For the longest time, I felt awkward talking about the part-time jobs I worked in college. I guess it was a problem of perception. I always figured my peers were members of the silver-spoon clique, and that I'd be out of the race for the corner office if anyone found out I'd done time punching the clock in the paper-hat industry. Of course, I've done worse things for minimum wage ...

... which I'm still working up to admitting.

Though it wasn't glorious, it kept me focused. I was a short-term part-timer - which is to say that there were long-term full-timers around, and I certainly didn't want to become one of them. There are people in their mid-forties, who fry burgers and run cash registers, and who've topped out in their professions because all the community college courses they need to qualify for an assistant manager's slot seem to coincide with second shift. The only break they get in life is the fifty bucks they get when it's their turn to be "Employee of the Month," or falling head-first into the fry hopper and getting workmans' comp.

A sweet deal once the scabs heal

Funny thing is, at least in my experience, that all the people who are in the running at all have done their time in one piss-factory or another, and the silver-spoon crowd has been neatly divided into two categories of failure: those who ended up in sales (and whether that's real estate, insurance, or shoes, it's a miserable, second-hand life), and those who end up managing the kind of places where kids who will get much further in life end up working part-time while they're in college.