Gainfully unemployed

A SLICE OF WRY by Anna Breslaw

    I’ve always been a big fan of working.
    I don’t work per se, but I wholeheartedly support people who do. My high school educates tons of part-timing teenagers. Domino’s cashiers, CVS counter girls, Build-a-Bear employees, the teeming mass of food-service drones — I salute you.
    I’m very in touch with the working class. I mean, my parents work.
    Kudos, Mom and Dad.
    I’m one of those people who firmly believe in blue-collar labor as a cornerstone of what we stand for, a working-class flag waving proudly in the mid-afternoon sun.
    That flag may be covered with dirt, grime and other people’s food — or, like my first job, involve a boss who’s an aviator sunglasses-wearing, vintage-raiding sellout — but it’s the quintessential American backbone.
    There was a line in "Gee, Officer Krupke" from West Side Story that went "I’m not anti-social, I’m only anti-work." That pretty much illustrates my situation. Working is absolutely fantastic; unless, of course, I’m the one working.
    My recent barista stint at a local café was doomed from the start. By the middle of my first week I had discovered that every single employee was 22 years old.
    Twenty-two-year-olds are the pits. They’re old enough to feel superior to teenagers but too young to realize they’re equally idiotic.
    To preserve their anonymity, I’ll only say that they were headed toward second-rate art schools, dead-end careers and the eventual not-so-trendy adult life spent in their parents’ basement.
    Besides, I have a love-hate relationship with the café itself. Its ambiance is very emo-bands-performing-every-Thursday, very aviator-sunglasses, very long-ropes-of-pearls-paired-with-Converse-high-tops. Granted, part of me can’t help but enjoy the occasional indulgence of trendy elitism served, steaming, in a venti-size cup.
    However, arrogant early-20s indie screwups with trust funds the size of Albania coupled with a café that popularly housed just the sort of people I tended to stay away from and maybe poke with a big stick was just too much for me. So I quit.
    Often I’ll go to the local café with friends, but we’ll bypass the Vans-wearing trend-worshippers in favor of people who have no conventional labels on their clothing or their personality. At least, we’ll try to.
    Solution: Get a job at the little deli within walking distance of my house. It seemed perfect, the exact opposite of the trendy little café. The new job was very pro-America-bumper-sticker, very Toby-Keith-marathon-on-CMT, very don’t-instead-of-do.
    Very "Who-shot-J.R.?"
    My parents insisted I would feel out of place at the deli not only as the only girl, but the lone employee with a working grasp of the English language. Of course, my parents were right, but I don’t like talking about that.
    I was the lowest form of life at work. I was a dishwasher.
    Not only was I a dishwasher, a job that a chimpanzee would find lacking in the challenge department, but I was a dishwasher for $5 per hour. As in below-minimum-wage $5 per hour. For $5 per hour, even the poorest Cambodian child laborer would’ve thrown down the Oscar de la Renta clutch and called it quits. br>
    There was another student at work: a Vo-Tech kid. If you don’t know what Vo-Tech is, all you need to know is that the girls go for cosmetology and the boys go for some kind of Cro-Magnon bicep-building proficiency, plumbing or mechanics or something. Scholars of hair-cutting and toilet-fixing: the shining future of America.
    Um, I guess somebody has to do it.
    Vo-Tech kids aren’t obligated to take some of the academic classes the rest of us do. As a result, they tend to have simple … um, course loads.
    Because my co-worker’s most difficult class was Honors Grease-Mongering, he was able to comply to the demanding schedule with which I was struggling. His standard, in the eyes of my boss, was exemplary. To people like him, honor roll students weren’t intelligent, but geeky or homosexual.
    Knowing just where to bang on a pipe to stop that weird squealing sound — now that’s smarts.
    Needless to say, I disappointed my boss.
    Whenever I requested to work any less than six days per week, he would launch into a tirade about how he pays me and he’s the boss of me, nyah-nyah-nyah.
    However revolutionary it may have been for the proprietors of the deli, I was putting my education first. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I might’ve been the first employee to graduate from high school if I hadn’t quit.
    "That," he said the last time I asked for a day off, "don’t work."
    It don’t work for me, either.
    My friends and family hassle me for sitting around on afternoons when most kids ring stuff up or wash stuff down or mop or sweep or dust. Lucky for me, I have the ultimate infallible comeback, perfect for any anti-work — or anti-social — person.
    "I’m not just sitting around," I reply defensively, "I’m writing!"
    — Anna Breslaw, putting the "tic" in fantastic since 1987.