My family--first my grandfather and now one of my uncles--has owned a little bar in Pittsburgh since the 1950s; that was where my dad and all his brothers had their first post-paper-route jobs; at least one of my cousins still works there; my grandmother, at almost 90, still keeps the books! So reading the heartfelt whining of all these little suburban overachievers ("Massive grade inflation means one less standard deviation between myself and those who don't try"--oh, oh, the Hugh Manatee!), I was appalled to read:
Serving people drinks was more rewarding than this full-time job, and it is killing me inside.Hey maybe you ought to quit your bullshit jobs and go back to serving people drinks you dummy! Like, um, oh, is it beneath you because of your high school GPA? Fuck you. Where's muh beer? So you acquired a soul-munching fake-economy white-collar boondoggle of a job and it totally sucks? Hm. Maybe you could take a moment to reexamine the priorities of your life, to reflect upon the nature of honest labor and personal contentment, to consider that happiness and success are opposites.
52 comments:
His girlfriend gave up her toe! She thought we'd be getting a million dollars! It's not fair!
Fuck yeah. Some of my happiest working memories are still linked to loading in kegs of beer, doing wine and liquor inventory, all in preparation for the alcoholic camaraderie of a friday night, a local band trying to make it in the corner, football on the screen, the sound of billiard balls dropping into pockets.
So long as it's not one of those friggin' sports bars in Shadyside that's gone all gentrified 'n shit.
I went hiking with some friends this weekend and one of them was this Swedish girl. She's been in the US since 16, so I asked her where she'd rather live. She said the US, because in Sweden everyone has guaranteed housing, and medical and a huge safety net in general and people have nothing to work for. I WANTED TO STRANGLE HER!!!
problem is, everybody wants to take the work out of the working class.
Working road crews as a teenager pretty much disabused me of the romantic side of working for a living.
IOZ: it may be Miss Gradegrind is peculiarly attentive to her future. Serving drinks is a lot more rewarding when you're a hot young 20 year old girl than when you're a not hot 50 year old woman. Similarly, a soul-munching fake-economy white-collar boondoggle of a job, with its generous medical "insurance" and its generous family leave policy, seems like a much better thing when you are having children at 30, than a job where you do actual noticeable work and therefore will be missed and probably replaced if you swan off for years at a time.
Did they even have children before paid medical leave? Parthenogenesis ended with the New Deal, right?
"familiy owned bar" = mafia front.
Happiness is a warm Iron City.
Over the weekend I watched the movie "Win Win" on DVD, and enjoyed it very much. The central character, played by Paul Giamatti, is a lawyer who is not doing so well financially, and at the end of the movie takes an evening job as a bartender, because he needs the money. He doesn't complain.
In all this movie is a worthy successor to Bill and Ted's adventure movie, and exemplifies its catch phrases, "Be excellent to each other. Party on, dudes!"
Thanks for reminding me of Bill and Ted's mistah charley! I love that catch phrase!
funny, i just watched everything you always wanted to know about sex, and there's a scene where gene wilder, stripped of his medical license due to a love affair with a sheep, is reduced to waiting tables. he erupts: "stop calling me waiter! I'M A DOCTOR!"
Buy why does success fail? It fails because you were searching
not for wealth, you were searching not for power, you were
searching not for security and safety; you were not searching for
a house, you were searching for something else. You were
searching for the eternal home, from where there is no going away.
You were searching for eternal rest, you were searching for a peace
which lasts forever, nontemporal. That is what the search is: a
search for the home. It is not a search for any house outside, it
is a search for a state of being where you are at home. You were
not searching for wealth, you were searching for protection against
death; you were searching for a life which no death can destroy"
Osho
PC load letter! What the fuck does that mean?
Your computer is jacking off?
The bar job I had when I was twenty was certainly the one I enjoyed the most, both socially and in pure job satisfaction. That said, it paid shit and almost everyone who stays in it for the long haul drinks way, way too much.
I still do the latter mind, but still I don't complain. You can afford better booze when you're getting twice the cash for updating your twats.
Bar tending != bar owning. Once again, IOZ is guessing what life is like for the non-property owning class and the result is something akin to the 'biting' satire of American Beauty, y'know, where Kevin Spacey followed his heart and became a fry boy at a fast food restaurant.
I feel as if I am wasting my life, sitting here at this desk, doing trivial work and browsing news articles all day. When people tell me that I am lucky for having a job, I want to cry. How can this mundane existence actually be envied?! I do have a roof over my head and health insurance, but my optimism about the work world has been severely damaged. I did not work this hard in order to obtain this outcome.
Yes, Virginia, jobs are tedious and boring. That's why they pay you to do them. Santa Claus and the tooth fairy don't really exist, either.
Bootyclapper -- for reals.
Anyway, even if "suburban overachievers" experience it in a way that leaves other suburban overachievers (ahem) unsympathetic, the disappearance of work in a society that doesn't enable many other ways for adults to acquire their subsistence and connect to one another is nothing to give moral self-improvement lectures at.
What Leonard and Bootyclapper said.
Also: these kids were all of 17 years old when they were told by every authority figure in their lives that they needed to commit immediately to $100K+ in non-dischargeable student debt if they didn't want to end up on the street or in prison.
Arguably, they made the wrong choice (although the numbers don't exactly support IOZ's implicit rosy scenario for non-college graduates). But in any case: what would you recommend for a 22-year-old who went to Harvard and ended up unable to find a job that would pay his student loan interest plus his share of rent in a shared apartment? As Bootyclapper points out, "buy yourself a bar" isn't a great answer.
If you aren't "enable[d] to connect with to [others]" unless you're slotted into a working role, society might be the ultimate cause, but the problem is most definitely you.
What to recommend to the sort of shit bum who slogs through four years of, and then graduates from, Harvard? Go pick vegetables. At piece rate. In Florida. Or blueberries during peak season, in Maine. Or, sweep floors. Or, wait tables. Or any of the literally thousands of sorts of jobs that people who didn't merit accreditation do every day.
"Massive grade inflation means one less standard deviation between myself and those who don't try"
No. Grade inflation compresses the raw scores, but leaves the distribution in terms of standar deviations unaffected. Very, very basic statistics.
What I find most annoying about American so-called overachievers is how little they actually achieve, other than a pimped-out ass-kicking resume.
It's practically standing still now. They've dropped ropes out of the nose of the economy, and they've been taken a hold of down on the field by a number of men. It's starting to rain again; it's—the rain had slacked up a little bit. The back motors of the economy are just holding it just, just enough to keep it from — It burst into flames! It burst into flames, and it's falling, it's crashing! Watch it! Watch it, folks! Get out of the way! Get out of the way!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Morrison_(announcer)
Morrison served in the United States Army Air Forces during World War II, and later became the first news director at WTAE-TV in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
I just wonder how long the but-hurt whining phase will last before entitlement-bound graduates figure out the "economy" don't need 'em pampered and fat anymore.
By the way, I think this goes hand in hand with the sense of betrayal many Obama-voting Democrats now feel. Since Obama did as promised per-election and then some, it was clearly from illusion that they expected to get their testicles fondled instead of another kick in the groin; vainly believing the Government--at least the Democratic wing of it--has a special interest in the middle class suburban good-graded post-graduate much the way most monotheistic religions believe God has a special interest in the welfare of humans.
"To those of you unemployed now, go find an internship. Freelance. Volunteer. Do anything to make connections. If you are still in college and are not trying to get multiple internships before you graduate, you are a moron. Does it suck that you have to work for free? Yeah, it sucks and it isn't fair, but that is the only thing you can do right now. "
Find an internship! I have to smirk at the naivete behind this. When you're willing to work for free, you just set the market for what you're worth. It never occurs to any of these go-getters that the job they hope to gain will be done free by someone else next semester.
As someone doing volunteer & freelance work right now, it had better be something you'd do free anyway or you'll go fucking crazy with disappointment while you wait for any material gain.
Also notable was the "And if they're as smart as they say they are, then they should have the intelligence and the physical dexterity to become an electrician, or a mechanic. Get your skills up and you'd be shocked... shocked at what kind of money you could make." guy, as though onedidn't have to start those trades in HS and the apprentice for a few years and get a few certifications.
It's not like there aren't plenty of unemployed or underemployed electricians and other tradespeople out there right now.
Also, very, very few graduates of even the best electrical engineering programs are in any way qualified to become electricians (even assuming some sort of 6-12 month training program). Jesus, even Tommy on This Old House leaves most of that stuff to the pros.
Lastly, I don't know about you but even this college town has seen cheap eats and bars close down in the last few years. Its becoming harder to find a place that needs somebody to tend bar.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14764357
John Gray writes:
Marx was wrong about communism. Where he was prophetically right was in his grasp of the revolution of capitalism. It's not just capitalism's endemic instability that he understood, though in this regard he was far more perceptive than most economists in his day and ours.
Marx co-authored The Communist Manifesto with Friedrich Engels
More profoundly, Marx understood how capitalism destroys its own social base - the middle-class way of life. The Marxist terminology of bourgeois and proletarian has an archaic ring.
But when he argued that capitalism would plunge the middle classes into something like the precarious existence of the hard-pressed workers of his time, Marx anticipated a change in the way we live that we're only now struggling to cope with.
"to consider that happiness and success are opposites"
What
"In college, I studied Business."
See that's the biggest mistake right there
David Macharelli, you are so right about the interning. If you work for free, ain't no body getting paid for that position.
Behavior and attitudes I find strange--Reminiscing about being a low wage servant because it offered at least some human contact, however alienated, compared to your current white collar boondoggle. Professional workers so disciplined they eagerly endure several years of debt slavery (student loans) usually with a year or two of slave labor (unpaid internship) as a rite of passage into an inherently soul-battering business hierarchy.
You're a disgrace to our family name of Wagstaff, if such a thing is possible. What's all this talk I hear about you fooling around with the college widow? No wonder you can't get out of college. Twelve years in one college! I went to three colleges in twelve years and fooled around with three college widows! When I was your age, I went to bed right after supper. Sometimes I went to bed before supper. Sometimes I went without my supper and didn't go to bed at all! A college widow stood for something in those days. In fact, she stood for plenty.
Teenage angst has paid off well
Now I'm bored and old
what would you recommend for a 22-year-old who went to Harvard and ended up unable to find a job that would pay his student loan interest plus his share of rent in a shared apartment?
I dunno. Blog for Think Progress?
Whenever I read about all the little shits in prestigious private high schools and Ivy League Schools whose biggest ambitions in life apparently include becoming part of the "investor class" and trying to cling to the coattails of the rich and powerful, I always think of the song "Terminal Preppie" by the Dead Kennedys:
"No, I'm not here to learn
I just want to get drunk
And major in business
And be taught how to fuck"
Pfft. Bartending is for PhDs.
crap jobs are the greatest if you can afford to survive off of just one of them. those who maintain two or three crap jobs in order to make ends meet might have something to teach the ivy grads and assorted other professionals (our host included) about "soul-crushing" work.
I'll admit to some anarchist leanings, but I fully support a well-funded and loosely regulated government branch dedicated to investigating, jailing and physically abusing assholes who reveal the endings of currently running movies without so much as a "spoiler alert".
-msw
Hey msw,
"The Help" is about noble blacks having to work for dysfunctional whites.
Hey whoever - you seem confused about the meaning of the phrase "the ending".
Crazy times, CNN has caught up to IOZ
http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/09/07/rushkoff.jobs.obsolete/index.html?hpt=hp_c1
Hey - did you just delete a post of mine?
Now now Zoz - just because you've settled for a mid-level arts admin sinecure doesn't mean strivers can't be happy.
Particularly if they don't have to keep one foot in the demi-monde so thay they can find an inexhaustible supply of new candidates for their proclivities ...
MSW, the strokes/folks ratio is still being hashed out, but if you're watching a Thomas McCarthy movie for the plot twists, ur doin it wrong.
I'm sure you're right. Thank you for picking a stroke for me.
- msw
Thomas McCarthy movie?
Guess what asshole, the mannequin becomes a lady FOR REAL. Fuck you!
Tom McCarthy, of note, a graduate of a university not known for producing directors. Or actors. Or anything but Seahawks. So if you did sink yourself into six figures of debt going to a nice school, there's apparently still hope!
Is there more than one McCarthy? I found the actor who is the guy who directed the not-awful (because it has the world's most underrated actor, ever, in Peter Dinklage) The Station Agent?
Same guy?
Ty Webb: What's wrong with lumber? I own two lumberyards.
Danny Noonan: I notice you don't spend too much time there.
Ty Webb: I'm not quite sure where they are.
Bob
Oh rest assured that whatever their lame first-world complaints, all these mis-employed former pretty princesses and bobthebuilders will soon enough get their ration of real tragedies. Then we'll see how they mewl in the streets. Not a shred of schadenfreude, moi.
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