Children's Letters to the Loser #20

Dear Complete and Total Loser,

I am sixteen years old and a month from now I'll be out of school for the year. My parents keep telling me that I have to get a summer job even though they make plenty of money. They want me to, as my dad puts it, "learn the value of a buck." I'm not lazy but there just are no jobs where I live. I've looked, but they tell me I haven't looked hard enough. What can I do?

Geoff

Dear Geoff,

Your parents are wrong. Everyone knows that the value of a buck is one hundred cents. Case closed. You should not have a summer job and you should stop looking for one immediately. But note this: If you hadn't said your parents "make plenty of money" the Loser would say the opposite. But you did.

Years ago, when the Loser was just a few years older than you are, he worked briefly for a film crew that was making a feature length movie that never got released. He worked as a gopher (go for this, go for that; gopher). The job lasted just three weeks and the screenwriter, who wrote for a local television station, liked the Loser enough that he told him he could get the Loser an unpaid internship at the station for the rest of the summer. Alas, the Loser demurred. His parents, like yours, made plenty of money and would have given the Loser their blessings, but he never even asked them. He feared that his two older brothers would have disparaged the Loser, called him spoiled, pampered. So he went back to working at a rundown movie theater, selling popcorn and cleaning toilets.

It was one of the Loser's bigger mistakes in life.

Work out another arrangement with your parents. Maybe there's unpaid work you can do in a field you're interested in around. Do volunteer work for an organization that does something you think is worthy or even one that does something you know nothing about. Hell, if the Loser had ever had a kid, he'd pay the kid $50 for every book the kid read from an agreed on list. Your parents think washing dishes or doing yard work will teach you something, but those are things you should be doing around the house anyway. Besides, there are far too many people of all ages who need jobs right now for real reasons. You should not take one from them, even for the summer.

Your friend,

The Complete and Total Loser

The apron's adorable but really, what's the point?