A REAL WORK ETHIC
No drive to work? Just fire up the tractor.
When 16-year-old Ethan Oake was left with no ride to work, he wasn’t having it.
That’s why the lad who lives on MacMillian Mountain Road near Middle River, drove his tractor to get to his evening shift at Tom’s Pizza in Baddeck on Oct. 23.
“It’s kind of an important thing. My workplace treats me really well so I want to be there for them when they need me,” the Grade 11 student said during a phone interview on his lunch break at Baddeck Academy.
“When I say I am coming in, I should keep my deadlines and stuff.”
Not a short jaunt, Oake lives more than 20 km away from Baddeck, and a tractor might be the turtle of motor vehicles, with a maximum speed of 29 km/hour. But it did the trick, even if it took about four times as long to get there.
It was a miscommunication that left him without a ride. Oake thought he wasn’t working until 15 minutes before his shift.
He had been working on his trusty red tractor, a 1992 CASE IH 695 his family bought five years ago, when he came in for a wrench to find a phone message from his employer.
No one was home to drive him and Oake knew biking would take too long. So he drove the tractor, taking back roads to avoid breaking any traffic laws.
“I kind of thought they might be disappointed because I came in late, I was like 40 minutes late. But they were all happy to see me,” he said.
“They all kind of thought I was crazy. They were like, ‘Did you actually bring a tractor into work?’ And I was like, yup. When I told them to just look outside and they saw a tractor there, they just started to laugh.”
Jane Prentice, the manager on shift that night, said she wasn’t surprised Oake drove his tractor instead of not coming to work.
“He’s a great kid, just a really hard worker. Obviously, his parents did a really great job raising him to be responsible,” she said.
It’s the first year Prentice has hired students to work at the pizza shop. Many of them didn’t work out but some did.
“Ethan and a couple of others have been super employees,” Prentice said. “But Ethan, he just stands out because he goes the extra mile to help us out in the restaurant, doing his job plus always offering to help out others in their job. It’s been a pleasure having him in the restaurant.”
For now, Oake doesn’t plan on making his trusty red tractor his go-to mode of transportation because it uses too much fuel.
But he does plan to continue the yearly tradition of driving his tractor to school on the last day, something he started doing with his friend Robert Berk.