I’ve worked some crappy jobs in my lifetime, I’ll tell you. At one point in my life, I held down three jobs at one time. It made for long days. Probably one of the worst came in the way of working at a drive-thru, the kind that sells beer, soft drinks, cigarettes, and Mike Sell’s Green Onion potato chips.
It was a dirty job, especially when people handed you damp money or spat tobacco out their windows. Hot in the summer and freezing cold in the winter. All at minimum wage. Those were the days.
I started working, in some form or another, when I was a small kid. We started with household chores. We also had “jobs” at school. So from that point on, whether for pay or for deed, I’ve worked at something every day.
I should not complain, though. Most everyone has worked an awful job at some point. This especially holds true for earlier times in history. In fact, in the days of yore, things were pretty bad.
Many times, children suffered the most. A good example is the chimney sweep. It was a tragic life, and all too often, it ended in death. It was part of the job, that risk of death. Someone had to do it, as a lack of a clean chimney might have been catastrophic for anyone burning fires.
The Great Fire of London in 1666 is an example. And that fire led to the practice of using boys to do the task. Sometimes these kids were as young as four.
Mostly, it went like this. Parents would sell their little boys to the chimney sweep bosses. And those tiny kids took their brushes and were forced into small chimneys to do a job that was otherwise impossible to big-bodied humans.
They’d work through all the daylight hours. At night, they’d retire to some shoddy meal at their master’s crappy house or lodging and then sleep wherever they could on the floor.
The next day they did it all again. But that day might always be the last, as it always held the possibility that his next chimney could be the one to finally kill him. It happened often, by fall, by suffocation, or by becoming stuck in those chimneys.
Oftentimes, the bodies of many of these poor kids would remain entombed in the chimneys that killed them, all throughout London. It is said that the British Houses of Parliament are riddled with the corpses of dead boys.
Another lousy job for children was that of a coal mine worker. Some little boys spent their entire childhood deep beneath the earth’s surface. They would perform any number of menial tasks for the men who worked to get coal out of those mines and into our furnaces.
These children worked all day, every day. They drove the animals that pulled the wagons of coal up and down. They were in charge of opening and shutting doors that kept the miners safe from hazards that might occur.
Their futures would be filled with lung disorders and more hard labor all their lives. Of course, there was always the risk of being killed by a mine collapse.
The jobs kids had run on and on. Cannery workers, shoe shines, apprentices, cotton mill workers, and more. Even soldiers.
In perspective, I feel I have no room to complain about any of the jobs I worked. I did what I needed to do and learned some things along the way.
So yes. That perspective. Everything is relative. All that we are.
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“It takes less time to do a thing right, than it does to explain why you did it wrong.”
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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“People are still willing to do an honest day’s work. The problem is they want a week’s pay for it.”
– Joey Adams
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“Son, if you really want something in this life, you have to work for it. Now quiet! They’re about to announce the lottery numbers.”
— Homer Simpson
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The jobs, oh the crappy, crappy jobs
