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Now that school's out, I realized that I had to do some serious thinking about what I was going to do with my summer. I should have been thinking about it a lot more at the end of the school year, but I kept putting it off, what with finals, parties, awards night, and all that. Here it was, the first week of summer vacation, and I still didn't know what I wanted to do. My parents were really getting on my case about it. I was scrambling.
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Tyler Valdez
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I quickly examined my options. The faculty advisor for our school newspaper had told me about an unpaid internship for high school kids at the alternative weekly newspaper that's published here in Boston. That sounded pretty cool. My father (the professor) thought I should work for one of his colleagues at the University, setting up an electronic database to help him organize his research for a book he's writing on the history of CIA involvement in Central America. Exposing the horrible things the CIA has done to Latin Americans is always a good thing, plus I thought I'd learn a lot and it would look great on my college application. My mother seemed eager to get me out of the house, too. She had a job for me at her office, taking phone calls and signing people up for the big Walk-a-Thon at the end of the summer.
I showed up for the intern orientation at the weekly newspaper. They put me and a whole bunch of other eager high school journalist types in a windowless room that smelled like pizza grease and told us what we'd be doing. I'd been envisioning myself sitting right there, with a real writer, seeing how professional journalists work. But I soon realized that this place doesn't even have any writers on staff! The whole thing is written by freelancers, who work out of their homes. I also realized that this paper I'd been reading ever since I realized that there's more to life than the Boston Globe, when you looked at it closely, consisted mostly of phone-sex ads, desperate personal ads from lonely people, ads for lame radio stations, and music and movie reviews that are no better than the ones in my school newspaper. The college student who explained the different jobs to us right away assigned me to transcribing the personals that are called in every minute of the day and night.
After a whole day of writing down people's race, marital status, and sexual preference (GWM, BDBF, SWMHJ, whatever...), I realized that there was no way I could do this every day for the rest of the summer. I asked my supervisor if I would get a chance to work more closely with the editors and writers, and he said no. So I said thanks, but this isn't for me. My parents were very disappointed, but the next day I started working for my father's colleague — let's call him Professor Ruiz. As it turned out, this was also an unpaid internship. After both my father and Professor Ruiz had told me how exciting this job was going to be, and how much I was going to learn, I realized after working just five days what the real deal was. All I was supposed to do was work my way through a huge, dusty pile of magazine articles, and enter certain facts and information about each one into a database that some previous intern had created.
I guess the job wouldn't have been so terrible, except that I was the only person in the office pretty much all day long. I sat in front of a computer for four hours, had lunch all by myself, sat in front of a computer for another three hours, and then went home. I couldn't even call outside the University on his office phone! Once I got used to doing the data entry, my mind started to wander while I worked. I thought about how ridiculous it was for a high school kid to be doing work for free that some starving grad student should be getting paid for. Then, that made me think, "Hey, I should be getting paid! Why should I be doing this for free? I'm not even learning anything!" So I told Prof. Ruiz I didn't think this was going to work for me. He said he didn't care one way or the other who entered his data, but my dad was kind of disappointed in me.
To make him feel better about the situation, I started working at my mom's office the next day. Compared to the other jobs, it was heaven. For one thing, I was getting paid. True, the hourly rate wasn't even enough to support my frappucino habit, but because it was a nonprofit organization it was good for my college application. I also really liked my mom's co-workers, most of whom were part-time volunteers — they were super-funny, they took me thrift-shopping at lunch-time, and we got to listen to '70s disco all day long. None of them were my age, though, and I also started to feel like I had no identity of my own. I was constantly being introduced and referred to as my mother's daughter, never as "Tyler." After a couple weeks of this, I nervously told my parents at dinner that I really wanted to make more money this summer, and to strike out on my own.
The thing is, for the past year my best friend Maude Hughes (she asked me to put her whole name in my column so she could see it on Tripod) had been trying to get me to work with her at the Red Lobster next to our favorite movie theater. She worked there last summer, was always flashing lots of cash from her tips, and got to meet lots of different kinds of guys and other people. Even though it was almost July already, Maude said she could still get me a job there, because the manager really likes her. So I said "Why not?" and started the following Friday night.
It was chaotic. I hated my uniform, being around all that seafood started to gross me out, and even though I was just being trained in by another waitress, the customers were really obnoxious to me. The other waiters and waitresses were really nice to me, though, and after training for a few days, I started to get pretty good at it and all of a sudden I was raking in the dough. Now, I actually look forward to going to work at night. It's really hard work, though. Your skin gets all greasy and the cooks yell at you for no reason. You're so tired the next day that you can't do anything but spend your tip money. Worst of all, a lot of customers come in with a bad attitude and think you're just there to serve only them.
I really like working at Red Lobster a lot, compared to those other jobs I tried, but I know being a waitress isn't going to help me any on my college applications. It's good that I'm making more money than I would have at those other jobs, though. The best thing about working at this job is all the different kinds of people I meet. The dishwashers, the cooks, the busboys, the managers, even the customers, all have something special to offer if you just know how to pay attention. Even though I realize that no college admissions office is going to be impressed by my career at Red Lobster, I'm still learning a lot more about life than I would have at any of those sit-around, do-nothing jobs. I guess it's a trade-off.
Tyler Valdez is hype, yo. This is the fourth issue of her Mad Crib. Catch up on what you missed in Tyler's archive.
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