I'm a hustler

Hustling hard all day

In the interest of padding my minimum wage work week, I’ve been contracted out to my brother-in-law’s catering truck. Specialties include any variety of ways to induce a coronary, from $1.50 to $4.00.

My favorite transaction involves a guy squandering half of an hour’s pay on one energy drink fueling a placebo-effect high. When I wasn’t fading in and out of consciousness in advanced microeconomic theory, I learned that optimum social welfare is achieved by allowing individuals to allocate their own funds, instead of dictating spending through subsidies. Something tells me aggregate social welfare is not maximized when a warehouse full of men is hopped up on Monster and racing toward 5pm.

Who am I to judge? I’m picking up hours anyway I can with a car to support and the lingering hope that I’m going to have to put my savings toward moving expenses in the very near future. And if I need to be fueled by an over-priced energy drink to keep ringing up more of the same, so be it.

TGIM

Cobbling together all of these hours, weekends have become inconsequential to me. They once divided otherwise endless work weeks, signaled impending hangovers, and initiated poor decisions. Now I bum around with my middle aged roommates begging for a family drive or challenging my mom to Bananagrams. I may as well hang it up and head to the retirement home, and I would gladly do so were it not for the absence of the all-important nest egg. All my issues come back to a lack of stable employment…

What’s worse, the weekends render my job hunt useless. What’s the point of depositing an HR email in the inbox Saturday morning, only for my carefully crafted words to be buried by Monday? So I sit and mull restlessly about a lack of prospects and panic until Monday when I can again torture the hiring departments of every Fortune 500 company (and most of those that didn’t even make the list).

It’s not like I require additional rest over the weekend. In fact, I grapple with the other convenience store employees for possession of the vaunted time and a half Sunday shifts. I’m miserable anyway, may as well be miserable at close to $11/hour- that puts a little extra pep in my “would you like a bag?” Plus, the extra hours really sway my productivity-to-nothingness ratio for the better. I’m on the verge of a 40/60 differential. Just weeks ago, the ratio was somewhere around 10/90, with that ten corresponding to trips to get a drink or throw something away.

Leave it to Beaver lied

So many people operate on this unconventional work week that my Leave it to Beaver conception of the “real world” is imploding. Guys at the catering stops are clamoring for burgers at 8am and my closing at the store is the start of some of my customers’ day. Where have I been in the last 23 years that I’ve avoided this nocturnal crowd acknowledging the moon with a sun salutation and traipsing off to work on a Sunday without demanding overtime?

My sister called it- I’m a bubble child. But I’m learning, and while that’s not hedging against my car loan, I can take these examples to the proverbial bank. Probably get better interest than my current savings account, too.

As today is Monday, I will resume my deluge of resume dropping after distributing Monsters to the factory workers of Northern RI.