An interesting debate sprang up online last week.
It was spurred by a young woman’s open letter to her employer, complaining that her minuscule wage (something that amounted to slightly over $8/hour after taxes) wasn’t enough for her to pay her rent in San Francisco, where the tech company she worked for is based.
I say ‘worked’ because her very public tirade got an almost immediate result, in that it cost her that low-paying job within two hours.
But the internet wasn’t done with her yet. Soon, a 30-something woman weighed in, publicly schooling the young ingrate about how actual hard work and sacrifice look and feel.
She explained in great detail that in the past — as far back as a decade or two ago — people who wanted to be successful in life were willing to work their way up from the bottom.
It got me thinking about what it was like for me and my friends to be young and just creeping out from underneath our parents’ protective wing.
There are arguments to be made on both sides of the issue, but I probably tend to fall on the side of the older woman, knowing first-hand what it’s like to spend days at a stretch surviving on sauceless generic noodles.
There’s no question the world has changed over the past couple decades. Job prospects are diminishing and student debt is at an all-time high.
That said, I don’t personally recall a time when many people I knew were landing jobs that paid top dollar straight out of college.
A lot, including myself, waited tables, working for minimum wage plus tips, and somehow found ways to make ends meet. Usually, that meant living with roommates (plural) to take a bit of the sting out of city rents.
And it wasn’t like your closest friends always needed a new place to live at the same time you did. Sometimes you just had to spin the wheel and hope for the best.
Taking on a stranger as a roommate is kind of like cranking the wheel on one of those toy-in-a-plastic-bubble machines. You never know what you’re going to get.
Some turn out to be that most sought-after prize — a life-long friend. Others, well.
I had one roommate, a perfectly lovely woman, who upon breaking up with her boyfriend, immediately ran out and bought a dog.
Two weeks later, in a move that surprised no one, she got back together with her boyfriend. That left the dog home alone most days to chew up everything I owned, in what was obviously a serious case of misplaced aggression.
Probably the most memorable case, though, was a guy who was one of about eight of us sharing a house, during what was unquestionably the longest summer of my life.
This guy spoke to nobody. Instead, he stayed locked in his room at all times — except, that is, when he’d creep out in the middle of the night to steal everyone else’s food.
The jig was up the night he decided he’d like a cup of tea to go with his pilfered midnight snack.
Presumably overcome by the sheer effort of not buying his own groceries, he returned to bed before the water had boiled and ended up melting the kettle onto the stove.
He was just one of a handful of food thieves I roomed with in my 20s.
As aggravating as it can be to endure the bizarre habits of the people we share space with, it’s these experiences — or so we’re told — that build character.
Failing that, the associated misery almost always makes for better stories than, ‘Hey, remember that time I lived alone in peace, paid all my bills on time and still had enough money left over to buy the good noodles?’
