The work experience on my r?(c)sum?(c) looks like an itinerary for souls condemned to eternal punishment on a terrace in Purgatory. Like many students, I've had to maintain a job throughout my school career in order to subsist in this cruel world.
It all started when I got my first job at the age of 13 as the neighborhood's paperboy. While some people complain about Indonesian child labor laws, I complain about ours. After trudging for hours through foot-high snow with a 40-pound sack of The Buffalo News everyday for three years, making Nikes in the warmth of a South Asian shoe factory seems like a day in Eden.
"You can buy a car with that money when you grow up," my mom would always remind me.
Unfortunately, this is no success story and my mom's reminder was no more than a ridiculous fantasy, never to be realized.
I currently drive my dad's old '93 Buick Park Avenue. The "check engine" light is always distressingly lit up on the dashboard, and the grumbled moaning of the car's innards makes the memories of my death marches through frozen suburbia all the more nauseating.
Since my job as a paperboy, I've had a slew of other jobs, each one more depressing than the previous. The carthorse profession sounds appealing at this point. Car payments, tuition costs and my humble upbringing leave me with no choice but to work.
Unless you're daddy's little princess, or your neglectful parents paid your tuition and bought you a BMW to make up for lost years, you probably had to work your way through college at some time or another, too.
At age 16, I climbed the economic ladder to the rung of cashier at Tops. Try standing in one spot for eight hours with managers constantly reminding you to "smile more" and not contemplate committing suicide. It's almost impossible. Suddenly, those mailmen who indiscriminately shot coworkers seemed like they were onto something.
I then got a job at a local hockey rink as the public skate guard. With a ratio of 200 kids to Ken, I wouldn't have been able to bring order into that rink even if I were channeling the spirit of Stalin. After getting pelted in the back of the head with ice balls by prepubescent assassins, I thought, "There has got to be a better way."
There wasn't.
Enticed by the prospect of getting paid more than $5.40 an hour, I took a job at the Home Depot as cart-pusher, or "Lot Attendant" as they liked to call it. Contrary to what history books say, slavery was not abolished after the Civil War. It's still alive and well at the Home Depot.
Cashiers, licking their chops at the prospect of someone being ranked beneath them in the hierarchy, quickly accepted me as their cart whore. Suddenly every revolting job they could think of conveniently fit under my job description. Not only was I the cart-pusher, I was the toilet plungerer, garbage changer and dead-pigeon remover.
The businesses for which I worked aren't the only targets of my wrath. I also aim at the system that forces us to work while in school.
The high costs of education demand that we take out loans and/or work after classes to pay for food, gas, and tuition.
It shouldn't cost us so much money to obtain an education so that we may function in our own society. Nor should I have to work 30 hours a week to pay for an education on which I can't focus all my energy.
Though I do acknowledge that my work experience has developed my work ethic, shown me the value of a dollar and prepared me for this vicious world, I've also wasted countless hours cleaning toilets when I could have been reading Shakespeare or pursuing extracurricular passions.
For those, I have nothing to show but a few premature wrinkles, back problems, and head full of bad memories.
Photo: Courtesy of Matthew Messina, from the RMBERS' Instagram page
