I went to the convenience store near my house around 7 p.m. last Saturday night, and the door was closed and locked. This is not the first time that the gas station, a Circle K, has been closed, and it appears to be due to a lack of employees showing up for work.
This has become a trend I am seeing; signs almost begging for shop help are all over storefronts. It seems to me that no one wants to do a menial job anymore.
I have talked with people starting up new restaurants, and they all are planning systems that make up for the lack of staffing, not that they particularly want a robotic kitchen, but it is becoming more necessary in our society.
I suppose my generation was the last to be compelled to work when the circumstances demanded it.
At the risk of sounding older than my 52 years of age, I find it disheartening that our society is moving away from demanding individuals work their way to success and is, instead, intent on providing a parachute to those who are unwilling to learn from their own mistakes.
In the days before massive government handouts on-demand, I, as an adolescent who grew to be a work-able age, had to get a job. There was no choice in the matter. My mother and I both had to get jobs due to the ill-timed death of my father, who was the family’s primary bread-winner.
It took some trickery to get me a job because I was too young to work legally. Yet, my family needed a second income source, and so I set out to provide it.
My pay checks helped cover the power bill and fund our “Pizza Saturday” nights, where we kids would be allowed to eat in the den while watching “Airwolf” on television. During the summer, I would recruit my brother and his friends, and we would all cut our neighbor’s grass on the weekends for extra money.
I got my first steady job at age 13, working for Garner’s Auto Sales washing cars on the lot at the intersection of Washington Road and Bobby Jones Expressway in the dead of winter. Later, CSRA Camperland, across Washington Road, offered to pay me 25 cents more an hour, and they had heaters in the shop.
Then, the lady who ran the ceramics shop off of Washington Road offered me $3.75 an hour, and the job was a closer ride on my bicycle. So, I spent my afternoons filling the ceramic molds with silt and helping run the kilns.
When my mother remarried and I was offered the chance to quit my job, I didn’t. I loved having a job and having responsibilities that made me more independent.
Once I got my own set of wheels, I was delivering pizzas for Postal Pizza in Martinez, and, occasionally, the owner would let me drive one of his Ford Mustangs.
Having responsibilities, I learned, forces you to look at your dreams with the necessary boundaries. They help one develop the life skill of knowing where upon your dreams might lay and figure in that balance of freedom versus responsibility.
My generation was also allowed to fail and to pick up the pieces ourselves.
In fact, I have had far more failures in life than successes, and some of those failures came with painful costs.
When I was 21, I left what was the beginning of a promising broadcast career to pursue movie acting. My agent told me I had “the look.”
However, I was not the next Brad Pitt or even the next Andy Rooney.
Never-the-less, I rebounded, but I can’t say that I learned my lesson.
When I was 25 and working as a junior executive at an international marketing company, I got bored and made the decision to quit the job and pursue a career in music; but unfortunately, that did not pan out even though it took me as far as Rochester, N.Y. into a burgeoning music scene that never quite took off nationally.
I had a lot of fun, but it ended up with me working in a deli to keep the lights burning.
That failure propelled me into college at the age of 30, but even a college education and having the second opportunity of a successful broadcast career did not make me less prone to fail. I still managed to fail just fine on my own, thank you.
In 2010, I put all my chips into running a retail business and found out rather quickly that I had bitten off more than I could chew. The business finally tanked at a time when no company needed a radio journalist; no matter the amount of awards gathered or ratings achieved.
While book sales remained steady, no company was willing to bankroll a book tour.
But I had other skills, so I tried selling cars and that failed. I tried radio ad sales and that failed. I got my license to sell insurance and that failed. My seasonal job at Lowe’s petered out, and I found myself working in a restaurant, serving tables.
I was not a failure at serving restaurant tables. I am actually quite good at it, and I am not ashamed that at 45 years of age I was waiting tables because, all the while, I was dreaming of the next success, but also looking at my prospects with a realistic eye.
I had turned away from a stable career ladder to grab a creaky rung and now had to face the consequences. That was all.
During that time, I never requested public assistance even though I was raising a minor child. I was raised to act as a contributor, not to become a burden; and, while sometimes I had to drain the savings account, I made it through just fine and learned even more life skills along the way, just as my mother had some 25 years prior.
Now, I’m not bragging. It just happened that it took me longer than most to find my real purpose in life, but I was never dependent on my fellow man in my quest to find that purpose.
I am also not the only person out there that has had to work for a living. Two friends of mine from Egypt escaped the Arab Spring in 2011 and asked for my assistance once they reached the United States.
Both of my friends held medical degrees, but their credentials were not accepted in America; so, to escape tyranny, they had to agree to start out waiting tables here in Augusta while raising a baby.
In Egypt, they had lived the life of luxury, enjoying the family’s horse ranch and spending weekends on a yacht. As emigres, they had to settle on a one-bedroom apartment, and they did so almost gleefully.
After all, they had just escaped a killing zone.
My friends managed with very little, and both are now successful professionals though they started out as people with medical degrees slogging it out with menial jobs.
It is rather jolting and a bit revolting to me that the government has been paying people not to work, and our society just accepts that it will continue on, with a yawn.
As a society, we should be raising the bar for excellence and not lowering it; success cannot be bestowed, it must be earned through hard work and adaptation.
Scott Hudson is the Senior Investigative Reporter and Editorial Page Editor for The Augusta Press. Reach him at scott@theaugustapress.com
