Life's Little Injustices (Take VIII): One Foot Out The Door (Always, Always)

<i.>

If you're stuck in this particular movie, you know the script already. On this sweltering summer day, The Squawker and I find ourselves marooned in a never-ending line, in some big box store that prides itself on its massive nature -- even short walks through these places feel like traipsing on the U.S.S. Saratoga -- but on this day, the C-word (choice) that America cherishes seems to have run aground. We've come to get a couple of exotic commodities -- like hearing aid batteries -- that we haven't found at the last couple stores. That makes them exotic.

Ahead of us, a mom who's filled her shopping cart to the rafters -- mostly with the usual ghastly processed foods that these places tout in their TV adverts -- unloads her items, one by one, onto the now-silent conveyer belt. She doesn't seem in any particular hurry.

Neither is the cashier. Aside from the odd sidebar conversation with this customer -- and another mom in front of us, leaning on her half-filled art  -- the cashier makes no attempt to engage anyone. She just stares blankly at the register, going about her task with a grim, mechanical air, fixating on the numbers and decimal points that she's tapping out.

Minutes tick by, though you'd never know how many, since clocks are an equally exotic commodity in these places. Do they really want you to know how much time you're stuck wasting? (For further reference, see the above graphic.)

Finally, we get our turn at bat. When I ask the cashier, "What took so long?", she just sighs. It's the management, she explains. Seems that this store's long-standing practice of docking cashiers for minor violations has ratcheted up. If you get six points in your first 90 days, you're in deep you-know-what.  "Do they let you work them off?" I ask.

"Six months," the cashier responds. "They're losing people here left and right. But I ain't waiting on them that long. I've already got two job offers this week, and once I figure out my schedule, I'm out of here. I can't take it anymore."

Almost on cue, a manager walks briskly over and starts chewing out the door for some alleged infraction or other, just as Squawker and I are bagging up our stuff. We know what's going on well enough not to ask...even if the cashier already has one foot out the door.

<ii.>

Back home a day or so later, I'm treated to a curious sight. It's not the moving truck that arouses the attention of Squawker  and myself. It's the tenant, a now-former charter school principal, whom I've met at  several events. This time, however, he's not wearing his suit and tie, but shorts and a T-shirt.

At first, I think he's helping someone else move on his day off. That's a common enough scenario here, as more and more people are getting priced out of our fair town. "Hey, how's work going?" I ask.

The principal exhales. "I had some discipline problems with some kids in my class. When I tried to tell them how they were supposed to behave, some parents complained." From the way his brow furrows, I guess the oncoming punchline, and I'm not wrong. I wish I was.

"I got called into the school leader's office a couple of days later. (That's what charters call their particular pyramid toppers, as opposed to superintendents.) 'Based on what I've heard,' the leader says, 'you can either resign, or you can be fired,'" the principal recalls. "I took the first option."

"What happens now, then?"

"We're moving to Saginaw," the principal explains. 

"Never been there," I respond. "What's over here?"

"Nothing, just family. I'm going to stay with them for awhile." 

I can hear how the rest of the conversation might go, in his head, the unspoken part: I'm back in Mom and Dad's nest for the first time, in ages. We'll see how that feels after a few weeks, until if (or when) I get the next chapter figured out. If I figure it out.

"Gee, that's too bad," I offer. "Well, good luck." 

As lame as my response sounds, I can't think of anything else to say to this person who's on his way to becoming just another ghost in my memory bank. However, it fits the script that's been written especially for this occasion. Just like an all occasion greeting card, it serves a purpose.

A week later, on another sweltering Saturday afternoon,  I watch the principal (plus his wife and kids) make the usual endless multiple trips to fill the truck with their life story. As you can guess, they look distracted and preoccupied, so I don't try to talk to them.

I wake up Sunday afternoon, having pulled another all-nighter. I go outside to take out the trash, and notice a blank space where the moving truck stood all day. They're gone, that's all she wrote. In work, and in life, we're just step away from going out the door...always, always. --The Reckoner

Just Get a Job!

This one made me laugh, but there is sad truth in it---The Squawker

All Grown Up and Dependent on Parents

Why Are So Many Adults Moving Back in With Their Parents?
When I was 21, I had to move back home for a year, unable to make ends meet, doing student teaching which took up seven to eight hours of my day and didn't pay a dime...plus my side job, which actually gave me a day that went from 7:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. [an insane schedule, by any standard] just didn't pay enough. I ended up moving home, I had to have some spending money, so the insane schedule had no letup, but I got to eat and had a room to sleep in. I think about young people today, and wonder, "How on earth are they going to make it? "

My health was not helped via lack of medical insurance -- not to mention hours and hours of part-time, pieced-together jobs -- but I managed (even with my college degree) to pick up a few jobs that paid in the $10-14 dollar per hour range...keep in mind, this was the early 90s...and at least I wasn't just stuck with minimum wage. I could get the rented room, plus stacks of milk crates and keep an old car going most of the time. What are today's young people to do now, when prices are higher, and wages really have not gone up much?

I have relatives in their mid-20s who still live at home and stuck with a life that hasn't really begun, due to lack of meaningful employment.  In their case this situation has meant no dating, few hobbies and being stuck in a small room with other unemployed twentysomething siblings.  One has a college degree but has not found a job to go with it. The article is right, in that the education system does not prepare them for the real world. I wasn't told how hard it was to make a living and majored in education -- right before a wave of layoffs that began happening, just as I came out of college in the 1990s.  As they say..."Timing is everything." --The Squawker

Peanut butter, anyone? Surely that graphic makes you hungry. Never could stand the stuff, myself, because it seemed like such a College Student Cliche 101-type of thing...but I digress.

Reading the Squawker's entry on this subject reminds me of a saying that my father often brought up whenever anything college-related crossed the TV screen: "The trouble with this place here is that everybody graduates." 

I'd crack up, because a) it meant that I wouldn't be on the receiving end of dear old Dad's trademark sarcasm, and b) it wasn't hard to see the truth of that expression, even during the '90s, when all those nasty old bubble markets seemed eons way.

Ironically, my problem differed from most of my peers -- I found a job in my degreed field (journalism) without a lot of difficulty, but it didn't pay enough to support my own place, let alone all the other expenses that I was carrying at the time (car payment, college loans, credit cards).

Even then, however, it wasn't hard to see the storm clouds gathering.  Eventually, I quit my newspaper job and moved to Chicago, where I wasn't able to find any journalism-related day gigs...so I worked in an office, and wrote at night. 

However, I was too poor to afford a computer -- that wouldn't become a given until the late '90s, when I made it back to Michigan -- so I'd have to trek over from Rogers Park to a friend's house in the middle of the city.  We'd graduated from the same college, so it was OK to use his computer, as long as I wrapped up by 10 or 11 p.m.

My friend lived with four or five other people, who were all either recent graduates or future graduate school customers. None of them owned a car, nor other presumed symbols of the hipster good life that were already being touted on such megahit sitcoms as "Friends."

Sure, my friend and his pals were skinny, white and wisecracking, but that's as far as the similarities to the world of "Friends" went. I don't remember any designer hairdos or clothes among this crowd.  As far as I could tell, nobody ate out, and 90 percent of the meals were vegetarian...as much out of budget, I suspect, as conviction.

Sometimes, you only need to look around, and your eyes will latch onto a symbol that confirms your true status in a flash.  At my first paper, I only had to glance across the parking lot, where the general manager -- who often lectured the rest of us lot on the gospel of businesses operating "lean and mean" -- drove an enormous, battleship-sized SUV that dwarfed just about everybody else's ride.

For my friend and his housemates, you could sum up their status through the stacks and stacks of used books and CDs they'd acquired during their travels -- the symbols of a media consumer's life that became positively quaint once the Internet era took hold for good.

I'm still in touch with my friend, but have no idea what happened to anybody else in that house, or if they found anything resembling their chosen career specialty. But nobody was paying much attention, anyhow.  And if you doubted what your gut told you, well, there was always the big screen for some temporary relief, sending up the twentysomething "slacker" stereotype in movies like Reality Bites...

...so nobody felt particularly compelled to pay any attention.  These days, however, the joke doesn't seem so funny anywhere, when an estimated one in three jobs doesn't need a college degree (see the link below)...only nobody's making a movie about that deal. --The Reckoner

Links To Go:
The Wall Street Journal: Do Too Many Young People Go To College?