Dear potential employers,
I need at least $2000 a month which is as unlikely, it seems, as anyone thinking that Barack deserved the Nobel.
I am not: enthusiastic, energetic, highly motivated, pleasant, excited about my low-paying crappy humiliating job. I will not be cheerful when answering phones all day for $9 an hour. I will not be highly motivated as an attendant at the Marriott. I will not be a self-starter unless you pay enough for me to feed and clothe said self.
Do you realize that $600 a month for daycare, which I can’t afford, is unbelievably cheap? For this rate, when you pick your child up you get to stand in the rain waiting for someone to come to the locked door because the daycare doesn’t have enough money to pay a receptionist. (I admit, I considered applying to be their receptionist.)
I am not just out of college and will not accept perpetually being paid a rate that 22-year-olds have no choice but to accept with joy in their hearts. I have no joy in my heart unless I can afford good red wine.
How about I just write poems for you? I can do that. I have degrees in that. Writing poems—a real life skill! Just pay at least $20 an hour and expect that I will need to sit around for hours staring into space waiting for the creative spirit to strike; and that if it does strike, this doesn’t necessarily mean that A) whatever I’m doing will become a poem, or B) it will be any good. I will need to be well-supplied with coffee. None of that cheap crap, either although there is something poetic about the cappuccinos that come out of convenience store machines adjacent to gas pumps. Lonely machines that wait under fluorescent lights to be refilled! Have you considered paying me to properly honor, with song, these machines and their secret dark hazelnut-flavored product?
I need health insurance. I am a human being who may tomorrow be rear-ended or knocked flat by a bus. I may require 20 stitches, or glasses so I can see when I drive. I may need a little something done with my teeth once a year so they don’t fall out, thus entirely erasing my single-mom dating prospects. Expect that the human being will require maintenance in order to be cheerful, a self-starter, high-performing—or to show up at all.
If this sounds good you may reach me anytime at…oh screw it. Please call me now. I will be your steak cook, nail technician, night auditor. I will work at your HoJo in Slidell. Just pay at least $20 an hour and don’t expect me to have any of the skills / personality attributes you are seeking.
