On Christmas Day, customers usually have enough shame to not show up at a fast food place. They ask insecure questions about when the company lets the employees go home. When you deliver the sad news that you're working until closing, they retreat to their table to eat their McChicken with embarrassed expressions. Unfortunately, during Thanksgiving, customers have a lot less shame. They find it incredibly quirky to go to Popeyes for Thanksgiving instead of cooking a homemade meal. Working in fa…

Nursing is not for sissies

Doesn't it seem like some of the hardest, most labor-intensive, (and often most important) jobs in the world pay the worst while some of the most useless ones somehow pay the best? Coincidence? I'm not so sure. Lots of redditors got together on good ol' r/AskReddit to make a comprehensive list of all the most overpaid and overvalued jobs that exist today. My question is: where can I find these “ jobs ” and how do I sign up?

There's nothing worse than getting laid off . Just kidding, there is something objectively worse than that: finding out you're getting laid off from an outside source days before it happens. Being terminated without pay is possibly worse than getting let go, but getting let go always feels somewhat slimy, especially when your department is seemingly cut for no reason. Getting laid off is like saying, “we'll give you a little unemployment as a treat.” It's seemingly innocuous, but it's just anot…

I could never be a lawyer. This is partly because I do not care about the law that much. I have never wished I could spend the rest of my life engaging with legal documents. From what I've heard, law school is a terrible idea for people who are not passionate about it, so that would never work for me. As the writers of one of the only critically acclaimed CW shows, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend , one said: Don't be a lawyer! Don't do it, quickest way to ruin your life Don't be a lawyer! Not worth it, it'…

Ah, Valentine's Day, the holiday where couples with 9 to 5 jobs get to terrorize people in various industries. If you work in entertainment, service, or hospitality, I am so sorry. You do not deserve the chaos, madness, and terror that is coming to you during this Hallmark card of a holiday. For most people in the hospitality industry, January and February are chill months! Unless your hotel is hosting a convention or you worked at an Arizona Hotel last weekend, your hotels are likely pretty em…

It's hard to let the baby bird leave the nest. Many parents struggle to balance being involved in their kids' lives and being overly involved. I understand the struggle! At one point, you had to work day in and day out to ensure this young human survived. Flash forward a few years, and they seem like they don't need you anymore. This transition can be challenging for parents, but it's of the utmost importance that parents give kids, especially their adult kids, space to function without them. T…

'Exposure' doesn't pay the bills.

It's no secret that some jobs discriminate based on age and gender. There's a reason that restaurants typically have teenage girls work as hostesses and servers and teenage boys washing dishes or bussing tables. It's not because one group is uniquely skilled at one of these jobs but because of industry conventions. There are still incredibly legal ways jobs can discriminate against certain groups. For example, have you ever applied to a job where one of the requirements is “the ability to lift…

"I enjoy what I do but I don't do it for free."

I discovered sarcasm at an early age. I vividly recall discussing the definition of the word with a fellow second grader, and we determined that sarcasm was “saying something nice in a mean way.” We were pretty on the money, but Merriam-Webster describes it as follows: Sarcasm refers to the use of words that mean the opposite of what you really want to say, especially in order to insult someone, or to show irritation, or just to be funny. Not everybody gets sarcasm. When you have a Saharan dese…

Why? Just why?

We spend the majority of our lives working and rarely get time off. Once the period of our life where we get summer vacation is over, the era of having long stretches of carefree time with little to no responsibilities rarely happens again. There's something so valuable about having time to rest and relax without having the pressure to be “productive” constantly hanging over our head

Have you checked in on your freelancer friend lately?

Always send work emails on company time.

The only thing worse than getting your massive pile of work interrupted by one of those company-wide hours-long mandatory seminars is having to do the seminar twice. After completing one such seminar about how to spot an email phishing scam, one employee received an email from their “IT director” that included a link, which they foolishly clicked on—the email had been a phishing test. To this employees horror, they had to go through the whole 2-hour seminar all over again. The employee maliciou…