Hi ho, Hi ho, It’s Off to Work I Go: Underpaid and Underappreciated

Published October 23, 2007

By Alex Townsend

It was a time long ago (last weekend) when I was enjoying a simple day of carefree fun with my family. They had brought me food and I was very happy, until I saw something I had hoped to never see again: a plastic bag. Specifically, it was a green one, with the words Grossman’s Delicatessen written on it in a terrifying font.

You see, once upon a time I worked at that very deli. It was my first job, and boy did I hate every minute of it.

Really, it taught me a lot. It taught me about the indignity that comes with being paid below minimum wage, having to work eight hour shifts without a break, and just what it’s like to be the only cashier when there are at least seven other things that need to be done. It wasn’t fun.

But I don’t want to make it seem like all of my experiences at the deli made me want to join a union. No, it also made me very philosophical. For instance, I discovered that when my world is essentially reduced to about thirty feet of space for eight consecutive hours my emotional range shrinks in proportion. While I was behind that cash register the tiniest things would make me happy: children smiling, customers’ not disturbing my carefully arranged penny dish, people with exact change. The customers who bagged their own groceries were gods.

Likewise, I had never in my life found it easier to hate people with such a burning passion. And if the deli was its own little world in my mind then it certainly had its own little version of Dante’s Inferno. There was a level of hell for everyone! Folks who refused to acknowledge me or even get off their cell phones were sentenced to being repeatedly stabbed with little plastic forks, the woman who gave me a hundred when she bought a cup of coffee would be strangled by receipts, and as for the eighty-year-old man who flirted with me… well, there may be children reading this.

What made the whole situation that much more difficult was that I was still in school at the time. On Thursday afternoons I would race to the deli to be on time for my shift and then spend the next few hours wondering when on Earth I was going to get my homework done. More than once I wound up reading my textbooks while on the job, much to the amusement of my customers.

Now that I’ve finally escaped the Deli of Doom I’m really hesitant to try and work somewhere else. I have no idea how other students manage to balance having a job, going to classes, and still having time to relax, but I applaud them.

It’s not easy to force yourself to regularly go someplace where you’re often looked down on, ignored, or even insulted. It’s even harder if you’ve got twenty other things you need to do and some jerk is trying to return three gallons of now-expired milk.

Mentally sending him to a dairy-oriented hell just isn’t going to cut it. I know that a lot of people, especially teens, really hate their jobs. The work can be hard and tedious. The folks at a video store aren’t likely to have it any easier than the student making impossible-to-pronounce drinks at a coffee shop. Really, all of you deserve applause for doing what you do, if only for the appreciation. I know first-hand that a paycheck after taxes isn’t always enough.

There are the standard things you can say to comfort yourself. “I’m earning money.” “It’s only for now.” “My shift’s almost over anyway.” But they don’t change the fact that you’re there now and right now it sucks. So what can you say to make those tedious hours that much more bearable? Something different probably works for everyone, but my personal favorite is “Thank God I’m not an eighty-year-old pervert.”

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