Opinion
Part-time jobs, classes difficult for some students to balance
November 8, 2012
Guess what? I’m going to talk about the elections.
Briefly.
I hope you all voted.
This election, more than anything, was about jobs. I hate jobs.
That’s not to say I’m lazy (I am), but I just hate manual labor.
See, I told you I would be brief about the elections: already done.
There’s a majority of students that I take classes with that have multiple part-time or full-time jobs, along with a full 12 credits of coursework.
Frankly, I don’t know how they do it.
They are incredibly determined people.
Heck, I find it hard to even manually write this weekly column and submit it on time.
Example: I forgot to submit last week’s article by the deadline.
For much of last Friday, I traversed the University grounds wondering why I had been censored from the newspaper.
I actually believed some nagging complainer had finally whined enough to get me kicked off the paper.
I’m pretty sure that some people would have liked the column I had written: it had to do with Halloween and scaring my grandmother so bad her dentures would fall out.
The article had also discussed the possibilities of handing out laxative candies to random trick-or-treaters, but I determined it wouldn’t be right for me to give another job to a sleep-deprived parent (they don’t deserve that kind of punishment).
I tried holding down a part-time job while taking a full semester’s worth of credits.
I ended up spending a whole year in the hospital.
It was fun.
The hospital wasn’t all that bad. The best part of being there was receiving sponge baths by nurses.
Sponge baths are good; nurses are better.
Even the nurses, I suspect, dislike their jobs at times.
I know if I was a nurse and I had a patient that enjoyed getting sponge baths, I would despise my job on occasion.
This past summer I worked for a telemarketing company which sold overpriced vacuum cleaners to the richie-rich people.
Thankfully, I only worked there three days. The vacuums cost a total of $2,000.
I don’t know about you, but I would never spend $2,000 on a vacuum cleaner.
I would spend that on a truckload of Fig Newtons, but never on a vacuum cleaner.
Anyway, I began to reminisce over the multitude of calls I made while employed there.
I made over 1,500 calls within three days; many of them were hang-ups.
Being that it was a job, I hated every moment of it.
As I’ve said, almost every call was a hang-up.
However, there is one call that stands out over all the rest. I made the call from the ‘O’ section of the River Falls phone directory.
A gritty voice answered the phone, “Yeah, who is this?”
I gave the spiel, “Hi sir, I’m from the “Overpriced-Piece of Crap Vacuum Dealer,” in Hudson, and our company is advertising in your area.
We send a representative to your home and give a free shampooing to any carpet in your home.”
“I have wood flooring,” said the grumpy man.
“Well sir, we would be willing to do a piece of furniture.”
“There’s plastic over my furniture.”
“Sir, is there anything that we could shampoo for you? We’d be more than willing to come out and shampoo anything that you had in mind.”
What came next, I’m still not completely sure if the man was serious or fed-up with my salesmanship, he said to me, “Well, I’m pretty hairy. Could you come and shampoo my body?”
I hung up.
This week, I really want to give a shout-out to all those people fed-up with their jobs.
I would also like to take this opportunity to apologize if I called you while I worked as a telemarketer this summer.
Anyone who can persevere through the agony of a full-time/part-time job is super-man/woman to me.
More power to them.
I could go for some Fig Newton’s.
Tyler Smith is a student at UW-River Falls.