The World's Worst Employee

There comes the sad day in everyone’s life where we find out that our parents really don’t care about us, and make us get the two most dreaded words a high schooler has to say, a job.

For the first part of our existence, we are born to believe that this world is perfect. We can have whatever we want, eat whatever we want, and do whatever we want. Our minds are trained to think that this world we live in is almost as beautiful as Scarlett Johansson’s body. Sadly, it’s not.

To be completely honest, this world sucks. We have way too many fat people, way too many people that smoke cigarettes, and way too many people that don’t know how to live life sukka free; this is only the beginning of our problems.

I didn’t understand this because I live in an upper-middle class suburb where all of the world’s problems are bordered by white-fences, and the Starbucks is the “social spot” for 6^th graders. Hell, the McDonalds closes at 10pm. If that doesn’t paint the picture in your head…than I don’t think this blog is for you.

For the first 17 years of my life, I had been given everything I could’ve wanted: a great home, a great life, a great education, and a great future in my footsteps. I was living the high life that most 17 year olds would dream to have.

The summer going into my senior year, my parents finally realized that it was in my best interest to find out what this world is really like, and made me get a job. After applying at several places, I soon realized why the unemployment rate is over 8%. Who wants to flip hamburgers 40 hours a week or fold clothes all day?

Three weeks went by, and finally I got my first call for an interview. It wasn’t the best job around, but my parents said they would stop paying for my gas if I didn’t have a job by the start of the school year. That scared the hell out of me, because I drive an SUV that gets less than 10 miles per gallon, so I took the interview and ran with it.

I really had no idea what to expect when it came to the interview, but I was given the God given talent of being a great B.S.er. The manager asked me some questions about working as a team, and I rattled off some good answers about being on sports teams and always being supportive as the team benchwarmer. It wasn’t until the last question that I really had to think of something good to say. He asked me to name a situation where I was clutch, or came up big. I’ll be honest, there really hasn’t been a significant moment in my life when I’ve come up clutch. So out of my ass, I told the manager the story of how I had a walk-off walk to win my JV baseball game. He thought that was the greatest thing ever, apparently on the same level as the Joe Montana touchdown pass to Joe Taylor to win the Super Bowl. Truthfully, what really happened was a walked to load the bases, and the next batter struck out to end the game. I wouldn’t recommend lying in an interview, but no one ever said anything about stretching the truth. A week later I got the call, I was officially a pizza boy.

The first couple of weeks were real rough. Surprisingly, it is incredibly difficult to make a perfect sauce line, and apparently people really do care about how much extra sausage you put on their pizza. To make things even worse, I sucked at mopping, sweeping, and pretty much anything involving cleaning.

Amidst my struggles to master the pizza making business, I learned more than I could have ever imagined in those first few weeks. For one, I learned that to 95% of the world, making $7.70 an hour to provide a service…is hell. Second, I learned that it is possible for a 14 year old to conceive a child (hopefully you get where I’m going with that). Third, apparently mixing the regular cheese and low-fat cheese is a $500 dollar mess-up that ends in multiple customers complaining and my ass getting chewed out for a very very long time. I’ll never live that one down. My bad boss.

It took longer than expected, but managers finally stopped yelling at me everyday (but believe me it still happens). After a couple of months I could actually go one night without messing up an order, and mop the floor in less than one hour. Finally, I was starting to feel like I belonged in the fraternity of pizza makers.

Having never understood what it truly meant to “work,” having this job made me feel like I deserved something for once. Even though I couldn’t make a pizza to save my life, I was learning more about life than I could’ve ever imagined. It was empowering to know that every other Friday I was getting a $100 check signifying that I wasn’t good enough to get a pay raise, but good enough to not get fired.

As much as I had thought about being successful in life, the whole concept of being successful didn’t truly hit me until I cleaned the bathrooms for the first time. As I walked into the men’s bathroom to clean a stall filled with stuff you don’t wanna hear about, something hit me. For the first time in my life, I understood that in order to make it to the top, you truly have to start from the bottom. The people who make it to the top only make it there because they know what it’s like to start at the very bottom. Cleaning those bathrooms made me realize that if I’m willing to put in the work, follow my passion, and never give up, the sky is the limit. I know it sounds like a lot, especially all from cleaning toilets, but I was having an epiphany that night. Just go with it.

Wow. A year has gone by and they still haven’t fired me. I guess the either find me as a good source of comic relief, or maybe I actually am a productive member of the pizza making team. Meeting people with real problems, learning to take responsibility for your mistakes, and being a team player, those aren’t just things you learn when you work in a restaurant, retail store, or babysit; it’s what you learn in life. Having a job has taught not only suck up to your superiors when you want a pay raise or an extra day-off, but more importantly, hard work can lead to a better place in life. I never thought I’d say this, but I’m gonna miss being apart of the pizza business.

To all of you out there who dread waking up at 7am to work a minimum wage job, I want you to remember this. Yes, it may suck, but 20 years from now when you’re successful, happy, and working a job that gives you everything you’ve ever wanted, you’ll walk past a kid cleaning the bathrooms on your way out of work. As you walk past this kid, you’ll smile, remembering a young, ambitious, immature kid that cleaned those very same bathrooms once upon a time ago.

Yours Truly,

Chip I.T.

“You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain”