poverty
...ed at IHOP with me and lived in a trailer with her husband and three kids; supposedly she also had a drug problem, evident by her disintegrating teeth and thin drawn skin so common to the cigarette smokers who had been waistressing for more than ten years. She lived in a trailer park and her family all dressed in Goodwill clothing. Then there was Big Sara who had three children; one lived with its father, one with her parents, and another was a surrogate she had for some family. She shared an apartment with a female friend in a decent building that was across the main road from the projects. She had to work seven days a week as a cook the last time I saw her. She drank, smoked marijuana, and had several friends with benefits who were attached to certain days. I think that all the IHOP veterans smoked cigarettes and drank-if they did not have to take urine tests- was because it is a fairly desperate life. Your life becomes wake-up, wash-up, dress-up, and go to work. The night shift prevents you from even normal socialization like going to church because before eleven is far too early to wake up. Both my friend Ashley and I agree that if either of us had worked there a month longer we may have gone crazy or suicidal. For us knowing that we could go home and sponge off our parents made us pity the girls like Big Sara for whom this would be a lifespan if she did not go to college and get a degree in something as she was planning. I think that only working for a month and closing at ten made the physically demanding, wholly unsanitary, and often frustrating job of waitressing seem a bit less glum. She started in Florida at a restaurant called "Hearthside" working as a waitress at only .43 an hour plus tips. She discovers that most of her coworkers either live with their parents, boyfriends or in hotel rooms and she herself lives in a small apartment. In order to pay her rent, she takes another job at a restaurant named "Jerry's" as a waitress and works from eight in the morning to ten at night. Barbara decided to quit Hearthside, work only at Jerry's, and move out of her apartment and rent a trailer in a trailer park for ,100 so she will be closer to her job. She gets another job as a housekeeper at a hotel and is paid .10 an hour. On her last day in Florida she leaves her job and continues on to Maine. Barbara works two jobs in Portland, a dietary aide at a nursing home for an hour and as a maid for .65 an hour. She works at the nursing home only on the weekends and helps serve the elderly their food. During the week, she works as a maid with 4 or 5 other woman cleaning rich people's homes. It was both sad and surprising when the other women expressed that they were special and worth something because they could pass a personality test and were offended by Barbara's view of their job. During her time as working as a maid she hurts her back and many other parts of her body. She felt that it was necessary to cheat by getting a real prescription drug from a doctor. When she moved to Michigan she had her roughest time. She could not find a reasonably priced apartment nor could she get a very good job. She did bring up some very interesting facts about how there is such an extreme affordable housing shortage and the "Labor Shortage" in America is not a shortage of the unemployed in need of jobs but more so a shortage of people willing to be bent over by the all mighty Wal-Mart every time they receive their paychecks. She shows how people have the opportunity to take a job for higher pay-s...