And After Work, I Walked Home Barefoot in the Snow

My 18-year-old niece phoned last week, and the conversation soon got around to her summer job. She’s still talking about starting junior college in the fall and, knowing she had been working at McDonald’s, I asked how the job was going and if she’s saving any money.

I regret now that I didn’t write down the exact time of her response, for it may well mark the moment at which I entered fuddy-duddyhood.

Her response was: “Oh, I’m not working there anymore. I’m just not the fast-food type.”

I felt my cholesterol rising. Another hair fell out. A wrinkle deepened.

I’m just not the fast-food type. To clarify, I’m sure what she meant was that she’d be the fast-food type if she were the general manager of the franchise or, perhaps, vice president in charge of worldwide marketing. But that the thought that she, a recent high school graduate and almost 19 years old, would work as a cashier or at the drive-through window . . . well, her indignation singed the phone line.

Thus, I formally announce my entry into middle age. Chronologically, it probably set in a few years ago, but today is graduation day because, to my knowledge, this is the first column where I’ve ever written, “Back in my day . . . “

Back in my day, I wasn’t the run- the- plastic- sack- full- of- potatoes- through- the- stapling- machine type.

But that was the warehouse job I got while trying to make a few bucks. It was your basic crummy job: fill a flimsy plastic sack with potatoes, then pull the ends of the sack tight across the top so it could be run through a stapling machine that secured the contents. This was a volume business, mind you, so there was no dilly-dallying with the sacking and stapling. We only had a few seconds to bind each bag.

Job hazards were threefold:

* Hold the sack too long while running it through the machine and you might staple your fingers to the sack.

* Not hold the sack long enough and the staples might not take hold, so that when you released the sack after it passed the machine, the contents spilled all over the warehouse floor.

* And the greatest risk of all: If you did everything perfectly, hour after hour, you would get bored to death.

With the exception of covering a school board meeting, there is no boredom like warehouse floor boredom. How many times did I stand there and daydream, Oh, if I could just have a job someday where I’d get paid to to sit around in an office with my feet up on the desk and be an irritating know-it-all .

Cautionary note: Be careful what you daydream about. But that’s another story.

Anyway, back to the subject at hand. I don’t remember if they had McDonald’s in my day, but taking orders for burgers sounds a whole lot better than being stapled to a sack of potatoes.

Sheesh, kids today.

Back in my day, the job was incidental to earning money. The thought of working long hours and doing back-breaking, mind-numbing work was not cause for turning the job down.

Back in my day, we knew our parents didn’t have much money, and we were honor-bound to make money. My older sister started de-tasseling corn under the scorching Nebraska summer sun (picture the sweat pouring off those doughty young cornhusking youths) when she was 14. I’m trying to picture my niece in a cornfield in 90-degree temperatures and suddenly coming upon a worm in an ear of corn.

Like, gross.

So, what did I tell my niece? Did I give her a good talking-to about how there’s virtue in all work and how she just ought to be thankful she had a job?

Of course not. I said, “Oh, that’s too bad.” Somehow, I didn’t think she’d appreciate tales from the warehouse.

I never got around to asking her if she’s looking for another job. Or, what she plans to do for money when school starts. Why bum her out with such stupid questions?

Ever since our conversation, though, I’ve been stewing. I know each generation is supposed to want their children to have it better than they did, and, yet, I have an overpowering desire for my niece to get up at 6:30 in the morning and take a bus to work and get 30 minutes for lunch and be bone-tired at the end of the day. And all for peanuts.

Is that so wrong? Shouldn’t every 18-year-old have to do that?

You know what, I feel much better just getting this off my chest.

I like the sound of, “Back in my day . . . “

Say, maybe being a fuddy-duddy won’t be so bad, after all.