The User Teacher  I'm with others in a group. There is a man about 55-60 years old with grayish white hair and a beard with us. He has a blue Geo Metro that he lives in. He is an outdoors type of person. He takes a paddle and a lump of cotton, and starts pulling and stretching the cotton until there is a washcloth on the paddle. Two regular nails and one two-pronged nail for electrical wiring attach the washcloth to the paddle. This is what the old man has to teach us. We are going to work so we learn how to do this. He wants us to haul 20-30 garbage cans full of water up a sandy hill. The man has a young man as an apprentice. The apprentice shows us how to lift a plastic canoe using a paddle for leverage, like a yoke. He wants or instructs us to use the paddles as levers to haul barrels up the hill. He wants us to fill the barrels with dirt and sand. I grab a 20-gallon garbage can and start walking down a sandy hill. I use a hose to spray some of the sand off my garbage can. As I walk down the hill I want to tell the two guys who are at the top of the hill to fuck off, and to leave their can there. It is going to be so heavy and painful to carry these huge cans of water and sand using a paddle on our neck as a lever! Ouch! Then I realize the old man is a fake. His trick with the cotton and the washcloth was a hoax: there was a washcloth nailed to the paddle in the first place, and all he had to do was rub away some loose cotton that was covering the washcloth up. I explain this to my sister Ramona and her friend Barb Mohs while we're standing on metal bed frames, stood on end, at the bottom of the hill. I won't haul the garbage cans. The man was going to use us to haul his water up the hill.