Unexpected , livre ebook

The Unexpected
Sean David Snowdon
Austin Macauley Publishers
2020-04-05
The Unexpected About The Author Dedication Copyright Information © Those Early Years The Balance of Life The New World The Unexpected Moment of Truth Above and Beyond My life in Jeopardy Building the Foundation The New Beginning Our New Playground Till Death Paradise Consumed The Light at the End The Start of the Empire Acquiring the Nightmare The Road to Hell To be Abandoned The Beginning of the End The End
About The Author
Sean Snowdon is a young entrepreneur, always looking for better ways to gain knowledge of life mixed with the thrill of adventure, having the passion for adventure and being 40 but still containing that kid's instinct of life.
Not only learning about successes and failures of life but also in the romance department, he realized that the wanting was behind another door never expected. From the arrogance of youth, believing in control, he realized that a different plan for the future was soon to be discovered.
So he decided to chase the next thrill with the more dangerous wildlife and take on the world with no remorse.
Dedication
To my lovely wife, Ellie, and daughter, Emily, who no doubt saved my life.
Copyright Information ©
Sean David Snowdon (2020)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher.
Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Ordering Information:
Quantity sales: special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the publisher at the address below.
Publisher’s Cataloguing-in-Publication data
Snowdon, Sean David
The Unexpected
ISBN 9781643780030 (Paperback)
ISBN 9781643780047 (Hardback)
ISBN 9781645366690 (ePub e-book)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020902789
www.austinmacauley.com/us
First Published (2020)
Austin Macauley Publishers LLC
40 Wall Street, 28th Floor
New York, NY 10005
USA
mail-usa@austinmacauley.com
+1 (646) 5125767
Those Early Years
What lies ahead is only a mystery. As I sit here thinking about the past, I only wonder if the next 15 years will be the same roller-coaster as the last 15. Will I have the same extraordinary adventures in my next 20 years? Do I have any regrets over what I have accomplished or failed in the last 15 years? I wrestled the grizzlies of the north, swam with the sharks of the south, climbed to the skies of the west, and froze in the arctic cold of the Middle East. Many times, not knowing if I would live or die, the stress came from something so much simpler; who am I and what do I want with this one chance I have on this beautiful planet of ours? This is a question we need to ask ourselves. For me, there are major regrets in what I have done to my family; at the same time, I believe the mistakes I made have shaped me for the way I am today. As much as it hurt, I believe the wisdom of an individual is created by the mistakes of their path. If I had to do it again, would I go down the same salvation and not change anything, or would I challenge a different road?
I sit here in the parking lot at Humpty’s, in Calgary, on an Easter Sunday reminiscing about the past and thinking about what lies ahead in this horrid future of mine. I can only hope that I will still be living on the edge and fulfilling every need. One thing learned was life is not what I expected when graduation day arrived and left. When we were teenagers in our big world, we thought life was easy. We really mattered to everyone out there and should be respected and looked after by all. Boy, were we wrong! Everything I thought should be or was expected had changed my beliefs.
It was the summer of 1993, and after seven months at Supreme Convenience, I was offered a job to manage my own store in Campbell River (three hours away from where I lived). Eighteen years old and already managing a convenience store for minimum wage, I knew what the rest of my life would turn out like; I had it all planned. With many jobs at the same time over the last four years, money was never something that I lacked. Maybe time to spend it, but the most stress I ever acquired was that of sleeping through my alarm by 15 minutes. No bills, no lack of work, and certainly never a time when death was closing in on my heels. I would sit behind my desk, work the books and one day own my own store making millions. Nothing in my head was telling me any different; however, the first step to my life-change was opening my eyes to the world out there.
I arrived in Campbell River with my boss, and walked around the store looking at what we had in labor for the next several months. There were four workers (well more like babysitters sitting around doing nothing) who ran this little gas station of about ten customers a day. It took them ten minutes to even acknowledge we were there when we showed up. There was a reason that nobody came by. The outside was run-down to the point where you couldn’t tell what the paint color was supposed to be. The canopy, torn and faded, was held up by a rusted post with a garden of weeds at the base. There were a couple of tenants upstairs who treated the store as if it were their own personal ashtray leaving cigarette butts on the pavement and beer bottles stacked on the front deck. The store inside was filthy, outdated with shelves of useless, outdated cookie mixes, cereal boxes, and containers of yeast. Coffee, if that was what you called it, was somewhere in the corner between the garbage and Twinkies from the 1960s. The walk-in cooler was in okay shape; however, it was empty of the everyday necessities needed and overstocked with no-name brand pop. The store was screaming for a new makeover, and after the first day of only ten customers (and that’s not even exaggerating) we definitely had time to spend on the tear down, only for rebuilding. It was easy to drop workers, because after the first day when we changed the hours of having one worker at a time instead of two and actually making them work, they all quit except for two. One of the two workers who lasted was a good friend whom I would visit often over the previous years; Adrian Atherton. I would drive to Campbell River and party with him and his girlfriend over many weekends. Not sleeping and drinking coffee for three days straight definitely isn’t healthy but being so naive and young, I felt that I was living.
The next month consisted of 16-hour days of throwing just about everything away, redoing new floors, paint, brand-new canopy coverings. Hell, we even had a huge pile of groceries in one corner with a big sign saying free. The funny thing is, it took us two or three days to give away free food, because nobody wanted half of it, for it was useless and outdated. During the hours I wasn’t rebuilding, I was learning how to manage the books, hire and train staff, order product (always have enough so as not to run out, but make sure that it never lasted on the shelf past its due date). I moved in upstairs with a couple of roommates, and this was good considering my life was the store. I would get up at 6 a.m. to start organizing and open the store, then prepare for the day. If I wasn’t serving the few customers we had, I was cleaning the store inside out, making sure anyone coming into the store would want to come back. Customer service was the number one key to attracting repeat customers. You had to make them feel welcome, joke around with the regulars but not overdo it. The store would close at midnight; I would finish up what I was doing and try to sleep for six hours before tackling the next day. After seven days a week, 18 hours a day, the regular customers started to know me very well, which definitely would help the store? Over the next six months, I took the store from ten customers a day to a more profitable margin where I could hire more staff and even have two people at a time for a shift. When you are managing a store with all the duties and mistakes, you mature very quickly. Hiring staff was my biggest learning experience. Not only did I have to hire the right employees, but I also had to deal with trying to tell someone older than me what to do, especially since I was a 110 lb., 18-year (looking like I was only 14) kid. My biggest mistake back then was not having a life for the first year, only working. It did help with the customer service because it was always nice to visit anyone who came into the store. To pass time, I had a passion for creating. I would make candy displays at the front counter every week that would keep customers looking forward to seeing what was next. At first, we never sold any candy; however, after a while just from impulse, our order of candy shot up by 500%. People couldn’t help but look at the displays and impulsively grab a small handful of candy. I had trains going around the display and through tunnels; holidays were awesome. On Halloween, I placed spiders by the front with hidden pumps, so when people looked closely, the spiders jumped out at them, and at Christmas, I always had something special for the regular customers whether it was a free movie, coffee, or something small. I was always playing jokes on the regulars and getting them to either