What I Actually Do With My Summer As An Hourly Worker
Last weekend my aunt texted me out of the blue, asking if I was planning any fun summer trips now that it’s warm out. I stared at the text for five minutes while I ate a cold hot dog I grabbed from the grocery store hot bar on my 15 minute break. What do I tell her? That half the time I don’t even know what days I’m working next week, let alone have $500 to spare for a weekend at a cabin upstate? That if I miss more than one shift a month, I’m scrambling to cover rent for my half of the run-down duplex I share with my roommate Jake? I just texted back “Not much, just working a lot!” and left it at that.
People seem to have this weird idea that hourly workers get summers off, or at least get to laze around more when it’s warm out. It’s not that simple. It just looks different, depending on where you work. Jake does hourly landscaping for a local company, so summer is his busy season. He leaves the house at 6 a.m. every day, comes home at 4 covered in mosquito bites and grass stains, and can barely keep his eyes open through a microwave burrito for dinner before he passes out. Last week he worked a 12 hour day hauling mulch for a rich guy’s lake house, came home, and fell asleep on the couch before I even got home from my second shift. He didn’t even wake up to turn the AC on, just slept through the night in 80 degree heat.
Me, I work the checkout at the same grocery store, here in a college town. Once all the students leave for summer, the store cuts everyone’s hours by 8 to 10 a week. So instead of working 40 hours at one job, I picked up a 20 hour a week opening shift at the coffee shop downtown, plus I clean my friend’s mom’s house every other Wednesday for 50 bucks cash. So I’m actually working more hours total than I was during the school year, just split across three different schedules I have to scribble down on a crumpled receipt I keep in my phone case.
Last month I covered a 4 a.m. stock shift for the store manager, who went to Hawaii with his kids for two weeks. I’d closed the coffee shop at 8 p.m. the night before, so I only got three hours of sleep before I had to be at the grocery. I showed up, my jeans still had coffee stains on the knee from spilling a latte on myself, and halfway through stocking the pickle aisle I dropped an entire case of dill pickles. Glass everywhere, brine soaking through my sneakers. I just stood there for a minute, staring at the mess, because I was too tired to even get mad. The other older stock guy, Gary, handed me a root beer from the break room fridge and helped me clean it up, so it wasn’t the end of the world. It just… happened. That’s how most of summer goes for me, honestly. One small messy thing after another.
When I do get a random stretch of unplanned time off, it’s not some fun vacation. It’s just… waiting, or scrambling for more work. Last Wednesday I only had a 4 hour shift starting at 4 p.m., so I had the whole morning free. I made a list of all the stuff I needed to do: mow the tiny patch of grass out front of the duplex, plant the marigolds I bought at the grocery store a month ago, fix the wobbly leg on my kitchen chair. Instead I spent two hours scrolling through the local gig Facebook group looking for extra moving jobs, because my 1998 Civic’s transmission has been making this weird whine when I turn left, and I need to save $800 to fix it before it dies completely on the highway. Then I got sucked into a 100 comment thread about a guy who scammed a retired teacher out of $150 for moving a bedroom set, and before I knew it it was 3 p.m. I hadn’t done a single thing on my list, and I had to rush to throw my uniform on and get to the grocery.
My cousin Lila works at an ice cream shop down the shore, so she’s the opposite—she’s got 60 hour weeks all summer, hasn’t had a full day off in six weeks. She texted me last week saying she hasn’t even walked the 15 minutes to the beach from her apartment once this summer. She gets off work at 9:30, showers off all the sticky vanilla syrup, and falls asleep in front of the TV before 10. She’s making good money in tips, but she’s too tired to do anything but nap on her one half day off a week.
A week ago I ran into Mrs. Henderson, a regular from the grocery who comes in every Sunday for vanilla yogurt and bananas, at the laundromat. I was folding my socks, because our dryer broke two weeks ago and I can’t afford to fix it yet, so I do my laundry there every Sunday after my coffee shift. She said “Oh how nice, a day off to relax! You kids have all the fun in summer.” I just smiled and nodded. I didn’t have the heart to tell her I was only there because I couldn’t afford to get my own dryer fixed, and I had to be back at the grocery by 2.
It’s not all bad, I guess. Sometimes I get 45 minutes between shifts, and I sit in my car with the windows down, eat a cherry popsicle I got from the gas station, and watch the ducks waddle across the grocery store parking lot. No one’s texting me asking me to cover a shift, no one’s waiting for me to ring up their groceries, and it’s quiet. Those 45 minutes are nicer than any fancy vacation I could imagine, honestly. But it’s not the cute, carefree summer everyone posts about. We’re just… scrambling. Some of us work too much, some of us work just enough to get by, and we all keep an eye on our bank accounts waiting for the next thing to break. That’s what hourly people do in summer. Same as we do any other time of year, just a lot sweatier. (Word count: 1187)
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