Free A Working Stiff's Manifesto by Iain Levison Page A

working thirty more hours a week and averaging, after taxes, ninety more dollars per paycheck. Furthermore, I have become a lightning rod for blame. The night cooks forget to change the fry oil one night, and we open with burned grease. Nobody has ordered fresh fry oil, so we have to spend the lunch shift serving blackened french fries. Jeff comes in and sees this.
    â€œDid you see this fry oil?” he screams at me. The days of handshaking and smiles are over.
    â€œYes.”
    â€œWhat have you done about it?”
    â€œWe’re getting a truck tomorrow.”
    â€œGoddamnit, we need fresh grease today. What are you going to do about it?”
    I am fresh out of ideas. I’m supposed to be a trainee. People are supposed to be showing me what to do.
    â€œWe’re not paying you this kind of money to just wander around,” he tells me. “Call another restaurant and get them to lend us some grease.”
    This makes sense, and while I am doing it, he comes in and screams about the lettuce.
    â€œWe’ve got lettuce rotting in the back of the freezer! Why aren’t you rotating it?”
    â€œI’ve been making onion rings,” I tell him.
    â€œYou’re not supposed to be making onion rings. You’re supposed to be managing. Get someone else to make the onion rings! I want you watching the lettuce and fry oil quality!” He storms off.
    He’s living in a dreamworld. We’re fresh out of employees. He thinks we have prep cooks lined up dying to work. In reality, if we’ve got three prep shifts a week covered, I’m happy. I go back to making onion rings because we’re almost out of them.
    Jeff comes back into the kitchen a few hours later, sees me working at the stainless steel table. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”
    â€œIs it about onion rings?”
    â€œLet’s just talk.” I know how the conversation is going to go. I take off my apron.
    â€œI’ll be in to pick up my paycheck,” I say.
    I walk home.
    So that’s how it goes. I should have just stuck with a nice nine-dollar-an-hour job, minding my own business. As soon as you start to move up, you’re asking for trouble. There’s nothing up there but ambitious, driven people trying to get you to do more of their work for less of their money.
    For the rest of us, the dream has nothing to do with it. It’s avoiding the nightmare that counts. I’m walking along a busy street peopled with the homeless and the nearly homeless, the walking, talking reminders of what happens when the bottom falls out. I have about ninety dollars left until my next payday, and after that, nothing. What divides me from them? Ninety dollars.
    A guy comes up and asks me for some spare change. I wonder if he is doing better than me, financially. In Philadelphia, I remember working a Friday night at a restaurant where a homeless man would stand outside begging for change from our customers. At the end of the night, I had made sixty-five dollars, and he’d made seventy. How much money is there in begging? I’ve never tried it, maybe I should give it a whirl. You can pick your own hours and be your own boss. Isn’t that the American dream? Maybe I should become an independent finance acquisition specialist.
    This guy reeks of alcohol, and his skin is as leathery as a saddlebag. He is having trouble standing as he tries to focus. Maybe he isn’t doing better than me, for now anyway. I give him two dollars and send him on his way.
    I have a friend, Jim, from a restaurant job a long time ago, who was recently hired by a national moving company, and he has a job driving a tractor trailer across all fifty states. There is a message from him on my answering machine when I get home, telling me he needs help. How timely.
    Jim wants to pay me $500 a week to drive and help load the truck. He’s been having a problem lately because every time he pulls into a new city, the company