I work retail full time. Specifically at a book store. I can barely afford my $400/mo rent. I don’t have a consistent schedule, which means sometimes I work a 10 day week. The only consistent thing is that I never get Saturdays or Sundays off, even when I’ve asked for it. I get yelled at all day by customers. Sometimes it’s funny, like when someone asked for “The Scarlet Sweater by Nathaniel Hawthorne” and got upset when I asked if he was thinking of The Scarlet Letter. Sometimes it’s less funny, like when I got screamed at by an old man for following policy and checking that the dvds he was buying were in their cases and my manager saw what was happening and ignored my request for help. Aside from being emotionally draining, it’s physically draining work. I’m constantly shelving books, which is kind of like lifting 5lb weights above my head all day. I’m also lifting 30-50lb boxes multiple times a day. We actually just got in trouble with our mail carrier because we were filling up bags of outgoing orders more than 50lbs. It gets busy in the store. Today I did 43 register transactions in a single hour.
My boyfriend works from home. He makes more than twice as much as I do. My days off are never on the weekend, so I’m home while he works. He gets paid twice as much as I do and does a quarter of the amount of work. He’ll sit and paint models or play video games all day while he waits for clients to respond to him. He’s not a slacker. His boss has called him “top talent” to my face. He just genuinely does not have as much work. His corporate drama sounds so benign in comparison to being threatened with a knife by a customer. He gets to wear pajamas. He gets a fucking paid lunch break.
I’m trying to get out of my job. I’ve been applying to places for over a year. Nobody wants to hire an art school dropout who’s been stuck in the same dead-end job for 3 and a half years.
The grass on the other side of the fence is most definitely greener, but there’s an electrified barbed wire fence keeping me from it.
EDIT TO CLARIFY: A 10-day week is working 10 consecutive days in a row before I get a day off
EDIT TO ADD: I'm not saying that office jobs don't suck. I'm saying I'm envious of what I see happening.