Why Pointless Jobs are Overrated

I graduated from college in May of 2005 and all I wanted was a pointless job. Work should stay at work, at least for a while. I needed to get my life organized, and I figured that about a year should do it. Now it is almost a year in the future and I learned many things about the pointless, first job you get after you acheive a B. A. in something.

As an English major, I quickly learned that unless I went the academic route, there was very little I was trained to do in the real world. I had decided that I wanted to be a professor, and immediately decided I would be writing a senior thesis, and on William Blake, no less. It was right around the beginning of my senior year at Boston College that I realized that I had given myself more work than I was prepared to do. As a senior, I suddenly became very confused about what I wanted to do with my life, even though mere months before, I was convinced a Ph.D. was somewhere in my future.

By the end of the term, I could no longer hear the words "William Blake" and "grad school." I couldn't wait to get a silly job making coffee or selling clothes. A job I didn't have to think about. I was sick of poring over books in the library, of making notes in my laptop until I was crosseyed. It was time to have no emotional connection to my work! I was thrilled when I started making sandwiches at an expensive café near the Harbor in Boston. I was there for about two days.

My next job, making $7.50 and hour, was at the Harvard Coop, in the clothing department. I must admit that I was all smiles for the first two weeks or so that I was working there. I was nice to people, and very considerate of hysterical mothers who *need* the sweat pants in extra small, even though we don't carry them. Shoppers are very unreasonable people. The honeymoon period quickly ended and soon I was getting headaches, even migrains, and working weekends makes every day exactly the same. It's very depressing. I had taken this job because I had no responsibility beyond showing up and doing my shift. This job, whether I liked it or not, was coming home with me.

Being sorely overqualified for something makes for a very unfulfilling experience. After a while I wondered why I was putting up with people who assumed that because I was behind a register I wasn't qualified for anything better. When you've graduated from a top college with honors and as a member of Phi Beta Kappa, it's difficult to put up with people talking down to you.

Working a pointless job did have its benefits: it made me make up my mind about graduate school. This fall I will be starting at Pratt Institute's School of Information and Library Science. I never could shake off my bookishness.