Medium Writer’s Challenge 2021 Honorable Mention Winner
When Your Life’s Work No Longer Works
Working for a living isn’t living
My first paying job? Babysitting, age 12. Mom would pick me up from middle school and drop me at the trailer park just in time to meet sweet little six-year-old April as her bus pulled up.
April and I would walk up the hill to her place where I’d fix her a snack and wait for her mom to finish driving her bus route. Most days it was only half an hour, but it didn’t matter. Every Friday, April’s mom pulled up and handed me $30 cash. It was a sweet gig.
Making money was intoxicating.
From there, I had a very brief stint faking like I was making phone sales for a portrait company. My shift was from 4:00 pm to 8:00 pm. All I remember is me and 5–8 other kids roughly my age sitting in tiny little cubicles like the ones inmates talk across the glass to family members except ours weren’t see through.
We stared at a bulletin board that held our script and the list of assigned phone numbers we were to punch into our green push button phones until we reached someone who didn’t slam the receiver down before we got ‘hello’ out.
