It's where I learned to like salad -- it was a good place for me.

[flexagon]

Out at lunch with the new intern, a few of us ended up trading stories of first jobs. I said I worked at Burger King, and this elicited "REALLY?" and quite a lot of laughter from one of my newer co-workers. Sure, when I was a teenager I did, and it was a good first job in a lot of ways. People nodded, and this coworker was shocked to find that most of us around the table had had some kind of food-service or blue-collar job when we were teenagers. "So you guys... you weren't working these jobs because you needed the money, did you, it's more like a cultural thing?"

Well, we got some allowance, but for real spending money to buy our own stuff we needed the jobs, sure. Why, what was your first job, we asked?

It's a totally different culture, he said. Yeah, I didn't say, it's called being rich.

Someone said something about feeling sorry for kids who have too much handed to them. I might have nodded, but I didn't mean it. I know a few people who have grown up with money, and it really hasn't messed them up. Hello, bitter jealousy... ugh... it's the offhanded assumption that everyone has money that tends to get to me.

Comments

[bluechromis.livejournal.com]

Yeah, there are a lot of protected people out there...they genuinely don't know how different things can be. I do NOT feel sorry for them. Sure, a lot of them don't have the same survival skills other people do, but they don't really need them either. I was the only one at my school in OR that had a "real" job during the school year, ie. wasn't just occasionally helping at my parent's office or something. And yeah, I was bitterly jealous, rightfully so, imo.

[flexagon]

I have an ex-coworker who claims to be surrounded by the remnants of once-wealthy families. She says they make really dumb pride-based financial decisions and are basically losing everything. I guess so... it must sometimes happen... this is the only even secondhand evidence I have heard though.