I met The Ronmower!

11:55 AM 5/5/11

I met the Ronmower, Ron the lawnmower guy. He's an LSE. The whole conversation between both of us was all introverted sensing and extraverted logic. Blah blah, when I come home from work all I want to do is take a shower and go to bed, blah blah, don't feel like doing the paperwork, woe is me, blah blah. (Who does THAT sound like?) Felt like I was having a heart attack, sat down and drank some water, realized I needed to hire some help, can't do all the work myself. I make a line on the calendar going over three days and if we get done early then the last day is free, blah blah. These are the papers that I fill out for each job, I put the name here, blah blah. Can you find out whether these things are tax deductible, and so on.

So, we understood each other just fine.

He started this lawncare/landscaping business on his own and he is now overwhelmed with the amount of business he has, and he can't do it all himself, and he can't even keep track of the money anymore, and it makes him anxious to know that he's making a profit, but he's not sure exactly how much, and he's not sure if there are any problems in any areas where he might be spending too much money or not making enough, and it fits the pattern that I've read about so many times, the pattern of what happens when people start their own business. It's just the right situation for me. He's doing this out of his house and getting paid in cash from his customers. It's a perfect practice run for me to get experience in bookkeeping.

I got a surprise text message from him last night and he rescheduled a meeting for this morning. We successfully found each other.

He shows signs of poisoning. He would sometimes have aphasia, the inability to remember a simple, ordinary noun ('file cabinet'), which I myself experience - I can't recall nouns either, and it's worst if I'm having a drug residue reaction. After I shook his hand, and after sitting near him for a few minutes at the table, I felt like I myself was a tiny bit sick too, but not overwhelmingly so, so if I go to his house to do the paperwork, I will probably be okay. I assume that the poison is probably one of several things: herbicide, pesticide, fertilizer, or perhaps the poisonous plants themselves. It may also be something like diesel fuel from the lawnmowers. I don't have any idea what kind of fuel they use, but of course it will be toxic to handle it and to breathe the smoke from it.

He also had a heart attack like incident. I have had quite a few pseudo heart attacks, so I wondered what happened. ('This is going to sound weird, but, were you standing near a rhododendron bush when this happened?') There are several poisonous plants that will cause heart attacks or pseudo heart attacks while you are mowing the lawn. Rhododendron will cause it. Also, milkweed, butterfly weed, and digitalis (foxglove). If you mow the lawnmower over any of those things, it will spray poison everywhere into the surrounding air. You will inhale the poison, and it will get all over your skin and clothing, and it will either cause a real heart attack or a transient heart attack which passes after a few minutes.

I imagine there are a few other poisonous weeds that will cause heart attacks that same way. Milkweed is very, very common, and it occurs in any 'messy' areas where you have tall grass growing with weeds. Also, I just remembered another common one: poison hemlock. We have a lot of poison hemlock, and its relatives, around here. There are a bunch of things similar to poison hemlock. I learned all this because there was a time period when I was interested in learning how to forage for food outdoors, and I was researching which local plants were poisonous.

It will also happen if you are inhaling the exhaust fumes from the lawnmower. Smoke inhalation will cause heart attack like symptoms.

It will also happen if you are exerting yourself heavily after having eaten some categories of foods which I myself have had heart reactions to - I have had reactions to dried meats like those sausage things, which I was buying a lot of during a particular time period a year or two ago. They were these little snack sausages which you usually would dip in mustard or something.

He said that his vision went blue, like he couldn't see, and he went and sat down and drank a bunch of water to flush himself out, and decided that he would try to finish the job if he felt better, but if not, that would be okay. He was able to finish it after a rest, but that signaled to him that he was doing too much work on his own and he urgently needed help so that he wouldn't overexert himself.

So I'm not sure what caused his incident. But I agree with him, he's doing too much on his own. He was happy to tell me that he had finally hired another guy just this morning, before talking to me. So he officially has some help now and they will be starting soon, and he will be less overburdened.

So he and I will try to get together next week and look at the paperwork that he needs to have done. This is my trial run of a self-employed bookkeeper job. I am doing very simple and easy stuff, nothing complicated, but it will be helpful to him, and I will gain experience and confidence, and I will also gain a reputation, so that I can use him as a reference when I am talking to future clients.