Blog

Cory D. Haas

Professor Harrington

English 101

24 July 2014

Some Jobs are harder than Others, Even at Half the Pay

Never has the idea “don’t judge a book by its cover” ever been so true.

I grew up in the small hick town of Arlington, WA and to be honest, I wouldn’t have wanted to anywhere else. The Arlington and Stanwood (where I actually lived) areas are dominantly inhabited by middle to upper-middle class families. Arlington started out as a small farming town and in many ways it still is today, but with many Boeing employees living and moving to the area it has grown rapidly in recent years. It seems that this created a standard of being successful in life, which was all supposed to start in high school.

At my high school, getting a job was a very important part in the social hierarchy. If your parents were rich enough, having a job wasn’t important. But if you did have to find work, you better bet it’s something worth talking about. The Arlington Municipal Airport is surrounded by small machining and aeronautical shops and these were the cream of the crop for high school student jobs. They paid pretty well, and you actually felt like you were getting something out of it besides money. Students looked down on others who didn’t have the chance to work at the top of the line jobs. I was one of the kids who needed to get a job, but I didn’t get to live the high school dream of working at one of these.

I had the pleasure of working at the oh-so glamourous highway 9 McChevron (McDonald’s and Chevron Gas Station combo).

I didn’t start working till my senior year which was pretty lucky, but by that time the part-time job market wasn’t great. It was either fast food or the local outlet mall for me. After all the horror stories I heard about the mall, I wasn’t going to step foot in there, at least as an employee. With McDonalds being the only “restaurant” hiring, I applied there and started working within a week....