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?

The Loser is Employed

Though the Complete and Total Loser has a retail job that is humiliatingly below him he realizes that it is, nonetheless, a job and one that he will probably not lose unless he abuses a coworker or a customer, which he has no intention of doing.
Being employed in hard times feels odd to him; he's usually on the other side of the recession mirror, watching others laughingly gripe about their jobs as they dine in restaurants and shop in department stores for luxury items.
In the early 1980s, the Loser's first year out of college, there was a relatively short but severe recession. Ever timid companies cut jobs and the Loser, whose ignorance of how to find work was unforgivable even considering his youth and inexperience, would put on the one necktie he owned and a shabby sport coat and march into gleaming structures where he would get no farther than the reception desk. They would give him a generic application and he would fill it out. Days later, he would call, as his mother advised, to show his burning interest in working for Company X where a secretary would say someone would call him if they had any interest.
Weeks oozed into months. The days grew short. By midwinter, the Loser's routine was to awake around 11 p.m., shower, dress, get the day's newspaper, return to his apartment and eat a simple yet filling breakfast.
His door knocking had evolved to making telephone calls, and he made rules about when to call in those days long before common Internet use. No calls on Mondays; people are just getting back to their workweek and may be irritable. Calling on a Tuesday or a Wednesday was fine, but not in the morning. Too many people skip breakfast and aren't focused on talking to outsiders. People eat lunch at different times of the day and few want to be disturbed immediately after a meal, so before two was out. From 3:30 on they were wrapping up their day and looking forward to leaving work. That was true for all of Thursday afternoons and all day Friday. Weeks with or near holidays were best skipped.
The end result was that the Loser had exactly three hours out of the entire week during which to make telephone calls to prospective employers, and three p.m. was his own prime napping time. The continual rejection comforted him a little by validating how tough it was out there but it wounded him more, sapping the little self confidence he was born with. By the time he got a decently paying job—manual labor in a liquor factory—he was so beaten down that he's still astonished that he has a job when others do not.