Career Day

One of the long-standing jokes among humanities majors is calling any degree program without a clear professional application (e.g. anything outside of accounting, nursing, engineering, or one of the other professions) a “Do you want fries with that?” degree – on the assumption that any job you can get with a bachelor’s degree in English or Sociology (for example) will involve asking that question on a regular basis. It’s a measure of how far our society has evolved – or perhaps deteriorated – into a service economy, in that previous generations would more likely have mentioned something about selling shoes, delivering mail, or teaching high school. But today those are considered relatively good jobs, and working for a burger joint has become the bottom of the barrel. None of which prevented over a million people from applying for a job at McDonald’s last month…

Unless you frequent the McDonald’s restaurant in your neighborhood, or pay close attention to the business page, you might not have noticed that the company had decided to have a national “Hiring Day” event on April 19, 2011. They had originally announced their intention was to recruit and hire 50,000 new personnel, but the most recent estimates from around the country put the total at somewhere closer to 62,000. Now, in some respects, that’s a great thing; it’s 62,000 people who will almost certainly make more money than they could get from Unemployment or Welfare, and could (at least in theory) advance and develop to gain management experience, medical benefits, paid vacations, and the experience they would need to get somewhat more desirable jobs in a year or two. On the other hand, it also means that there are somewhere on the order of 938,000 people wandering around the country this week trying to come to terms with the fact that they weren’t quite good enough to get hired at McDonald’s…

Now, I want to be clear about this: I am not putting down any of the people who applied for jobs at McDonald’s. The fact is, I’ve had some jobs that were probably worse than anything they are likely to experience, and I can’t say I’m any the worse for the experience. The new McDonald’s employees are not likely to be asked to work any 25-hour shifts (that’s 25 consecutive hours, without more than a half-hour break) for example, and they almost certainly won’t be asked to work unpaid overtime unless they get promoted to management. By the same token, they probably won’t be asked to clean up the Incontinent Supplies aisle because the janitor called in sick – because McDonald’s probably doesn’t have an Incontinent Supplies aisle, unless our definition of junk food has gotten considerably wider than it used to be. It’s also very unlikely that they’ll be asked to deal with collections operations that include death threats, commission-only sales positions where the boss will belittle you any time you fail to make quota, or people who assume that because they’re good at math they know more about managing people than you’ve learned in a decade-plus of doing just that…

The fact is, I’ve fun on jobs like Audit-Team Leader, Swing-Shift Billing Facilitator, Pizza Delivery Person – and if Resume Writer was still a job, I’d probably still be running the Los Angeles District of the resume company. I’ve also seen people have a completely miserable experience on what are supposed to be high-prestige (or at least high-desirability) jobs, and enjoy crap positions that no sane person would ever want. From this I’ve come to conclude that most of what they told you on Career Day was nonsense made up by people who have never been within fifty miles of a clue, let alone had one – and that anything that pays the bills, puts a roof over your head and food on the table, and doesn’t put more wear on your nerves than you can handle is a good thing, even if it does sometimes involve asking customers if they would like to purchase shards of potato starch fried in vegetable shortening…