Half Price Employee
2005-04-28
1:14 p.m.
Right now I'm reading Nickel and Dimed, a book about the working poor in America. Some of it is amusing, but a lot of it makes me angry. This journalist went out to see how it was to live as the working poor and report back. I'm glad that this book made the bestseller list and I really hope that more people will read it.
The part that makes me upset is that this is how I'm living now. Not nearly in the squallor that others seem to be suffering in, but I can see my savings account dwindling. Sometime in the not too distant future, there won't be a savings account. Beyond that, perhaps I won't even be able to maintain a checking account. Unacceptable.
I can see this from two sides now. Before I had been poor with no idea how to ever get ahead. It was all month to month and hope you will not have any emergencies. There was no emergency money to fall back on.
Then the second side is from the perspective of having lived better and knowing that there is another life beyond hunger and depression. In this book, Barbara Ehrenreich, lives like the second side which is why she doesn't seem to understand why the working poor don't get up and fight for more. They have no hope because they've never known anything more than what they have (and who has that kind of energy?).
So that "good" job ended or more accurately, I ended that job. Even though Six had cut my pay down to almost a third, which was still $2 more an hour than I'm making now, I couldn't live with the fact that he'd cut my salary. He said it was some kind of mistake that I was making so much and he didn't know how it came about. Yet it troubled him not in the least to ask for a raise because of how much he was saving the place by cutting my salary and edging out the other similarly paid employee. Yeah, $37 an hour wasn't enough for him. And yeah, I'm still bitter over it.
I have faith in karma. I feel it will bite him and bite him hard. What worries me though, is what will he have to do to someone else to get trigger justice? They found porn on his computer and very quickly swept that under the rug. He has time, working for a ministry to look at porn, while working everyone else like his "nigger slave" (his words, not mine).
I kept telling myself that I was glad just to be out of there, and I am, but I'm not happy to be back at my starting point. I worked a bookstore not long after high school and here I am working at a bookstore five years after college. I was thinking how wonderful it would be to work in a bookstore and get that great discount. I was thinking it was a good transitionary job. But to tell the truth, it's like torture. I make enough to get by, but I'm in for it if there are any emergencies (again).
I had to call the mobile RV repair to fix some things that could not be ignored. It's cutting into my savings to do so. Now, this is emergency money and this certainly qualifies. The problem is that I have no means to replenish the funds.
The cheap cute shoes that I have are not holding up, nor is my body. I've never been in better shape in my life, but there is a difference between working out and wearing out. When I do my weight training, I feel better afterwards, stronger and healthier. At the end of a shift I get home and collapse after about a 30 minute time of spacing out.
I like the people I work with, but I think the biggest hit to morale is that I am no longer helping people, but serving them. There is a very distinct difference. I'm now like some sort of sub-human that most people won't look in the eye or respond to when you ask cheerily "How are you doing today?" So by this conclusion, I find that I am not meant to serve.
This is probably why I'm struggling with an idea for how to work for myself. T-shirt shop, commissions, online travel site, and as soon as I can figure out how to get merchandise, Ebay store.
So what to do right now? Do I just hang in there while working on my online shops while hoping this real estate thing works out for my mom so I can help her or do I take that time away from myself and look for another job that will pay more and hopefully not just be demoralizing in an entirely new way?
Well, I need to go. I want to donate some clothes on my way to work today. I've got three more bags of clothes to get rid of! Yay! I love my bakery scented perfumes. XOXOX, Loch
