"Everyone's a whore, we just sell different parts of ourselves"
I've seen this quote a few times in my life. I like it, and it is true. My first job was working with my uncle, roofing. Great job to help one become a man. What more to remove the last bits of childish youth than to hang out in 100+ degree weather outside, with men who would rather be holding beer cans than hammers ferrying 80 pound bags of shingles on improvised ladders? This has to be one of the toughest jobs that a few miserable souls still get to do today. All day long on the hottest part of the house, bent over with a hammer in hand, tacking sheet after sheet. Best case scenario, you don't fall, back is a little sore, and you get paid your minimum wage, $5 an hour at the time, 1989 and my uncle liked me. Worst case, you might fall and die.
I had jobs while in school, tutored college algebra (piece of cake, act like a junior professor teaching what you just learned), and driving the commuter bus (basically stay awake). My next job after I had gotten my fancy degree from UT was working in a warehouse. That was another manual labor job, again, with men who love their beer. This job was crazy serious and a little dangerous at times. I still remember unloading a flat bed truck with 20 pallets of coils of wire, like the stuff on the telephone poles. The flatbed was old, as it sounds just flat and open, pallets sit out in the open. there were welts and rusted out holes on the flatbed and it was drizzling to raining, depending on how would prefer, but wet nonetheless. At one point, I was headed back to get one of the last pallets and I felt the whole forklift slide under me. All I thought was "fuck!" I didn't fall off, but the story was still in my mind, that I had replaced a guy who had made one of the forklifts take a nosedive out of the warehouse. Then there was the time the foreman asked me to help him move a baby grand piano. He seemed confidant, we do it all the time, quit being a girl about it. Thing had to weigh over 600 pounds and shape was just weird. I remember it going up for a second, then my mind said Nope! I couldn't wrap my head around the idea of lifting it and going anywhere.
Eventually I landed in something resembling the field of study I took, chemistry. Today, I work in a lab filled with fancy tools and I get paid to run these tools. A lot of hand eye coordination stuff, making decisions of how far to take a sample, how to approach a given sample to give the customer the data they need.
All these jobs however different, still call on the person doing them to sacrifice some of themselves to complete the tasks. I could very easily have fallen from a house, one of my uncles did, at one point, broke a leg. I too could have fallen out of the warehouse in a forklift, those wheels have no traction and you are always running late, so there is always urgency to push. My current job does not have physical dangers, but I am in a lab, surrounded by cylinders of various poisonous gasses, running through manmade equipment that could fail at any moment. But we do what we do, mostly to chase that dollar. I consider myself lucky, and I feel that these very different jobs have taught me to respect the people that do them. When I see that small sized man working on all these apartments, knowing he is probably illegal, I don't think "goddammit, he's taking our jobs", I just think please don't fall, that job sucks, thank you for doing it well enough.
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