Comments on: privilege keeps knocking on my door

By: Something I Have Been Mulling Over « random babble…

Something I Have Been Mulling Over « random babble… — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 08:55:08 +0000

[...] should act. Labels have a way of dividing us. We are no more the sum of our labels than we are the sum of our jobs. When we put a label on someone (”she’s sex positive so she gives in to the [...]

By: whatsername

whatsername — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 16:13:55 +0000

Shout out to all the other service workers!

I honestly do judge other people on how they treat us.

By: ouyangdan

ouyangdan — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 05:39:17 +0000

well fucking said, carissa

By: carissa

carissa — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 04:47:38 +0000

I worked in the service industry for a long long time. I actually loved it, but gawd the customers could be such pricks! Still, it taught me a lot about me and what I could stand, what I wouldn’t put up with, AND what to teach the kid about service workers. I judge the men I date on how they treat service workers and its gotten me some pretty good guys.

Not everyone can be a CEO. Someone has to take out the trash or clean the toilet or serve or cook or deliver mail or drive your kids’ school busses, yada yada.

I am not my job. My job is what puts food on my table, and books in my hands.

People who mistake their job with their self-worth don’t have any.

By: Red Queen

Red Queen — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 05:21:33 +0000

Me neither. Though I’ve been in college for damn near ever.

Once long ago I worked as a receptionist for a type of engineering company that inspected houses. I answered a lot of client questions so I learned my technical shit backwards and forwards.

One of our inspectors went and did a scientifically impossible job on a house. He was looking for moisture levels in a house built with a metal screen in the walls to hold the stucco up. This makes the moisture meters not work, they measure conductivity and unsurprisingly his results said the whole building was a soggy wet mess

When I pointed this out, the boss screamed “why the hell is it that a 20k a year receptionist knows this when a 100k engineer doesn’t?”

It was one of the few times I felt vindicated. Ever.

By: ouyangdan

ouyangdan — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 03:46:34 +0000

Some one (if he still lurks here, he knows who he is) once asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and since I was going to school to become a teacher, that is what I answered.

No, he told me. You are not the job you do. What kind of person do you want to be?

Thanks, Tobes.

I didn’t even finish college.

By: Tobes

Tobes — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 03:35:57 +0000

I seriously cried reading this post. I have let myself be berated for leaving college with only (only!) a four year degree and taking a receptionist gig. I let people make me feel small and I let them do shit like that. You reminded me that we are not the sum of our jobs and its okay to enjoy our 8 to 5′s that pay the bills and keep up going.

Thank you so much for writing this and I’m sorry that asshole scared you.