Yey Granholm!!!
I was crying tears of joy this morning when I saw that Granholm had won a second term, and that the Democrats took control of the House! Hurrah! WHOOP WHOOP! Finally a break in the world of politics for us Dems. Some of my co-workers were talking about who they voted for and blah blah blah, and even though I love politics, I didn't feel the need to chime in. I don't know, I just don't feel comfortable talking about politics with people I don't know very well. Auf jeden Fall, it was an interesting lunchtime, even though I didn't partake in the convo.
I would love to write more about work in here, but I fear that someday I'll have a coworker as one of my "friends," and gossip spreads like wildfire there. I would so love to vent though! It consumes the majority of my day and my life these days, so sometimes I feel it is the only thing worth writing about, but I can't and it frusterates me! GRRR!
Venting about not being able to vent has helped a bit. I'm reading a really great book right now called Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America as you can probably see on this blog entry. The author goes "undercover" to work low wage service jobs and to tries to live with the "wages" that are affiliated with these jobs (I'm sure affiliated is not the right word, but I can't think of a better one right now, so there!). Of course, it's not truly like living with low wages and working in horrible conditions as she knew that she had something to fall back on, whereas people who have to survive off this often backbreaking work for pennies don't have much to fall back on at all. Sometimes they don't have anything. I just got done reading another one of Ehrenreich's books called "Bait and Switch" in which she goes "undercover" again and tries to get a white collar job. After sending out over 200 resumes and going to numerous networking events, job fairs and career coaching sessions for about a year, she ends up with two job offers: one is selling insurance for AFLAC and the other one was selling Mary Kay. She was going for something in PR! The AFLAC job required that one put up a bunch of money for licenses and courses, something a person who is unemployed doesn't have much of. People usually don't make a ton of money selling insurance anyway. For Mary Kay you have to buy the make-up before you sell it, and if you can't sell it, you're at a big loss as that stuff is expensive! Anyways, I really get a kick out of Ehrenreich's research. She really goes all out. I really identified with her in this book because I feel tremendously underemployed right now (there I go, venting about work, but I can't help it). I'm working for an extremely low wage in relation to my qualifications. Why, you ask, am I working this job? Well, there isn't much else in the damned state with the unemployment rate so high, and I really don't want to leave this area right now. I've partly taken a break from the job search lately as I just started a new position at my current place of employment and I wanted to get the feel of it before exploring other options. Now that I've read Ehrenreich's book, however, I've been given a jolt to start finding another job now, or else I may not get one for a really long time.
I really hate the "it's better than nothing" mentality. This is how people try to convince themselves that people working low wages jobs with no benefits is ok. It's not ok, and it might as well be nothing because that's virtually what it is anyway. Plus, these low wage workers are part of the effort to make the corporation more and more profitable, even though they never see most of the profits. It kind of pisses me off. This is how people justify work for low wages in third world countries as well, they justify the exploitation of human beings by saying that it's better the have a job than no job. You don't have to agree or disagree on this one; it should be taken to a whole new level: thinking that it can and should be better.