On wages and employment.

The other week, my one (pensive) (Tibetan) coworker introduced me to this new (Tibetan) coworker of ours who was following her around and she was showing her what to do, and she asked me if she looked like anyone in particular.

So, I looked at her a while and then I was like, "Are you guys sisters?", and it turns out that I was right.

Anyhow, her sister works full-time at an upscale grocery chain here in the city, and she's training at the resthome so that she can occasionally pick up a weekend afternoon shift and make a little extra money.

We were talking, and she was saying that not only does she make sandwiches and wraps and that I should stop in to see her if I was by her grocery store chain location, but she was also saying that she has worked there a long time, to the point where she's full-time now and gets a decent raise every year, so that she's at something like $15 or $16 an hour.

Which, is more than I make at the resthome job, and which makes sense, since her (pensive) sister is doing her best to get in full-time there at the upscale grocery store chain.

Recently, I realized that my job is one of the fastest growing in the U.S. and that's probably why I got into it sideways finally after applying for jobs for over a year-and-a-half.

Although it uses 'active listening' skills like you use with students, it really is separate from my training to be a college-level teacher, and by no means does it make full use of my skills or even have compensation enough to give me the minimum stability that I expected to have after preparing for a teaching career for so long.

Statistics say that average pay for what I do is like $24,000 a year, which is nothing, but at least it's a job I could get and at least it's a job in which I can pretty decently easily get forty hours a week of work, thanks to the expansion of health insurance under Obama, not to mention our aging population.

Though, I'm not looking forward to the next decade progressing, and I spend more and more of my day wiping baby boomers' asses.