You're at that age when children are made, money are squandered on instragrammable trips with friends or the significant other, saved for that mortgage payment.
But you are not there yet, and the incapability of imagining yourself wrapped in those scenarios distracts you from the tedious scrolling. Back to track: You're looking for yet another job amongst the hundreds of advertisements you're either too qualified or too unqualified for.
Your current job at a dark store, the one you have just decided to resign from with a combination of SMS and email to your unresponsive boss, was your first ever incursion into the working life. Ten hours a week, you thought you could manage that. True, you have a newly obtained master's degree and the pay is as low as it gets. Sure, the company has refused to stipulate an union agreement and is known for its questionable working conditions, but what else is there to do? Tech up and swallow caffeine in an attempt not to fall asleep during a coding tutorial? SQL, Python? By now, you have apprehended the notion that what you're best at are exercises in uselessness. Nothing cashable, nothing cool. You decided to swallow your pride and preconceptions and try. You'll be barely bale to pay your rent, but that's something at least.
The boss is two years younger than you are, the job interview is as informal as it gets as he listlessly works through the printed questions; to your suprise, he wants to hire you right away. They're desperate for people, you think. The interview room consists of a kitchen, a table, three chairs. There is a ~100 liters trashbag filled with soda cans, and another one with microwaveable pan pizza packagings. In the same area, separated by a door, there's the changing room which smells like seasoned feet, a 3 square meters cube, separated in turn by another door from the bathroom. Quite a few times you'll experience the rush of changing your shirt while your coworker plays music on their phone on the other side of the door and proceeds to flush the toilet.
That's what you'll do: you'll prepare orders by searching for items in that warehouse-looking supermarket, scanning them, bagging them. Couriers, mostly immigrants who earn less or more than you depending on their willingness to hustle about, will pick up the bags and take care of it. That's your formal job descriptions, but what you still don't know is that your tasks include regular warehouse activities, with physical chores your 45kg body has never been used to performing. And everything is too high up on the shelves. And there's only one ladder that you will drag across one end of the store to the other as your Linus' security blanket. And you will break many nails (your own, unfortunately).
Soon you realise that the groceries arrangement is not as streamlined as it's been made to appear from the barcode system and three-group ciphers over every shelf: sometimes items are missing entirely, sometimes you fail to find them. They give you a phone, an oversized rectangle that barely fits in your pocket. It rings continuously whenever an order is placed, and it won't stop until you swipe the notification away, even in the middle of another order. Every order is timed on the basis of the number of items: an ever-present sign on the top right corner of the screen shows how late or early you are. At first you let the threat of time loom over you, obfuscating your already shaky sour cream chips detection skills, but you finally decide to take it easy. Your pay is hourly, after all.
You soon realise that you have substandard work ethics. You rarely slacked off at school or at university, and you thought that the same innate willingness to do well would accordingly apply everywhere. But you don't give a shit. You do the bare minimum to get by, as your frustration at the mind numbing repetitiveness of the work on the one hand, and at the disorganised chaos that is that place on the other increases. There's stuff you're supposed to know, but no one tells you until it's almost too late.
You spend those few hours underneath the neon lights, no rest for your eyes and your body. The whiteness of that place, coupled with the loud humming from the industrial freezers dulls your senses and your mind. You're bored and sleepy. You walk with the plastic gray basket, collecting bag of candy after bag of candy, 5 different kinds of flavoured energy drinks, ingredients for a taco night, frozen pizzas.
In the monotony of that cycle you detect a mingling of envy and pity for those you imagine sitting at home on the sofa, waiting for their daily carburant and some more to keep reproducing the same cycles of work and consumption that you yourself are being an actor of. They're not working; they are now free to buy overpriced cookies and enjoy their well deserved rest. Alas, it's only a matter of hours before they're woken up by what I imagine to be the imperative of performing another job, perhaps less draining than mine, but with all probability nonetheless meaningless.
Your time at home reading, thinking, developing whichever shred of autonomous and non monetizable activity you manage to cram in is just a luxury. An addendum, a footnote to your responsible existence as a worker. If an average of ten hours a week has done nothing but confirmed my fears, what would forty look like?