What I wish I could use as my resume

1. 1. Babysitter, 12
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I always used to feel importantly uncomfortable when I would babysit for money. I was never confident enough in my ability to get children to listen to me, especially not about the important things like cleaning up their messes and going to bed on time. When I was twelve, and the world I barely knew loomed big around me, I wasn’t sure how to handle a six-year-old who didn’t feel self-conscious like I did, who questioned why I never wore my hair out of a ponytail, who writhed naturally when dancing, who chose to sneer at dinner in favor of dessert. In my several years of babysitting, I don’t think I really became comfortable with it until, at 21, I had a gig doing it a few days a week for my four younger cousins in Maryland. There’s something to be said about transitioning from a phase of being afraid of the future ahead of children younger than you to feeling grateful for having surpassed their young and vulnerable age in the first place.


2. Pool lifeguard, 15.

I got the job because my friend worked there, and because the pool was part of the health and fitness club whose swim team I belonged to, and because I had already passed the lifeguarding and CPR tests. I switched through three different pools, eventually landing on a tiny one hidden behind a wall of trees and a tall chain-link fence at an apartment complex near my house. It was down the street from Chick fil A, which I got several times a week, and though I know there must have been days when the pool was filled with screams and giggles and adults sunbathing in the speckled sunlight under the trees, I mostly remember the days when it was empty, and I was alone, both blissfully and angrily. Sometimes I listened to TedTalk podcasts, and sometimes I did Kayla workouts in the rain, and there was that one wonderful day when it was sunny and hot and I floated alone in the crystal blue pool water and finished Jeannette Walls’s The Glass Castle all in one sitting. 

But there were also days when my back hurt from sitting in the plastic wicker lifeguard chair, and the days when I had to sweep for hours to get all the leaves off the deck, and the day that a spider with eggs on its back fell off of my broom and onto my shoulder. At my lifeguarding job, I was able to successfully take two online classes without really getting disturbed, and I was able to go for runs with my cousin after work and practice handstands on the sun-warmed concrete. I felt lonely, and independent, and my weekends were relegated to Tuesdays and Wednesdays. I didn’t make enough money. I learned to carry large and heavy wood-based beach umbrellas, and understood the importance of sunscreen, and met people from my middle-class suburban town who lived in apartments and didn’t fit in. I loved it and hated it. It’s strange, the way revisiting a job in your memory — despite the fact that you swore to leave it behind forever — can make you wonder if you were exaggerating your misery in the first place. On my 21st birthday, I sat alone at my pool, posted a picture of someone else’s big puffy balloons, and felt glad that no one was around to make me feel pressured to drink.


3. Loyola University resident hall desk assistant, 19

One night in college, I got stuck with the 12am-4am shift at my desk assistant job. Since the resident halls were required to be monitored 24 hours a day, there were always graveyard shifts like that one that were perpetually up for grabs. My best friend and I got drunk off of Bud Light Raz-ber-Ritas, and I took a cup of one to my shift at the desk. It was fun at first, we felt like we were saying “fuck the system” and every person who slunk past me as they swiped their student card to open the door was beneath me, separated from a secret that only I was part of. But as the hours wore on and my buzz wore off, not even Survivor could keep me awake. I fell asleep for minutes at a time and swore never to take one of those shifts again.

What I remember most about working as a desk assistant was the way I started a habit of getting my homework done early, and how as the hours wore on, I read Stephen King’s 11/22/63 with a delight I had forgotten was possible with books that long. I remember telling people, as they questioned the huge, daunting, 849-page beast, that reading this book felt like watching TV, and how it was the only thing I looked forward to about work.


4. Writing Center tutor, 20

I only officially became a tutor in the Writing Center at my university in my senior year of college. This is because you had to take a semester-long course before you could actually work for money, and because I have a propensity to put things off. I liked the job, or, rather, I felt extremely qualified to perform it. Working at the Writing Center made me feel a part of and apart from my school, all at once. Our department was important, and always on the precipice of expanding, but never quite getting there. I had countless appointments with students who were only there because a professor had offered them extra credit points on an assignment to show up. I never personally had anyone who was anything but polite, but one of my friends came into class one day and almost burst into tears for the way a student had addressed her.

Working in the Writing Center didn’t technically qualify as working in the service industry, but there was always a clear distinction between myself and the students whose papers I reviewed. Aside from a select few occasions in which the student and I reached an “aha” moment simultaneously, suddenly putting the pieces of their fragmented essay together after we had spent so long unearthing them, my job at the Writing Center felt like the clear delivery of a service. The students I tutored took me only as seriously as they took the idea that being able to write a good essay would be useful in life after college.

A few times, while watching my dog at college when my mom was out of town, I brought him to my shifts at the Writing Center. Aside from when none of my appointments showed up and I got paid to read or do my homework, that was probably my favorite part about working there. On a particularly busy day for me, I asked one of my friends if he could take my dog for a walk, as he was getting a little antsy and disturbing my tutoring. A few minutes later, one of my roommates texted me: instead of taking my dog outside, my friend had led him confidently through the Starbucks on campus.


5. Intern, Weinberg Housing and Resource Center (WHRC), 21

As a Sociology major, you’re supposed to be really well aligned to work with nonprofits. Weinberg Housing and Resource Center is a homeless shelter, the biggest one in Baltimore. Even on the days when all I got to do was enter data and sort through the well-meaning donations of mini bottles of shampoo and conditioner, I liked to remind myself of that. My organization didn’t turn people away based on criminal histories, let them keep beds as long as they needed to, was a place that provided job training and employment references and several days out of the year where you could sign up to receive an ID card from an MVA representative team. Did you know that they make ID cards that aren’t driver’s licenses? I didn’t.

The thing though that no one tells you about nonprofit work is that most of the essential work that has to be done (and tends to go undone) is kind of boring. There is a lot of paperwork, and data entry, and sorting. When I worked at WHRC, most of my days made me feel like I was just another cog in a disordered machine. I spent a lot of time dragging scanned files from one network folder to the next one, trying to understand the system created by the person before me, while also trying to come up with a more organized file management system of my own. I never finished. Instead, I began and didn’t end several different tasks, and the office I shared with the Volunteer Manager was constantly cluttered with donated clothes, old folders, and bottles of hand sanitizer we had received but could never actually distribute to the residents. Sometimes I would glance into the offices of the case managers, and picture myself as one of the people behind the desk. It felt motivating to picture myself listening to stories from the real people of Baltimore we were sheltering off the streets, to imagine being in charge of taking on their cases and making a real difference in their lives. I took the internship because I wanted to enter into the social justice side of the nonprofit world — I loved being able to talk to the residents even though it was uncomfortable when sometimes they would nod off in the middle of talking (WHRC doesn’t require its residents to go through a mandatory period of sobriety before receiving a bed). But sometimes I felt like my time was being wasted, and so I started to get discouraged. I guess maybe it was a little naive to assume that as an intern I would be able to do whatever I wanted, and could therefore eliminate my experience with administrative tasks like copying donation logs from the handwritten sign-in sheet into a database. I also guess my growing frustration can be attributed to my own easily discouraged nature and my adverseness toward administrative tasks.

The best days at WHRC were the ones where I got to eat donuts and pretzels and drink juice with the residents at their monthly VRM (Volunteer Resident Monitor — people living in the shelter and volunteering to help clean/do laundry/etc.) awards. Or the ones where I got to interview residents to become VRMs, or the ones where I got a brief minute to talk to residents, or the one day when I realized that the security guards at the door knew me and no longer asked me to go through the metal detector on my way in to work. It felt awkward leaving after only one semester; by the end of April I already knew I wouldn’t be coming back, and couldn’t afford to do the one year of unpaid service they wanted me for. My internship took up a lot of my time, and made it difficult to save any money at all. In the end, I went back to babysitting for the summer.


6. Server, 22

I moved to California a month before my birthday. I brought $700, one suitcase, and the vague idea that I would get a job pouring wine at a vineyard in Napa, taking things easy for a while as I figured myself out on the West Coast. I had to get a job almost immediately. It was immature of me to think that I could pay for anything in San Francisco for very long with a perpetually decreasing stash of $700. I got my first serving job after handing my resume to a bartender at a bar/restaurant conveniently located right behind a bus stop. The owner didn’t mind that I didn’t have any experience, he was more concerned with the idea that I was sweet, and friendly, and willing to learn. i got my second serving job much in the same way — I walked into an open interview at a bar in a San Francisco neighborhood, and, after expressing my desire to meet people and get involved in the service industry, they hired me.

At first, being a server made me feel like I had been let in on a big secret. I didn’t have to pay for food in the kitchen, made friends with the bartenders, and learned how annoying it is when people ask to change things on the menu. One time a girl asked me for a breakfast burrito (one of my bars sold brunch), but told me she was vegan, and so she didn’t want any meat, cheese, egg, or other animal products on it. I accidentally forgot to order it without egg. She sent it back.
Working in the service industry though, can quickly turn into something that feels like working for mere survival, and not much else. I made friends who worked double shifts most days out of the week, made the mistake of planning trips with money I hadn’t earned yet, and when my first restaurant closed down, the owner didn’t bother to call me about the new bar he was opening across town. Working as a server made me feel both replaceable and valuable at the same time. Even now, months of experience in the industry later, I still feel that way.

As a server, one time a guy pulled me to the side and told me that he wasn’t really a “leggings” guy, but that I had changed his mind. One time a guy tried to take a shot of Jameson and threw up on the table. At one point, one of my bosses took away one of my regular shifts because I wasn’t being friendly enough to the customers. One time a guy left his number on a credit card receipt, and signed it “Oregon Dad” to match the shirt he had been wearing. I’ve been pressured by customers to take shots with them, have been asked if someone can take my picture, have sometimes felt so frustrated I’ve wanted to cry. The worst is when people treat you like you’re stupid. Like the total on the bill is no one’s fault but yours. Like they don’t have to follow restaurant policies because they’re a regular, and if you don’t give them what they want they can get past you anyway. As a server, people touch you when you don’t want them to. They say things about you that you don’t want them to, and unlike when you’re a bartender, they have a clear understanding that you are there to serve them, and they owe you nothing. They don’t get out of your way when you’re carrying hot plates, or a tray full of drinks, and sometimes you get bumped into, but it’s still your fault if you spill anything. When you rely on a tip income for a living, you don’t get the choice to mirror your reaction to how you are actually feeling. Jobs are a lot less fun when every shift is dependent on what other people decide they’re willing to give to you.

Working in the service industry, by far my biggest pet peeve is when people go out to eat and can’t afford it, and they choose instead to make up for that difference by not giving a tip. Let me explain a little better: the other day I served a woman who paid her bill by giving half of it in cash, and then told me to put the rest on the card. When her card was declined, she rustled up some cash to cover the rest of the bill — most of that cash coming from what she had already set aside to be for gratuity. In the end, she tipped me about a dollar on a tab that had been $50.

In those situations, a customer is doing something like that feels, from my perspective, like a slap in the face. I’m lucky enough to live in a place where I make full minimum wage, and tips are an addition to that income. Not every person in the service industry around the US has that luxury. I’m unlucky enough to live in a place where the cost of living is exponentially high, and so while working as a server full-time, I still relied heavily on income from tips to make a living. To take away from a tip in order to make up the difference in your bill is understandable, not paying a bill at a restaurant results in clear consequences. But by taking away a server’s tip, you highlight the power structure of the service industry — a server only makes what you decide to give them, regardless of how they performed their job. As a person who has relied on a serving job to pay my rent, I understand the unique hurt of giving my all and getting nothing in return.

I don’t work any of these jobs full-time anymore. Maybe one day I will again, maybe I won’t. I think there’s still a lot out there that I don’t know yet.