As with many former BYU students, I have a love/hate thing with living in Utah. There are many good things (access to skiing, prominence of the church, close to many locations from the hit film 'Footloose'), but there were just too many bad things for me to stick around much longer than absolutely necessary -- with crappy student job prospects being at the top of my list. I had to pay my own way through school, and after grants and loans, I still needed to work. So I did telemarketing. I sold t-shirts that I made (my best seller was a Brigham Young quote - "You can go to Provo or you can go to hell."). I also sold several paintings. I unloaded trucks for Color Spot. I participated in some paid psychological studies in the Kimball Tower (mostly playing video games where they watched me). I even worked in the deli section of a Dan's Foods (ugh, to this day the stink of ham still bothers me. Not even bleach could get the stink off my hands).
But the job I always admired was the flock of students picking up trash on campus. How did they get this free-loading piece of cake gig? I sure couldn't get onboard that gravy train. And you'd never see one or two of them, picking up trash and moving across the quad quietly and efficiently. No. There were always gaggles of them. 10, maybe 15 of them at a time, half of them standing around, the other half sort of casually looking for trash. Maybe. There was always the dedicated loser who was concerned that he wasn't "magnifying his calling" as a member of the trash herd, but the rest of them were obviously basking in the glory of their do-nothing job. Most would just lumber about, chatting it up. I swear there were couples. That's right -- what a great way to pick up chicks. Or hang with your fiance who you had known for almost 3 weeks. All while looking for garbage on a campus that never has litter anyway.
Damn, I wanted that job. I wonder how much something like that pays?
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