Well I got me an everyman suit and a firm handshake
I'm looking for a line of work and some money to make
I just hope I don't have to take a job in Cleveland
It's just a little too far from my current state
She was sipping coffee, looking out onto the cars creeping by on the busy street adjacent to the coffee shop where we decided to meet up. I didn’t like coffee, but the weather was cool and windy enough that I’d decided to partake in some hot chocolate.
“I don’t understand it,” she said, “Devin doesn’t have a job, Bin doesn’t either. All they do is sit around the apartment all day and play those video games and then go out and get drunk all night. Even when they do get jobs, all they do is bartend. I was sure they were going to make a lot more of themselves.”
“Well, they did both drop out of college-” I interjected.
“That’s not what I mean. They should at least be working towards something respectable. They’re all just bums. Even Ed, who has a degree and a job just works tech support for $8 an hour.”
“He has a degree in English. But besides, you have to start somewhere, don’t you?” I asked.
“So says Mr. Unemployed.”
“I’m a college student!”
“No excuse. You know you could handle a job. You just aren’t looking for one.”
“I am, actually.”
“Not hard enough. You’re just like the rest. Bums! The whole lot of you!
Now it helps in an interview to be a little insistent
that you never pumped gas you were a customer fuel assistant
mowing lawns was a stint in agricultural landscape
and your paper route was a journalistic means of escape
Some months later, we were engaged in a romantic entanglement too complicated to really explain. I’d moved out of the dorms to an apartment, but was still unable to find work. She was still plugging away at the staffing agency’s headquarters. She’d left Devin and Bin and their sloth behind. That I was unemployed was not exactly of a whole lot of comfort to her.
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