I Work Hourly, So You’re Wondering What I Do All Summer? It’s Not All Pool Days, That’s For Sure
My cousin texted me yesterday, mid-morning, when I was standing behind the counter of the college bookstore where I work. “Must be nice,” it said, followed by one of those playful eye-roll emojis. “Sitting around doing nothing all summer while I’m stuck in a cubicle sweating through my blouse.” I didn’t reply right away, because right then a retiree came in needing a new school-branded coffee mug for his granddaughter starting in the fall, and I had to dig through a dusty box of extra mugs in the back closet where the AC doesn’t work. When I got back up front, I stared at his text for five minutes, trying to figure out how to explain what I actually do all summer, and ended up just typing “lol yeah it’s something” and hitting send. That’s the thing, no one ever really asks for the real answer anyway.
For the uninitiated, I’m full-time hourly during the school year, when campus is packed with students buying textbooks, overpriced hoodies, and energy bars before 8am lectures. Summer? The campus empties out except for a couple of small summer classes and a rotating roster of kid camps that use the dorms. Some days we get 10 customers all day. Hourly rules mean you can’t clock out early unless management sends you home, so you have to stay, clocked in, and look busy. That’s the unwritten rule I learned my first summer here: if you look bored, you’re “not being a team player,” so you have to invent work. I rearrange the sticker section by the register at least twice a week. I wipe down the glass front door so often there’s barely any streaks left to get. Last week I sorted the entire lost and found bin by color—socks, hoodies, water bottles, even the weird collection of student IDs dating back to 2014 that no one ever claims. The district manager popped in unannounced halfway through that, nodded approvingly, and said “good to see you keeping busy when it’s slow.” I didn’t tell him I’d already sorted lost and found two weeks earlier.
Some days, though, management decides we’re too slow, and they send you home two, four, even six hours early. That’s the other side of it. Last Tuesday I was scheduled 10 to 6, got sent home at 1. I stood outside the bookstore for 10 minutes after, trying to figure out what to do. I’d counted on that $50-ish in wages to cover my half of the internet bill this month, so suddenly having a whole empty afternoon doesn’t feel like a gift. It feels like a hole I have to fill without spending any money. The bus fare back to my apartment is $3, so I just walked down to the city park a few blocks away and sat on a bench for three hours, people-watching, until my roommate got off work and I could bum a ride home. A kid selling lemonade for 50 cents a cup gave me a free one because he felt bad I was just sitting alone. That was nice, but it wasn’t exactly the fun vacation my cousin imagines.
I see this same weird limbo everywhere I go. The barista at the coffee shop down the street, she’s hourly too. I went in for a $1 drip coffee last week at 2pm, and she was sitting on a milk crate behind the counter reading a bodice ripper romance, but she stuffed it under the counter so fast when the door jingled that I almost felt bad for her. She told me later she can’t read out front when the manager’s around, even if there’s no one to serve. The lifeguard at the community pool near my place, he’s hourly, sits up on that chair for four hours a day, can’t touch his phone, can’t even slouch. I talked to him after my swim last weekend, he said he counted 192 different cloud shapes last Monday because it was overcast and slow. Said his back hurts from sitting up straight all day, and he only makes 25 cents more an hour than I do.
I got asked the same “must be nice” question at my aunt’s backyard barbecue two weeks ago. She’s got a kid who’s a high school teacher, so she said “Aren’t you just loving all that time off this summer? You should go take a road trip!” I was holding a plate with a hot dog and potato salad, and I didn’t want to make a big scene, so I just smiled and said maybe I’d do a day trip to the lake next weekend. I didn’t tell her that if I take a whole weekend off, that’s two shifts I lose, that’s $120 gone, and I still owe my roommate $60 from when I was short on rent last month. I didn’t tell her that time off for hourly people isn’t paid time off. Rent still comes, car insurance still comes, the $12 prescription for my allergy meds still costs money. You can’t just “take off” for fun.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not all bad. Some days I get sent home at 2, and I’ll walk to the grocery store, get a $1 iced tea, and sit under a tree and read for a couple hours, and that’s nicer than being stuck in a cubicle, I’ll give it that. Last week I got an extra two-hour shift closing when someone called out, and that extra $22 was enough to get a cone from the ice cream truck every day after work this week. When it’s slow, I get to daydream, I get to make dumb little lists in the margin of my notebook—lists of weird names on old student IDs, lists of what I’ll buy when I get my next full check, lists of all the different birds I see flying past the store window. That’s kind of nice, in a weird way. No one bothering you with meetings, no one pinging you every five minutes. Just… quiet.
Today I got off work at 4, it was 86 degrees out, the air was thick with humidity, and I bought a cherry popsicle from the bodega around the corner and sat on the curb to eat it. A group of tourists stopped me to ask for directions to the river walk, I pointed them the right way. My phone buzzed halfway through my popsicle, it was my manager asking if I can come in three hours early tomorrow because the other opening person’s kid got sick. I said yes. I need the money. That’s just how it goes. It’s not all lazy pool days, it’s not all grinding 12-hour shifts. It’s mostly waiting, I think. Waiting for customers, waiting for the next paycheck, waiting for the students to come back in fall when hours go back to steady. Some days the waiting’s fine. Some days you’re rearranging the same sticker shelf for the third time in a month and you just want to go home. No big lesson to it, really. That’s just what summer is, when you work hourly. (Word count: 1187)
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