Better Late than Never: My Personal Essay

I wake up to the sound of a fire alarm going off. It’s five o’clock a.m. on a Tuesday morning. The fire alarm isn’t real, but instead the sound of my alarm clock on my cellphone. I quickly race to the bathroom and take my morning shower as I get ready to start my day. I’m in a motel room in some small town in New Jersey. After I get out of the shower my friend who I shared the room with takes over the bathroom. As I sit on the bed watching Sports Center on ESPN, I find it hard stop thinking about “what am I doing with my life?”. I am twenty-two years old, my life is just beginning and I already think it is over.

Working for a stadium seating company out of Rehoboth, Massachusetts called L & J Associates, the job consists of traveling mostly around the east coast (Maine, New Hampshire, New York, Conneticut, New Jersey, Maryland, Pennsylvania). I leave on a Monday and come home either Friday or Saturday, I’m home for two-to-three nights and then take off again. Now some may say well at least your traveling, getting to see the world. But there is an enormous difference between traveling and working! After putting in 10-12 hour work days, not only do I not have the time to go sightseeing nor the energy. The job pays $11 per hour, which after a 60-65 hour work week can be quiet profitable, but take into consideration the $125 you must take with you every week for food, drinks, beer, snacks on break. Plus being home for only two or three nights means you only see friends/girlfriends for two or three nights a week, so that’s another $50-75 going to a club or dinner and a movie. I can recall countless mornings sitting in bed wondering what the hell am I doing here? How did I get here? Easy answer; flunking out of a community college pretty much sums it up. So when your parents refuse to pay for you to go back to school thinking that your only going to fail again, you need to go to work and pay your own way. Which is exactly what I did, dispite the pain and suffering I went through of working like a slave for two and a half years. The feeling of not being able to walk straight because your feet ache so bad. The feeling of a waisted life every day looking at the people who do this for a living. I knew from the first month, this is not what I want to be doing for the rest of my life.

Not to knock the men who do work there as a career, a few of them who are very successful. There are 3 bosses; one of whom started the company and is currently a millionaire, while the other two each own big houses, drive nice cars, paid for college tuition for their children, and bought cars for their children among other things. But take into affect they have put 20+ years into the company; a back-breaking, sweat-dripping,life-consuming, sun-up-til-sun-down-profession. A profession which I was not willing to accept. My parents always told me: do what you love, try and find a job or career that doesn’t seem like work, and you’ll find happyness. And if there was one thing about this job I can say is that I wasn’t happy doing it. I ended up saving up enough money to enroll in last year and gave the company my two weeks, because unless I took on-line classes I would not be able to continue working here while going to school. And by the time I get out of working the last thing I want to do is have to do homework . So for now I am taking the advice from my parents and pursueing a career in video game development, and the decent paying/job-from-hell now remains as a summer job or getaway as some people see it.