The job pool right now is a Dixie cup and the college graduates are a big, fat guy doing a cannonball off the high board.  A good number of the overeducated and underemployed chose to be Liberal Arts majors.  I suppose that was just an error in judgment.  I’m sure there are some who don’t regret this choice, but I’m not one of them. I’d sell that stupid piece of paper back to the university at half-price, if I could. 

I have an Honours degree in English Lit & Creative Writing and I’ve just been fired from a housekeeping position at a major hotel chain.  I don’t have any animosity; I really wasn’t cut out to be a housekeeper.  It’d be like getting angry if the circus fired me for being a sub par lion tamer.  Or fired what was left of me.  Out of a cannon.  

Housekeeping in any hotel is a thoroughly underappreciated vocation.  Watch a music video that has any hotel footage and imagine having thirty minutes to make that room rentable again.  

I wonder about the old lady in laundry sometimes.  She’d worked in the same laundry room for twenty-six years.  If it was a prison laundry room and she was a convicted murderer, she’d be free to go.  I wonder if she ever regards her laundry job as an extended life sentence.  

I know I could never put in that kind of time.  My thoughts while cleaning often drifted to suicide if I was above the fifteenth floor.  I’d stare out the huge picture window at the ground below and come up with hilarious ways to die.  

A recurring fantasy involved me cleaning a guest’s room while he was still in there.  I’d act all happy-go-lucky until I hit the bathroom.  I’d come out with tears streaming down my face and point at him, mouth agape like an extra from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and scream, “You monster, you peed on the seat?!”  During his momentary stunned silence I would swan dive out the window.  

I’m telling you, that guy never misses the water again.  If he’s an emotional guy, he might pee sitting down.  And if he’s a really emotional guy, I see a future of bladder infections and possible kidney rupture from holding it in too long.    

MAID PLUMMETS TO HER DEATH, WIFE OF ROOM 1708 HAS NO IDEA WHOM TO THANK FOR HER ALWAYS PRISTINE TOILET BOWL.

I’ve forever had a problem turning off my brain and focusing on mundane tasks-at-hand.  It’s not ADD, I’ve never had a problem following goings on.  But I didn’t exactly win the genetic lottery being the eldest child of not one, but two English majors.  I certainly didn’t fall far from the tree.  Come to think of it, I didn’t fall so much as scrape up my apple cheeks rolling down the trunk. 

I think they should start teaching our youth to just say no to poetic discourse, like with drugs and the D.A.R.E. program.  Eventually the kids would realize that some form of experimentation is okay, and maybe even necessary, but they should never overindulge and offer it carte blanche control of their professional lives.

I often wonder if I’ve cursed myself to a lifetime of job dissatisfaction or if I’m just the egocentric personification of FAIL, as I still don’t really know what I want to be when I grow up.  In a way, my future is like an elaborate dinner party that I invited everyone I know to attend, only I’m shocked when they arrive since I hadn’t actually prepared anything to serve.  

In hindsight, I should have gone for a Biochem major.  Or at the very least taken a couple elective physics courses, so that future me could theoretically time travel to past me and kindly explain that English is for retards and Science is balls.