Work Ethic

    I have to be at work in two or so hours and I haven't slept. Well, I woke up at 3am. My sleep schedule is a little off thanks to my odd shifts. Regardless of the strange hours, I like my job. I mean I have to like my job if I'm willing to take $8.50/hr. Home Depot would have done me two full dollars better(don't get excited, I speak multiple languages) but standing around waiting for customers to show up sounds incredibly boring. I'm fairly certain that's what they do most of the time given how very 'attentive' they are to customers. Still, considering I'm not full time at my current job, it wouldn't hurt to try out.

     What I don't like about my job is the lazy scum whose slack I have to pick up. It's the one thing that has seriously had me almost quit on the spot several times now. To make it worse, I'm absolutely certain said scum gets paid more than I do. While I work up the courage to ask for a raise, I quietly stew in anger.

     I have a coworker that's convinced that the reason I'm better at my job than my slacker co-worker is that I'm a woman. Okay, I live in the south and my job requires a good amount of cleaning so it's not entirely unexpected but I somewhat disagree with the notion that being a woman makes me more inclined to clean. Living where I live, entitled males who won't lift a finger to clean up after themselves aren't what I would call rare. Living where I live, women that clean well are pretty common considering the culture. While my co-worker could very well be one of those slobs, I wasn't raised to be neat. My mother still does my laundry from time to time because I let it pile up in my room until the bin is overflowing. I'm working on that, by the way, so don't judge me. So far, I've managed to keep my room neat enough that it never has anything growing in it.

     Part of the reason that I have better work ethic is because I'm a woman. Yeah, I just said that wasn't the reason but keep reading. I have better work ethic not because I was raised to know to clean and get things in order but because as a woman I have always had to work twice as hard as my male counterparts in nearly anything I cared about to receive any acknowledgement. I can't get by with writing a good paper, it has to be excellent. I like to think that they just want to push me harder but I'm pretty terrible at lying to myself. I've seen the papers of my male counterparts and of my female classmates(even the ones I don't get along with to make sure I wasn't just being biased). Anonymous grading is a joke since it's pretty obvious by the sentence structure who wrote it. So, it's no surprise that I took to my job the same way I've taken to anything in my life. Can you believe that I was expected in grade school to color within the lines while male children were allowed to be sloppy with their coloring? God, I never even thought about that. No, I'm not going to go over my memories of childhood. Not gonna do it. Nope. I don't want to know how hard the world tried to make me into what they thought a girl should be.

     Too bad world, the internet made me a feminist. Take that. At that word, you might have made some assumptions about me. I don't hate men. I just expect them to clean up after themselves and know how to make their own sandwiches. I like having a clean environment and I like making food but that doesn't mean that I'm going to put up with someone that expects me to treat them as if they're a child incapable of doing it themselves. If I had to learn that no one is going to clean up after me, no one gets a free pass from me for being born with a dick. If that means staying single until I can find a man that doesn't expect to be coddled, so be it. I'm no one's domestic slave. Although, to be honest, if he turns out to be a guy that makes so much money that he makes my future post-degree income look like pocket change, I'd have no problem with being a stay-at-home mom(I don't have kids but want them at some point). Odds are though, that he's going to be making around the same range as I will and I am not going to work all day to come home to an unfair share of house-work.

     The other reason is my ethnicity. I'm Hispanic and that comes with its own long tail of problems. I'm not going to go into "racism" but I get tired of being treated like I don't belong in the city I've been in all my life by some jack-ass who hasn't been in Texas for a year even. Let's just say, I have a reason to want to hold on to the job that I already have. I have no guarantee I will find employment where I'll be treated fairly or that I'll like. Between having a vagina and a tan complexion, you learn to work twice as hard so people will look past those two. Hey, at least I'm attractive. I find that helps to balance the scales a bit.