Helping Mr. Bonkers

Some time ago, I wrote about my nephew's new "business venture" in a post found here. He decided it was time to begin his work-life and begin first business, collecting cans and bottles for return to the recycling plant and the refund they paid.

He's not walking around delving into bins though, he's building business relationships and a clientele list of neighbours, his day care centre, violin teacher and the facility where he has swimming lessons. He's got his dad's office involved too. Of course, a lot of this was set up by his dad, my brother, because my nephew isn't yet five years old, but Hive account@mrbonkers has been involved from concept to creation; it's a learning experience after all.

I'm really proud of the little chap as he's approached it with a great deal of responsibility and ownership and has shown consistency, energy and motivation for the task at hand; yep, he's learning valuable personality traits that will help in later on. He's even managed to inspire me.

To help my nephew with his endeavour, I decided I'd start collecting recyclable cans and bottles, wash them out and save them for him.

Here in Australia, each household has three Local Council-issued bins: General waste, green waste (garden stuff) and recyclables. I use them without question and also work towards reducing how much general and recyclable waste my household generates. All of the cans and bottles with refundable-deposits simply go into the recycle bin however I'm now set up with a system to save them for mrbonkers and his business endeavour.

Last night, I spoke to my nephew on a video chat and told him his business has gone multi-state meaning it operates in his home State of Queensland and in South Australia with me as the Operations Manager of the South Australian division. He was pretty-well chuffed with the expansion knowing it would accelerate the generation of revenue and get him to his goals earlier. Right now, those goals involve having money to buy Lego, a mission I totally agree with.

He was so funny on the video chat, I could see excitement bursting out of him and the beaming smile he had was priceless.

I live a long way from any of my family, thousands of kilometres, and don't get to see them in person very much at all. It's been five long and heart-wrenching years since I've seen my niece Hive account@smallsteps and it hurts. I have seen Hive account@mrbonkers a couple times in that period so it's a little better but I still feel so detached from his life and hers. This little endeavour gives me a way to connect with him and be a part of his childhood from afar. When he comes to visit we'll take the collection to the recycle plant and cash it in for the deposits and I expect that'll be a really nice moment for me.