The other week I had been reading out on the porch of the fronthouse in the one (college) town where I live now, and I ended up chit-chatting some with one of the upstairs neighbors, the (longer-haired) and (less jumpy) one.
Basically, he did end up graduating, and he had quit his job at a local national retailer a few months ago so he could take a short international vacation for a few weeks, and now he's back to looking for a job again.
He had gotten into retail through warehouse work during the pandemic, and then entered a managerial role where he was making $23 an hour, but he was saying that all his friends he had worked with had left, and there was no reason to keep on.
"You always have to quit and go somewhere else to make more money," he was like, and he was telling me that he had seen a few long-term employees who had managed to rack up like $3 more an hour from multiple raises, only to have wage inflation mean that new hires were suddenly making as much as them, but their wages never changed, despite that.
He was also saying that city bus drivers can make it good -- his dad is one and has put his years in and can now pull in over $120K with overtime -- and that maybe he would be an air traffic controller for a few years, and grab that money and then get out.
"So did you graduate?", I was like, and he said that yes, he had, the last semester, finally.
(A while ago he had told me that his degree really didn't do anything, but he was committed to getting around to graduating, so his grandmother could see him.)
I also asked just a little bit, and it turns out that he did bio because he thought it might get him somewhere but he didn't really like it that much, and then he kept applying for internships and kept getting turned down and so he could never get a lab job, and then after a while he just stopped applying by like his second or third year, and a bio degree like he has is pretty useless without lab experience, but he finished to finish, especially since he had this "college prepayment" thing from his dad where back in the late 1990s his dad had paid like ten thousand dollars down, and that meant all his college was paid for now, even for his degree that doesn't really do anything.
"It's just so freeing to give up," he was like.
And, I had to agree.
And, I told him the multiple professions where I had had leads or had made inroads or had tried to configure and reconfigure to maybe get somewhere, and how it was just endless frustration, and then wage compression and short staffing in eldercare was just horrible to find yourself in the middle of, especially realizing that it wasn't coming back on any timescale where you could salvage a decent job like you had anticipated when you had gotten into it going on 5-6 years ago, now.
And, when I listed the different type of jobs where I had had leads or had made inroads into over the course of like twelve years, he just gave this sharp dark laugh and was like, "Those are all the areas where they don't need anyone."
. . .
(I did agree with his sentiment, though I mildly corrected him, saying that you could walk out the door right now and get jobs there, they just worked you to death for no money and no real sure advancement, and so weren't worth having.)
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