a job is a job
Written on December 28th, 2023 by Anthony Ponce
I’ve worked a lot of different jobs—some in the mornings, others during the day, even ones that went all night. I’ve sold all kinds of shoes, legally manufactured cannabis products, and even got to golf a little bit.
Those are all stories for another time. My current job isn’t at all glamorous. I just deliver groceries. It isn’t cool at all, and it’s hard to even tell someone exactly what I do because they assume I just do UberEATS or Doordash. Not to knock those, but I think Instacart is just flat out better all around, mostly for pay. Still, it doesn’t exactly command a ton of respect on resumes. I like it, though. It’s providing me with flexibility with school, and I make like $22 an hour on weekends, but mostly float at like $18 an hour throughout the week. I usually drive like 5-6 hours a day and make over/under $100 bucks any given day. Is it a career? Probably not. But I mean, if I drove 12 hours, I would make about $200 a day, not the worst gig in the world. I get to listen to AM 570 and can hit my vape whenever I want. Sometimes I’ll sneak an item or something at the self-checkout for myself as a little treat. Any downtime I got, I just sit in my car with the AC going reading something on my phone or sometimes if I think it’ll be a slow day, I bring a book along with me.
It isn’t without faults; every so often, something happens that kills your mood. “Tip baiting” is basically when a person will say they are tipping a nice amount, then you deliver it, and suddenly you end up with like a $0.35 tip. Fortunately, it only happened to me once. Basically, they wanted that meme sports drink PRIME, and the store location I was sent to was completely out of stock, and they didn’t want any replacements. I still had to deliver the rest of the order, but they took my original $10 tip down to like $0.60 cents. Shit was outrageous. I laughed it off because it was like my 3rd delivery of the day, but still, man, some people don’t got any shame. Sometimes it’s gratifying when I deliver to an old person or someone disabled, and I know that I helped a person get things they otherwise would struggle to grab themselves. The hardest delivery is the first delivery. Just finding the motivation to get out the door is hard sometimes. Once you do it, you realize how much of a non-issue it is.
A job is a job. That is what I’ve grown up learning is the right thing. Every job deserves respect, and you should take pride in whatever job you are at.
This wasn’t something I learned from my family, though. I learned this in spite of them. My mom would shit on every single job I ever had. It didn’t matter how much I was making or how young I was; it was always the same comments about how those little jobs aren’t gonna get you anywhere and to take school more seriously. I get the sentiment, but it was counterproductive because it made me take a lot of my jobs for granted. I got into some good companies and didn’t really understand it until after I quit or burned the bridges. Not gonna scapegoat that for my lack of discipline, but it definitely takes the wind out of your sails to hear your mom say your job doesn’t mean anything when you were genuinely excited. I always got asked to pay rent while my brother never was. He was in school, I wasn’t. I hated school because of this. People got free money from the government, and I was working graveyards at the OC Fair or trying to turn around an order for ROVE at Se7enleaf. Come to think of it, the only job she ever liked was Nike, and that was because she could use my employee discount. To be fair, though, that shit was a good-ass discount, so no hate there.
A job is a job. And I’ve had plenty, so trust me when I tell you this one ain’t that bad.
