I’ve been working for a month at a drugstore. I enjoy being friendly to the cranks.
It is a gift, I guess, to be able to get an ornery person to crack a smile. Because I am such a grouch, I can relate to his or her frustration in the moment – a long line, aches and pains, loneliness or awkwardness – whatever it is that makes one person not a bundle of sunshine 24 hours a day.
I must be a good actress because, most days, I have spent the better part of my morning before going to work spinning my wheels about the scamdemic and the unethical doctors and nurses still promoting it. I try not to even discuss it with anyone else anymore. I am ashamed of myself for working as a nurse for as long as I did. I have more respect for pole dancers.
Pursuing higher education was a complete waste of time and money. I could have kept the job I had at 18 years old running a Burger King drive thru and be better off than I am now.
I am pretty much doing the same kind of work albeit I’m selling pharmaceuticals instead of heart attacks on a bun.
Either way, the people showing up for their opiates or sedatives or Covid shots and tests are committing a long, slow suicide same as those who eat fast food every day.
I shouldn’t care. It’s just a job. Something to pay the bills. I’m not forcing anyone to take medicine they don’t need or defraud their insurance company or the taxpayer so they can get on an airplane or go back to school.
I don’t care if they yell at me for being slow because I am chatting up a bored retiree or someone not playing with a full deck. It is better than being abrupt and rude because my back hurts and I am black and blue from hauling my five-foot two-inch self over the ledge to pass some pothead his or her "free" methamphetamine or Suboxone.
I can commiserate with the working man or woman without health insurance who has to pay full price for his or her blood pressure pills or inhaler or whatever it is keeping them alive so they can keep working and paying taxes and subsidizing the bullshit artists on both ends of the socioeconomic spectrum.
I can be nice to the bitchy, middle-aged soccer mom who is getting squeezed by her snotty kids and her aging parents and has to take out her aggravations on some numpty working for a few bucks more than minimum wage. She gave up her career to stay home with her brats and fluff her husband’s ego for the last 20 years and is bound to be irritable.
Even if she is nasty to me, I understand where she is coming from. I’m old now, too. Men my age are chasing women the age of my daughters. It sucks no longer having currency because you are gray and wobbly and you pee when you laugh.
But I don’t like to see women my age be nasty to young people who are actually working instead of going on disability for their “anxiety” or substance abuse.
My most recent nursing job was as a health care counselor and first responder at a college. For three and a half years I had one job with full benefits and paid time off that didn’t involve being verbally and physically assaulted on a daily basis. I also didn't have to kill people per "protocol".
It destroyed what faith I had in our education and healthcare systems. I was complicit in fraud by encouraging young people to stay off drugs, stay in college and “get an education”
as a way out of poverty.
That was a lie. I lied to dozens of people, including my own children, by saying the only reason I wasn’t on the street or on welfare was because I had an education. That was bullshit. The only reason I am not on the street or on welfare is because I refuse to be on the street or on welfare.
I will work at any job I can get (except killer for hire - that's why I had to leave nursing) and have always been that way. My grandfather used to say you just need something to “make a buck” and that’s exactly what I did. I wasn't willing to use and abuse people or the system to get or stay in the jobs I wanted. I settled for "making a buck".
I never imagined, after the brief few years of relative prosperity between 2017 and 2020, that I would have so little earning potential in 2022. But the financial situation of thousands of Americans is way worse now under Sniffer Joe and the Ho than it has been in nearly a century.
I can only imagine how bad it would be if I still had a house and dependents. At least I only have to feed and clothe myself. Granted, I still have student loan debt for me and two of the kids for now useless degrees. They, too, are working at jobs they could have gotten right out of high school.
I might as well have flushed all that money down the toilet. Yes, I am SO much better off than the customers who are getting their drugs paid for by the taxpayer, but I am sick of paying for their shit and I am sick of watching good, hardworking people in low wage jobs pay for their shit, too.
And I am sick of the politicians and the laptop class, who have the luxury of working remotely for all of eternity and not mingling with the great unwashed, making decisions that screw over the schmuck running a drive thru window.
All for the love of money.