There was a woman on the train yesterday talking on her cell phone. Loudly. I thought about all the times in the day when people were annoying. The car that moved too slow out of the parking space or wouldn’t let us into the lane. The woman in the grocery store, blocking the lane. We get on each other’s nerves. We arrive in each other’s day at inopportune moments and want things from each other. Things that aren’t easy to want to give. When I’ve worked in service jobs like waitress I’ve felt such rage at people’s demand on me and my invisibility. Spend one year of your life being a wait-person or a sales clerk. It will change the way you see people.

–Tish, at Fatshadow

In my life I have worked as a paint store sales clerk, a clothing store clerk, a taco maker, a burger flipper, a cashier in a drugstore, a desk clerk in a hotel. (Yes, I’ve lived awhile.) Most were moonlighting jobs I took to make ends meet in my twenties. Several of these jobs were in a university area, which provided its own kind of invisibility. I did not wish to be on the service-side of the counter. I wanted to be a typical college student. Like Tish, I struggled with my feelings of rage against life circumstances, and against the condescending demeanor of customers who thought that I, by virtue of wearing a uniform or ringing up their items, could be spoken to rudely, mocked, and on occasion (depending on their degree of inebriation), threatened.

Throughout these years I worked full-time at the university, part-time for extra income, and took college classes until I graduated with a B.A. in psychology just six months shy of turning 30. I attended college as a “typical” student — living in a dorm — for one year when I was 26. After having lived on my own for a bunch of years, sharing a 10 by 12 foot room felt like prison. I struggled to adapt. By that time, I’d outgrown the desire to have that experience. And while I didn’t love the extra jobs I had, they taught me to appreciate people who work in these hard, low-paying, often thankless and futureless jobs. It’s something I try to keep mindful of, even though those years are long gone.