The Dichotomy of a Worker Bee
My love/hate relationship with working
I’ve worked my entire adult life. I worked most of my teenage life, come to think about it, and I worked some of my childhood life as well. When I was in elementary school and wanted to rent a video game or buy a candy bar I had to pick pecans and sell them.
The farther I drift from my two precious pecan trees I realize this lifetime of work provided so much more than money.
Mythological gardening
My cousin gleefully passed the reins of my great aunt’s yard to me when he was set to graduate high school. I didn’t fully understand why he was so excited to show me around her root- and weed-infested yard.
It didn’t take long for me to realize why. It was a nightmare. It took me all Saturday morning once a month to manicure her yard, and when I finished it looked the same as it did before I started.
It was like the weeds grew back on one side of the yard while I was pulling them on the other.
Like Sisyphus, I toiled at my boulder until I graduated High School.
Pool boy blues
Then there was the summer job at the pool/restaurant/welding supply store.
I know, what the hell.
They could not make up their minds what they wanted to sell. The manager bragged that they had over 200,000 different products in the warehouse.
The first summer I worked as a pool boy. That was a decent job. Just riding around cleaning pools and occasionally plumbing new pumps with my boss. I never got to live out any rich housewife fantasies, which is probably for the best.
The next summer the owner said I should work the front desk. I hated it. It was boring, plus there were 200,000 products in the warehouse, and at any given time, someone would call about a random one.
I can still hear the manager’s voice, like nails on a chalkboard when he said his favorite thing to me,
“I got a project for you.”
Valuable lesson learned
I did learn a very valuable lesson at that job. One day, while avoiding front desk duties, I wandered into the warehouse to loiter with the warehouse workers.
They asked me what I was doing back in the warehouse. I said, “Killing time.”
One of the workers said I was doing it wrong. He handed me a broom and said,
“If you want to kill time and not catch any shit, move this thing back and forth, and when someone sees you, take a few steps in one direction.”
Constructing my future
Once I graduated high school, I went off to college. Before my first semester, I wanted hands-on construction experience because that was my intended major.
I found a job site and walked around it asking who’s the boss. Eventually, I found the guy. I asked for a job and he gave me one: cleaning the site.
It was a new apartment building, and there were mountains of construction trash in front of each unit.
Armed with a bobcat and time, I relocated all of them to the disposal site. I enjoyed that; it was a simple, monumental task that was clearly defined, and I had the autonomy to do it without having to socialize.
A crime of passion
My love affair with construction work ended when I dropped out of college and joined a finishing crew for a large apartment company. The work was a few hours away from where I lived, and they had the crew sleeping in hotel rooms.
I was 19 years old and didn’t know anything about the world. I was put up in a hotel room with three other guys who were dirty and degenerate, who smoked so much you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face.
The first night, I was lying in bed next to this dirty bastard who was steadily smoking, thinking to myself, “How the hell am I going to sustain this.”
He started telling me a story. He spent 10 years of his life in prison for killing his wife and her lover in a crime of passion.
I laid there for a few moments, then told everyone I was going to get McDonald’s and drove for 5 hours straight to my parents’ house.
Turning tables
After that, I started waiting tables. I was good at it. I could charm the cash out of anyone. One day, an old man came in and thought he was going to be cute and said,
“All these pretty women serving and I got stuck with you.”
I snapped back immediately,
“All these pretty women coming to eat and I got stuck with you.”
He gave me $20. I waited tables for another 7 years.
It served me well.
Feening for more
When I decided to go back to college, I moved to a new town. One day I had the urge to smoke pot. I didn’t know anyone who had pot, so I set out to get a job at a restaurant.
I put in a few applications and finally got hired. When I finished my first shift, the line cook who trained me said,
“You wanna get high?”
I grinned because it was the only reason I got the job.
Ironically, that job ignited a love for food that transcended all my other experiences.
Redneck in New York
At culinary school, I had to work. The school was prohibitively expensive. I remember parking one day in my old Corolla, that I struggled to make the $200 payments on, and next to me was a long line of BMWs and Teslas.
I worked 35–50 hours a week the entire time through culinary school. The school claims that their workload is the equivalent of a 50-hour-a-week job, so I averaged 85–100 hours a week for those two years.
I went to school at 6 am and left at 3 pm, clocked in at work after a 1-hour nap at 5 pm, and clocked out at midnight. After a shift beer, I was in bed by 1 am for a nice 4-hour nap and then it started over. I worked doubles on Saturday and Sunday.
When I started wine class, the professor, a level 3 sommelier, asked the class to raise their hands if they had a part-time job. I, as well as 4 or 5 other students, raised our hands. He said,
“Quit.”
I thought, “That’s impossible.” He continued to explain that this course cost $6,500 and was 3 weeks long. He then asked if we would make $6,500 in the 3 weeks at our job. It was rhetorical. I might have made $900 if I was lucky.
I didn’t, and couldn’t, quit.
I passed wines with a 95, I studied every night until 3 am and made over 500 notecards on quizlet.
I didn’t make it through culinary school unscathed. I developed shingles at 33 from extreme sleep deprivation and stress.
Salty like the sea
From culinary school, I joined the Merchant Marines. At sea, you work 13-hour days every day. What is great about that is when you are finished, you do not work at all. It can be mentally daunting, to know that every day for the next few months, you are required to produce 3 meals on time, no exceptions. I worked 95-hour weeks every week for 4-6 months each hitch.
Meandering to the moral
As I sit here dreaming about not having to work, wishing that I could write online and have it sustain my existence, I recognize that that’s impossible.
I am a worker.
I need to do something. I need someone to tell me to do something. I worry that if I were self-employed, I would eventually just lay on the couch all day and play video games.
That does sound awesome…
The motivation to write is the need to create my own destiny and to not have a boss. The irony of that is it requires me to have a boss. If I were to attain the dream of having enough money to just, as my British colleagues say,
“faff about,”
I would lose the motivators that make me who I am. I daydream of quitting my job but fear what I would become unbridled.
For now, I will continue to work and slog away at these keys at 6 am for fun. Online work is rewarding, but there is value gained from the experiences gathered from a lifetime of work.
As you sit there dreaming about quitting your job, remember that it may be the unlikely muse you need. Like Aesop’s fabled goose, we should keep it alive and not risk losing those precious golden eggs.