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“What’s your availability?”
“I can work any shifts right now. But I’m starting school in the fall, so I’ll need to work around that.”
He nods, his hair-sprayed bangs bouncing up and down. “We have lots of students working here. It’s a good fit.”
“Perfect.”
He brings me into the office to schedule my training dates and fill out my tax information.
“Can I see your driver’s license and social security card?” he asks. I hand them to him, along with my permanent resident card, which he’ll need for the paperwork.
“Oh! You’re,” he looks at the card, “Canadian!”
I nod.
He recovers from his surprise and carries on, photocopying my cards and handing them back to me one by one. “Let’s have you come in to start training tomorrow,” he says. “Be here at nine.”
“I will. Thanks.” This’ll be a fine place to work. Not the greatest, but fine. It’s not my main focus now anyway. It’s just a part-time gig to help pay the bills and give us some spending money above and beyond my student loans, when they come in.
I go back to the apartment and tell Scott about the restaurant and how accommodating they’ll be when I start school.
“That’s great for you,” he says. “I didn’t find anything.”
“Any prospects? Anything look good?”
“There’s quite a few jobs in the paper,” he says, “but they want a degree or experience I don’t have.”
“Why don’t you go back to school with me?” I suggest. “That’d be fun.”
“For what?”
“Well, you already have a degree, so it probably wouldn’t take much to get another one that you’re more interested in.”
“I don’t know what I’m interested in, though. There isn’t some great job out there that I want to work toward. No job sounds great or enjoyable to me. It’s work. That’s why they call it work.”
He’s decided that for him, jobs are just a price he has to pay for living in modern society. In exchange for a roof over his head and food to eat, he has to sacrifice forty hours of his life every week to “the man.” And that’s fine, he says. He doesn’t expect to like what he does. He just wants to find something tolerable, put in his time, and focus his attention on life outside of work.
But it’s not easy to find a “tolerable” job. He says telemarketing is out of the question, restaurants are too stressful, and hotel front desk positions are all overnight shifts. After three weeks of interviews and two failed attempts at starting a new job, I catch him looking in the Law Enforcement section of the classifieds.
“Why don’t you find something different?” I ask. “You don’t want to be in that field, do you?”
“It’s the only thing I’m qualified for.”
So he interviews for a loss prevention officer position at a box store, and he gets it on the spot. At least he doesn’t have to wear a uniform, he says. He can wear plain clothes so that he looks like a shopper. His job is to profile people: determine from appearance who might likely shoplift, then follow them around, careful not to get caught watching them. If he sees someone conceal something and then walk out the door without paying, his job is to stop them and ask them to come back inside. He can’t force them, but they always cooperate because they assume he has more authority than he does.
He does the job. He’s good at it. But he doesn’t want to do it. He doesn’t want to profile people or follow them around, spying on them, and then confront them. He doesn’t want to make teenage girls cry when he busts them stealing make-up, and he doesn’t want to call the police and have them arrested for it. I try to convince him to find something else. He’s not even making good money, so why do something he hates? But he’s familiar with this work, and he’s able to do it. That compels him to stay.
An unanticipated side-effect of his job is that after a couple weeks of spending eight hours a day walking through the aisles and aisles of stuff, Scott starts to notice all the things we don’t have. He decides that we need a new computer because his old one from college is just too slow to play any of the new games that are coming out. So he applies for credit and charges one, complete with monitor, speakers, and sound card. He also charges a computer desk to go along with it, a comfortable computer chair, and computer games. He’s thrilled. “This is totally worth it,” he calls from under the desk as he connects wires.
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