Just Rewards
This has long been a theme for me – being indignant when people defend their wage slave jobs. I define those as everything from the most menial shit on up to the more acceptable range. Let’s just say customer service, generally.
Life should be enjoyed. Absolutely. And I think, too often, we make excuses that the unrewarding job is a means to an end. But that’s a lie. Even if we’re productive in our off hours, are we really enjoying life if we’re tied down to some idiot job listening to our brains die for eight hours a day? Not to mention the commute, which gets most of us up to at least 10 hours a day. And, if you’re like me and living in one of the country’s most expensive cities, working a second job.
I’ll start out by saying that I had a dream and I fully realized that dream and made it happen. So the means to an end argument doesn’t hold water, because I know it’s a lie. What I’ve done with my dream is amazing, but I still feel that I have not enjoyed life because I have an hour in the mornings and, when I get home, about 90 minutes before I’m too tired to do anything. And I have to work on the weekends just to make ends meet. And I now have two freelancing writing jobs, which takes up those precious couple of free hours a day.
Yes, I live in an expensive city. Yes, realizing my dream plummeted me into debt. But my case isn’t unusual. People without dreams to realize are working multiple jobs just to meet the bills. And we spend our lives at those jobs. I could come home to morphine, whores, and dreams given flesh every day and that doesn’t change the fact that 80% of my waking hours are spent at a desk, talking to fucking idiot customers, or dealing with over-medicated, addle-brained co-workers wearing their most expensive irrational caps.
This is impossible, I know, but our day jobs should either be forwarding our own lives or humanity or should be so lightweight that they don’t matter.
And forwarding the cause of humanity doesn’t mean you have to be a doctor, or a scientist, or a politician, or whatever. I approve of lawyers, construction workers, and all that. The people who make things, defend things, and help keep things running. The field is wide open. Low-paying customer service? Whether retail, phone support, or taking payments for an organization, it’s nothing but a legitimized pyramid scheme. Fleece people of their money so your bosses can make a ton of cash while you get paid pennies and are expected to be grateful for the job. Our society has become so sick, expensive, and competitive that we are grateful for the job just because, if we were to be laid off, we’d be dead within three meals.
My day job is phone service for a member-based professional organization and academic publisher. My weekend job is as a glorified janitor for a venue that rents itself out at top dollar for events. I do nothing that helps me or furthers the lives of the people I’m taking money from. It is, simply, that. A money grab. Membership at my day job is not required, except at certain jobs that our marketing and insurance department has worked out sweetheart back-room kick-back deals with. There’s no real savings on the books and magazines. It looks like there is, but the books are still priced higher than online and, after taxes and shipping, are more expensive than if you were to buy them off the shelf at Barnes & Noble. The magazines are highly specialized academic journals, each with subscribers in the hundreds or low thousands. So most of the members don’t even bother, and there’s no benefit for the public.
My weekend job? Take as much money from the client as possible, and nickel and dime them to the grave if they go into overtime or dare leave something behind after the event. The clients aren’t human. They’re just a booking, to be hurried out so that the next booking can come in (sometimes five a weekend).
It’s pointless to complain, I know. And if I wanted to do more, despite my claim to have realized my dreams, then it’s my decision. Get a better or higher degree and apply myself. The same species of argument the Reaganites had against homeless people. My purpose in complaining is not to inspire change or revolution, but to try and drive home the point that you aren’t doing any good if you have jobs like mine. Do not defend the job. Don’t take it so seriously. Show up, do what’s needed to keep the job, cash their checks as soon as you get them. Just simply realize that the job is shit and your life isn’t much better, and shut the fuck up about how I’m wrong. I’m not an idealist. I’ve provided a broad range of worthwhile jobs that might overlap the wage slave world but are still okay. Customer service jobs of the sort I have are childish, worthless, unrewarding, and downright painful.
Of course, there’s no real point to writing this. The people who defend jobs like mine are braindead oafs anyway. They defend the job while sacrificing their lives for it – dropping out of school, failing to continue their degrees, unable to imagine what they want out of life and not willing to try. I shouldn’t even be listening to them, or addressing their kind. They’re dead already, they know it on a primal level, and there’s no way out of their personal hell. Lots of people I know are dead already. And, you know, it might be a good thing… Because we need losers around us so we’re reminded of what we should be and have less competition to move on.