SPEEDY
Phillip Woods was a kissing cousin to a woman that had one green eye and one brown one, and she was married to the slowest, laziest, man in the state of Maine; Jonathan Peaks.
Mr.Woods was telling us one night about an experience Jonathan
had when he left South Lubec. Times were getting so bad that Jonathan
couldn’t find a job and he was far too lazy to work for himself. Naturally
he did what 
any
enterprising Maineiac would do and went to Bath to work at the Bath Iron
Works. Jonathan’s reputation for slowness hadn’t proceeded him yet, and
because there were several unfilled openings at the Iron Works, he was
hired.
For the first thirty days Jonathan worked at his fullest speed (which was about one third of that of the other workers) and at the end of his trial period was accepted into the union. Once in the union he couldn’t be fired as long as he showed up for work and didn’t show disrespect to any of his supervisors. Jonathan was slow of foot but not slow of mind. He made his presence known every day and kept his nose clean. It didn’t take him long to acquire something called the Bath Shuffle. He would put his left foot half way in front of his right foot and shuffle his right foot half way in front of the left one. This, of course, only happened during working hours. When the whistle sounded for the end of the days work, Jonathan was the first one out the gate. Jonathan was given an order by his supervisor to go to the tool crib and pick up a thing-am-a-gig that was needed to complete a job that had to be finished within the hour. Thirty minutes later when the supervisor returned Jonathan had only moved about twenty feet in the direction of the tool crib.
“Hey, man,” the supervisor yelled at him, “where’s that tool I need?”
“I’m going after it now,” Jonathan informed his boss.
“For goodness sake hurry up. I needed that tool half an hour ago,” the supervisor yelled at Jonathan. “Don’t you have another speed?”
“Aayah, I do,” came the answer, “but it’s so slow I hate
to shift down to it.”
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