Summer Jobs
Friday, May 27th, 2005Lileks has a great column up about terrible summer jobs. I liked the whole thing, but this excerpt especially:
From Fred, a taciturn description:
Concrete block plant. Small. Owned by alcoholic. No stacking machinery, just me and three other low-end laborers, often alcoholic. too.Learned: I could stack 70 tons of concrete blocks every day for minimum wage — and enjoy it. I might give up my current 52-year-old life, money, property for that health and strength again.
That’s the attitude. On one hand, there is no more mindless job: moving concrete blocks from one place to another. On the other hand, you strip your life down to the essence. Who am I? I am the man who moves the blocks. Someone has to. There’s more elemental satisfaction in moving 70 tons with your own sinews than moving $700,000 from one mutual fund to another; the latter is incorporeal, a financial fiction to which we all subscribe. The former is literally concrete: The blocks were there. Now they are here.This is why I’m glad I was a waiter in college: I did something that was actually useful, as opposed to flapping my gums in a newspaper. There’s no column next Sunday? You’ll live. But the waiter disappears, and your Eggs Benedict cool on the counter, ignored, undelivered. The essence of the economy, of human labor, of our entire mortal existence, consists of moving stuff from here to there, and it’s good to learn this early on. If nothing else, it gives you respect for those who keep doing it after you’ve danced off to some soft-handed profession.
On the other hand, we had a problem with refrigeration at the restaurant, and I cannot tell you how many people got the 24-hour Egg Flu after eating our Hollandaise sauce. So if you spent your summers reading books in med school, that’s good, too.
