Summer Job
I finally came up to Maine for the summer this past Monday. Yesterday was my first day of work, and today was my first double shift of the season – that’s a full ten hours of misery.
This is my fourth summer working at the gift shop. It was my first job ever, the summer before my senior year of high school when I was sixteen. It is certainly a good first summer job for a teenager, but I am now far past that (mostly because the paychecks hardly meet my needs anymore). I really should have found a new, better job by now, but all I can say for myself is that I have just been too lazy to embark on a new job search. I really don’t have much of a right to complain, but, in my own typical fashion, I will anyway.
My boss owns three stores: a surf/swim shop, a gift shop, and a woman’s clothing shop, all of which are very small and specifically designed to attract tourists. I have always worked in the gift shop, which was located in the larger of the three stores, squished between an ice cream store and a restaurant. The woman’s clothing store was located, quite literally, in a tiny shack on the corner of the road. In a brave attempt to maximize sales, this season my boss decided to swap the gift shop and the woman’s clothing store, so that the gift shop is now located in the tiny shack. This is where I am condemned to work.
The store is so small that there is hardly any room to walk around, and the area behind the desk is so cramped that my only possible movement is an awkward 360 degree spin. There is no chair, so I must stand in this tiny spot for my entire shift. Obviously, ten-hour double shifts are particularly brutal for this reason. The best word to describe this atmosphere is claustrophobic.
This is the essential breakdown of what I do during my shift: I stand around, waiting for the rare customer to buy something. In order to amuse myself I’ll either read a book or work on any of the three puzzle books I bought specially for work (Sudoku, word search, and crosswords). Luckily, I am able to play my own music on my iPod stereo, which is a small comfort. I am supposed to regularly tidy up the store and make sure everything is properly on its shelf, but I rarely do this unless it is absolutely necessary (again, this is where my laziness comes in). Sometimes, when a customer asks, I’ll have to give them the price of an item, fetch a decorative wall plaque down for them, help them find a shirt in a specific size, and so on. Usually, though, my interaction with customers is limited to ringing up and bagging their items, and then giving them their change.
In short, my job is horribly boring. My hope before I began working was that going to work would make time pass faster because it would give me something to do. Instead, it’s the complete opposite – it only makes time pass slower. I am constantly checking the time and wishing I could be elsewhere, and the puzzle books do little to amuse me. Summer is such a drag.
