There is no comparison, live to work, or work to live

[HAYABUSA-FMW-]

Okay, I have since been transferred to work on the other side of town. I now work alongside people who do ten times the job I do. I used to do ten times the job of the people who I worked with before.

Its very humbling, yet at the same time, very sad.

I have no right to complain about a 45 hour work-week over 5 days when the guy next to me works 6 days a week for 72 hours.

They have asked me within casual conversation how old I was, thinking I was older than I am. Asking me if I have kids or if I am married. I said "No, but should I be?, I'm very young."

A co-worker was pointed out and said to be my age, she is married already and has 2 kids of her own.

Someone might not have gotten 100% of the details with this one, but they said she works here for the full day, 12 hours, then goes over to a different fast food store to work an overnight-graveyard shift, 8 more hours, sleeping only 2 to 3 hours!
(with the other hour being transportation)

I really hope this isn't done as an everyday routine, and maybe that someone got their facts wrong, or she does this once a week or less.

Wow.
I'm humbled by such hard working individuals.

One guy was asking me about getting a GED. Asking if he could go to college after getting it. I also tried my best to help him with an assignment given by his teacher.

-
For reference, it was about 16 toothpicks arranged into 5 squares, and moving only 2 to create 4 "congruent" squares(with no open shapes).
-

He asked why I was tranferred, I answered that my co-workers weren't doing a good job over at the other store. He said he felt that way about one of our co-workers that day. I didn't want to point out that this particular guy did soo much more compared to the lazy people I worked alongside with recently.

I learned to cut chicken and tried my best to keep up, this being my first time doing this. It was always handled in this store, not the others.

These workers cut hundreds of pieces of chicken a day. They're cutting them quickly and efficiently, maybe 300 while I was there. All the while I was trying to learn to do this and help out, only cutting about 100.

This might be seen as exploitation, this might be seen as they are hard working individuals. Some have families to support, while some live together pooling their money for resources like housing/cars.

Whatever the case, its very humbling to hear and see how things are run on this side.

All the while, last I heard my boss was berating a co-worker behind his back along with the punk teenagers over there. Making a stupid MySpace profile with all of them in it to make fun of him over the internet behind his back.

Hmmph.
What a world, a working world.
Always hearing about "the real world, life is tough, it isn't always fair," seeing it firsthand like this is pretty enlightening.

[HUnewearl_Meira]

The hell of it is, you're only seeing the tip of the ice berg, concerning how tough it can get. Probably one of the toughest jobs I've born witness to is the farm worker. My father owned a ranch when I was growing up, and every summer, a varying cluster of Mexicans would migrate up from the Southern border with their work visas, and we'd put them to work for three months or so, at the end of which, they return to Mexico with their earnings.

These men are up every day at 4 or 5 in the morning. They put on some modest clothes, and make a journey to whatever field it is they'll be working in today, to do whatever it is that they've been instructed to do with it.

Sometimes they are to churn the dirt; get it ready to recieve seed. Sometimes they're told to pull weeds. You may think it's a pesky job to weed your hundred square feet of flowerbed once or twice a week, but just imagine weeding tens acres over the course of a week. Sometimes they're out there to pick tomatos or maybe beets. One way or another, they get out there as early in the morning as they realistically can, because they don't want to be out there in the afternoon, as Summer in California's Central Valley can be quite punishing-- it's already 80 degrees at 6:30 in the morning, and it will invariably exceed 102 by 4 in the afternoon, then add to that, the humidity is very low, so you'll dehydrate very quickly.

These men will work no less than 8 hours a day, 6 days a week, and they're getting paid all of minimum wage, saving as much of it as they can, for their return trip to their homes, because this may very well be the most money they make all year.

It'll be worth it, though. When they return home, they return to a cost of living that is dramatically lower than our own, and they can now afford to survive until next summer, so long as they maintain a lower-paying job in Mexico throughout the winter.

These are truely the hardest working men I have ever seen.

It comes to quite a contrast to some of the people I've worked with. A coworker of mine recently quite, because she felt she wasn't being paid enough. I can't be sure, but I'm confident that she was getting paid more than I get paid, despite her habits of continually making poor (but thankfully, mostly inconsequential) decisions. I honestly wish I didn't feel like this, but I'm glad she's leaving. She's one of those people that you've got an irrational dislike for, but you've nothing solid to support your opinion on and you'd sooner try to ignore it than make a scene over it.

It's just... Great cheese and rice. You work in an air conditioned office, at a computer for eight hours a day, five days a week, getting paid at *least* $13 an hour, and you're upset that you're not being properly compensated? Goodness, we all want to make more money, but for the love of a healthy savings account, if you want more money, just make yourself more valueable...

[Daikarin]

http://www.stanford.edu/~jjshed/posters/failure.gif

Pics like these make you feel like making an effort to see life in a good perspective is immature.

Don't let the world change you, as rotten as it may look sometimes. Just because life is tough, doesn't mean you have to grow bad or rough.

You can grow tough by standing solid while life throws shit at you, not letting it shake off your self-confidence one bit. Because the world is never against you, it's always with you.

Problems are a chance for you to make a good deed. Good luck.