Summer Isn’t All Lazy Pool Days When You’re Paid By The Hour
I got off a 6am opening shift at the coffee shop I work at an hour ago, and my feet still ache in that specific, dull way that comes from standing on concrete in non-slip shoes. It’s already 87 degrees out, the kind of sticky mid-July heat that makes your shirt stick to your back before you even walk half a block, and a tourist stopped me on the sidewalk five minutes ago to ask if I wasn’t so lucky to have such a slow, easy summer now that the college kids are gone. I just smiled and said yeah, it’s pretty nice, same as I always do. I didn’t get into the real answer.
No one really asks what we actually do with all that “free time” hourly staff get when business slows down for summer. They just assume we’re out hiking, or reading by the pool, or having barbecue every weekend. Let me tell you what we actually do. We fill gaps.
Most of us got our hours cut when the semester ended, right? We went from five shifts a week to three, or four to two. That means more time off, sure, but that also means less money on every paycheck. So that extra time isn’t for lazing around. It’s for filling in the gaps with other work. Mia, the other barista who’s been here two years, picked up two days a week at the daycare down the street. The problem is, her coffee shift is at 2pm on those days, and the daycare gets out at 12:30, and her apartment is 17 minutes away across town. Gas is $3.50 a gallon right now, so it’s not worth driving all the way home just to turn around and come back. I saw her last week sitting on a park bench outside the rec center, eating a day-old chocolate chip cookie she brought from the shop, when a mom with a stroller stopped and asked if she was playing hooky from work. Mia just laughed and shook her head, didn’t explain. Who wants to get into it with a stranger about how you can’t afford the gas to waste a trip home?
I get it. I walk dogs between my morning coffee shifts, to make up the $200 or so I lose every month from cut hours. Yesterday I walked three golden retrievers for a family out of town, and the biggest one pulled me right into a patch of poison ivy off the trail. Now I have this itchy red rash on my ankle that I’m scratching through my jeans right now, and I spent $12 on calamine lotion last night that doesn’t even work. The most exciting thing I’ve done in the past three weeks that wasn’t work or scrambling for more work was sit on my roommate’s balcony and read a whole novel in one day, and that was only because my car broke down and I couldn’t afford to fix it for three days, so I couldn’t get to any of my dog walks. That’s the closest I’ve gotten to that lazy summer everyone talks about.
Jake, our closer, picked up framing work with his uncle on his days off. He was making pretty good extra money for a month, until he slipped on a wet stack of lumber two weeks ago and wrenched his shoulder. He can’t lift anything heavier than a gallon of milk right now, and he won’t go to the doctor because his hourly job doesn’t give him insurance, and he can’t afford the copay even if he had it. So now he spends most afternoons sitting on his mom’s porch icing it, scrolling Facebook Marketplace trying to sell his old gaming console to make up for the construction pay he’s missing. There haven’t been any extra shifts at the shop to give him, because we all have cut hours. It’s a dead end that no one talks about.
I went to a cousin’s birthday cookout last weekend, and she’s a full-time admin at an insurance company, gets two weeks of paid vacation every year. She leaned over while we were grilling and asked me, “So what’s the coolest thing you’ve done this summer with all that free time?” And I just stared for a second, because the coolest thing I’d done that month was wait 40 minutes at the grocery store for their weekly discounted chicken thighs, then count out my change to see if I could afford a half-gallon of vanilla ice cream to go with it. I didn’t say that, of course. I just said “Oh, nothing too crazy, it’s been nice” because who wants to be the wet blanket at a cookout ruining everyone’s idea of what summer is supposed to be?
My friend Lila works hourly at the college dining hall, which closes completely for two months in summer. So what did she do? She lined up three back-to-back house sitting gigs, so she doesn’t have to pay rent this month. That sounds nice, right? Free place to stay, all summer. But it means she’s sleeping in other people’s guest rooms, has to feed their weird picky fish that need special food only sold at the pet store across town, and she can’t have friends over because all the owners said no guests. Last week she got locked out of the house she was sitting because the old deadbolt broke, and she had to sit on the curb for three hours waiting for the owners to drive back from their lake cabin to let her in, because they wouldn’t let a locksmith touch it without them there. She had a pack of mint gum and her phone, that was it. She texted me that night saying she’d give anything to be back on her own lumpy couch eating cold pizza.
I don’t know. It’s not all bad. Some afternoons, when I’m done with my shifts and I have a little extra cash, I stop and get a snow cone and sit by the river for 20 minutes. Yesterday I saw Mia and Jake sitting in Mia’s beat up Civic in the coffee shop parking lot, sharing a bag of barbecue chips, waiting for their shift to start in 40 minutes. They had the windows down, Taylor Swift was playing on the radio, and for a second it looked like that perfect lazy summer everyone posts about. Then I heard Mia say she can’t afford to get her broken breaks fixed, and Jake said he still can’t pick up more construction shifts because his shoulder hurts too bad when he lifts. We joked about our manager scheduling everyone 4-hour shifts so he doesn’t have to give us mandatory breaks, complained about the heat, then we all clocked in.
No neat ending here. I still haven’t gone to the city pool this year, the one that’s $10 to get in. I might go next week if I get two extra dog walks. Or I might not, because I’ll probably need that $10 for more calamine lotion. That’s just what summer is when you’re paid by the hour. You fill the gaps, you scramble, you have a few nice moments in between the waiting and the worrying. That’s it.
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