prone to such accidents. And it cost dad a couple hours trying to weld the exhaust back on.
A more costly example which I think cost nearly a couple thousand dollars to fix involved me, a hay mower, and a manhole cover. I was mowing hay in a small field that was sort of in town. So there was a sewer line that ran under the property. Now I knew the manhole cover was there, I was shown where it was. I just misjudged how far away it was from me and the tractor. I figured I'd hit it on the next round, but I caught the end of the mower on the heavy metal disk and it wasn't pretty. This is a sophisticated piece of machinery that costs tens of thousands of dollars and I quite nearly broke it in half.
In both of these and every other instance where I cost time and money, dad never got mad. I mean I was always aware of his dissatisfaction with having to deal with whatever the hell I broke, but besides a heavy sigh and an undirected 'what the hell, boy' he never gave me too hard a time about these things when they happened (after the fact he'd talk a lot of shit though). And while mom and dad's bottom line was aided by having three able bodied sons to put to work, their profit margin was constantly being undercut by our youthful inadequacies. And I suppose if those unexpected costs of child labor were too much they'd have gone about their business another way.
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