Work

Not to long ago, I had a conversation with my current English Teacher about people working jobs that they hate. He told me a story about workers at a Ford Plant in Detroit drinking alcohol between shifts just to pass the day. A combination of the menial labor required and the time consuming restraints the job placed on them caused them to booze away what little money they made. This was a repetitive cycle that almost every factory worker engaged in.
Go To Work. Leave Work with a staggeringly small paycheck. Booze what little money was made away.
What a painful cycle to endure. And this isn't a cycle that any of these men could break at any time based on the fact that they had an oppurtunity for upward mobility. No. These were men who were helplessly confined to the realms of the Ford Factory.
The booze, as well as drugs, were the only things that helped these men get from one day to the next. With each day becoming increasingly painful to bear through. It made me sad to realize that men worked their lives away to satisfy no greater purpose in living other than to attach one bolt to one screw head. And this person is surrounded by other people who hate their lives just as much as he does.
         Two weeks ago I was bussing tables at my place of work. For the previous four months I had spent every Friday and Saturday night in the confines of the workplace. Either bussing tables, but more likely, cleaning dishes. Dish Duty is one of the worst things imagineable. Being relegated to an endless stack of trays, cups, cooking utensils. All usually coated with a thick cheesy layer, some form of ketchup, or littered with some other nasty shit you don't want to touch. This is the type of work which will make a man question his sanity.
But the realization I came to three weeks ago was that I was just as unhappy as those men who worked the factories in Detroit. Although their work was much more strenuous, I still experienced the dulling lifelessness that the restaruant business exudes upon its employees. I felt trapped; confined to a never ending cycle of cleaning up after other people and struggling to see the good in each day. Waking up each morning became increasingly painful because I knew I would spent the majority of the night doing some menial task that would suck the life out of me.
My English teacher said "Working can suck the life out of you if you let it."
Well, it did. And I tried to resist it, and although it was a gradual process, I left that place feeling a bit more and more robotic with each passing night. Emotions began to fade as connections with previous friends wanned because of a loss of contact based. That's what the resteraunt business wants their employees to be; Robots. Droids which fulfill one mission. The more robotic an employee is, the better.
 Two nights ago, I came home feeling particularly robotic after a ten long hour shift of non-stop dishwashing. During the last hour of the dishwasing, I began to cry hystrically from laughing. The laughing probably spawned from my realization that I had become the droid that I had promised myself I wouldn't become. But the crying came for a different reason. It was the fact that I had sacrificed a creed that I had so strongly based my life off of. Never Compromise Character. My character had been compromised that night, as well as for the previous four months. And I'm not against working, but having my soul devoured to the lifeless demon that the Restaraunt Business is is not how I imagine myself living.
During this scene of hysterics, I exclaimed ''There is No God."
One of the cooks, after overhearing me replied with "Not back here there isn't"
And at that point, I realized that he was a man who was not living a life of proportions he had imagined at one point living. He was a man much like those that worked at the Ford Factory in Detroit. Living a life of meaningless proportions.
Maybe that's why I was crying. I experienced the 'Real World' for what it really was and realized that at that point I had lost all contact with my childhood innocence. Going to college doesn't equal success. Not everyone is successful. In fact, a large majority of people would trade their current lives just to experience something else. Something that might hold the false promise of fullfillment.
After coming home from that shift, I felt desecrated. I'm not exactly sure what that word even means, but it describes perfectly how I felt in that moment. I felt confined to working a job that had fulfilled nothing. A job that described what I would be for the rest of my life. A job that limited me to being nothing more than a table cleaner and a dish washer. This realization led me into a great depressive slump.
A show I watched when I was young (say fourth and fifth grade) was 'Boy Meets World.' The particular episode I decided to watch after I got off of work dealt with the father feeling as if his life in the Grocery Store never meant anything. He felt as if he had never accomplished anything he set out to do because he had been limited by the confines of the store he began working at twenty-year previously. After crying on his wifes shoulder and admitting that he felt "the job described who he was as a person" his wife responded with;
"A job doesn't describe who you are. It only makes up a very small part of what you are as a person. It doesn't limit you to being something, you only limit yourself by believing that you are nothing more than your job."
This struck me so powerfully after hearing it.
Tonight, I walked out of work a free man. An unemployed man, but a free man.