"Bus Cleaner"

"The next piece of business is to comb through the want ads and find a job. I rule out various occupations for one reason or another: hotel front-desk clerk, for example, which to my surprise is regarded as unskilled and pays only $6 or $7 an hour, gets eliminated because it involves standing in one spot for eight hours a day. Waitressing is also something I'd like to avoid, because I remember it leaving me bone-tired when I was eighteen, and I'm decades of varicosities and back pain beyond that now. Telemarketing, one of the first refuges of the suddenly indigent, can be dismissed on grounds of personality." (Ehrenreich 13)

I remember reading this passage over the summer for the summer reading assignment. After reading these few lines, I wanted to throw the book out a window. I guess it was because of the situation I was caught in while reading about Barbara's situation. Her pickiness about what job she wanted to apply for probably irritated me because I had spent the marjority of my summer on the floors of charter buses and school buses scrubbing them with a tooth brush. Thats right, a toothbrush.

All the jobs Barbara had passed over in the above passage had been ones I would have loved to have last summer. Because of my own situation, I neglected the fact that Barbara's age and health had a great deal to due with her choices, but still her option to look over these jobs doesn't match up for reality. She was able to look over these jobs because even if she failed to get hired anywhere else she chose, she still had her own life and occupation to return to. Others who are in need of work don't have the choice to pass over these kinds of jobs; they have to take whatever they can get.

I would have loved to have had a waitressing job that made me "bone-tired" or a hotel-desk clerk that required me to stand in the same spot for eight hours. Instead, I scrubbed and work on buses my whole summer. I cleaned up messes left behind bus loads of travellers who I know never thought about the person who would have to clean the bus once they were done sticking their gum to the seats and smashing potatoe chips all over the floor.  And my favorite part of the job was always have to dump out the bathroom in the gutter. It was especially enjoyable after the bus had just been taken on a very long trip and everything that was left behind in the bathroom failed to completely make it into the gutter and instead splashed all over me. Waitressing definately would have appeared as a wonderful option to me had it existed. But, unlike Barbara, I didn't have a choice. I had to take what I could get and make the best of it. At least from now on, hopefully any job I try to tackle, even on its worse days, will not seem so bad as long as I recall my bus cleaning days.