custerc

No. Not that I hate him or want him dead or anything, but I don't care. We never had a warm relationship, and he was never particularly generous with me or treated me as anything other than some dumbass who polished his shoes.

Plus, his funeral would be attended by the rest of his family, and from what I saw of them, they're even more intolerable than he could be.

edit: great question, btw

When working full time, were you required to live in a servant's quarters and serve during odd hours of the night?

No, we were 9-5 most of the time, or sometimes other hours if he needed it but we didn't live there. However, there was a "servant's entrance" we had to use when we entered the house; we weren't permitted to use the regular front door. He also wanted us to wear hospital bootie type things over our shoes when we were inside, but if he wasn't around we usually didn't bother with that.

He did used to have a fill time staff of more like 30 people, and at that time, I believe some of them were around-the-clock, live-on-the-grounds type staff. However, he got in some kind of trouble with the IRS and lost a bunch of his money before I started working for him, so he had scaled back quite a bit.

If your comfortable saying, what was your rough monthly wage doing this full time?

Answered elsewhere. Minimum wage, basically.

How did you find the job and what sort of skills were necessary to be hired?

No real skills required. My uncle had worked for him on his boats sometimes, and I guess he ran into my uncle at the store one day and mentioned he was looking for some new help.

Lastly, whats the most embarrassing, disgusting, or horrible thing you've ever had to do while serving?

Hmm. I always hated polishing things, just because he made us do it constantly and it was utterly unnecessary. Did all fifteen of his pairs of shoes really need to be polished every day? I'm not a shoe expert, but I doubt it.

The must unpleasant I ever felt about how we were treated was when he asked us to polish some leather chairs one morning. We started with other things because (a) the chairs didn't need polishing and (b) no one ever even went into the room they were in anyway.

Around 11:00 he came and yelled at me, called me lazy and a bunch of other crap I don't remember, because I hadn't polished them yet. I told him I was doing something else and would get to it later in the day.

But then, before I could actually get to polishing them, he came by again and said, "Great job, the chairs look much better." No one had touched them whatsoever. it was simultaneously a relief and a reminder that most of what I did was so utterly pointless that even the man assigning me these tasks couldn't tell if they'd been done or not.

What's the coolest and weirdest thing you found in his collection?

The coolest thing was probably a platinum and gold replica of his old sailboat. This thing was probably worth at least $10,000, and it was just sitting in his basement in a box until we unpacked it for The Project. It had been there for decades. The boat had sunk by the time we unpacked it though, so maybe he was just saddened by it?

The weirdest thing, by far, was the button duck. I dearly wish I had a photo of it, but this was in the time before (I had) a cell phone camera. So I'll have to describe it: it was a big ceramic duck, probably at least three feet long and two feet tall. It was shit brown -- honestly, the ugliest shade of brown I have ever seen in my life -- glazed, and covered in costume jewelry that had been embedded into the glaze. You know those fake plastic pearls young girls sometimes have as toys? That's basically what this was, the whole body was covered with lines of those fake pearls. Instead of eyes, the buttons had been embedded into the glaze as well. And instead of feet, the duck had brass baby shoes.

We pulled this out of the box and needless to say, had a very long "WTF?" moment. Who would buy something like this? Was it some children's art project gone wrong? Just as we were wondering, the boss came downstairs and saw it. He made a beeline straight for it. He said something like this (probably not an exact quote, but very close): "Oh my goodness. This is marvelous. We need to get this upstairs right away." So he had us bring it up and set it in his foyer so it's literally the first thing guests see when they walk in the door. Later we learned he had paid several thousand dollars for it. WTF.

Did he ever leave his house?

Yes,he wasn't a recluse, he was just weird. He didn't leave often but he would go to the yacht club to eat, to play tennis and to go sailing or (more frequently) watch other people he paid to sail his boat in yacht races.

ಠ_ಠ

I have no clue what you're talking about, but my gut says no. It's clear humans are quite rare, otherwise "the human" wouldn't be useful information to include when referring to him. If there are other humans, then, presumably there aren't many. But from what you've said, there's no way to be sure. It's also possible there are no other humans but Finn, at some point, told them that he was a human, and the name came about that way.

edit: btw I respect the use of the AMA to ask questions unrelated to the title. That seems to happen only rarely, and I don't know why. It is, after all, ask me ANYTHING.