No such thing as unskilled labor

I answered the door and recognized the young man as the one who works at the bottle redemption station I go to. He said he goes home via where I live and by chance had followed me home one day when he got off work, quite by accident. Today he decided to stop and say hello. I mentioned that he looked familiar, more so than our chance meeting at the center, and he addressed me by name. Seems many years ago he was one of the most effectively terrorizing students I ever had in 8 th grade. Totally resistant student,  passive aggressive with studies, and that year picked me as his victim. Specialists brought in to mediate between us shared with me and my team that he worshipped his father who did not deserve the adoration- far less of a role model than the kid really wanted. He did everything to please his father who was anti- everything, society, school, etc. but his father continued to belittle him or ignore him completely. The specialists figured he was transferring his disappointment and terrorizing male teachers on his way through the system, taking out his disappointment in his dad on teachers whom he discovered he had considerable clout with legally.  He never did a stitch of work, constantly undermined the class, and clinically looked for any mistakes a teacher would make, politically incorrect statements, turning responses to him into meanings that weren't intended, taking words out of context to report to administrators, and skillfully building cases for the teacher abusing him in some way. It was an absolute year of hell- with of course the mother calling the school constantly to complain in his behalf and calling meetings involving slews of specialists with me fundamentally on the hot seat- not the kid. ( I'll tell ya, team teaching is great for that-  we have a whole team of teachers - about five at least- who teach the same group of kids, each in heir subject area- and plan small community activities with the team- I loved it. Unlike the old Junior High system, the teacher is not isolated. We've all been attacked by somebody and usually people with big guns and an administration that is lawsuit paranoid as our town budget never includes much insurance money.
   So there is this young man standing at my door. I had just seen him a couple days before bringing two big bags of returnables. I had been there a couple times before and always marvelled that he kept a running count of various sizes of bottles and cans, threw them all into their proper receptacles, bagged them at the same time in big bags for the trucks that come and collect from them( which meant he had to have a memory for partially filled bags he was always finishing off, etc. Smooth as hell with no paper and pen, and an enormous amount of returnables running by him all the time, I had to tell him that I really admired him for everything he had to keep track of and how skilled he was at his job. I told him of the Disney quote " Whatever you do, do it so well that people will come to see you do it." and added that I could watch him all day and threw a couple bucks into his nearly empty tip jar.
   He was here to thank me for the compliment. He had recognized me as his 8th grade teacher and made no apologies for those days. He just stopped to thank me for the compliment and remind me who he was as I hadn't seemed to recognize who he was. The compliment he said wasn't something the job attracts very often but he was glad someone had recognized what it took to do it and with no apology just dropped  " I always thought back then you were an all right guy." ( Jesus, I almost quit teaching over him)
  In conclusion, no matter how hard I searched to help him find an interest he could buy into, or uncover a skill he had - damn, he flunked everything- just goes t'show, we all have our own timing for awareness. I don't believe there is such a thing as unskilled labor because I have had to bus tables and wash dishes myself. What a great day this was with him and a great reward for that terrible year.