Confessions of a Subway Worker

I am very naïve. It was this naïveté that led me to take up a part time job in a Subway, as though they owed me something. As though my age and relative inexperience wouldn't automatically qualify me as 'kitchen bitch' both in terms of wages and workload. Put it this way, I'd have to work for almost an hour just to be able to afford the bus fare home... I lived less than 5 minutes away. 

I know that there are a multitude of teenagers and twenty-somethings working the night-shift in a dead end job, bleary eyed over the rim of their coffee cup and hoping for a little more satisfaction. But that doesn't make it okay. 

What I really have a problem with is the inflated sense of superiority that Subway customers seem to have. I may resemble a giant bogey in my lurid green 'meal deal' t-shirt but I'm also a straight A student applying to university. Just because I work in food service doesn't meant that I don't deserve to be treated with any less respect that if I were the Queen of England (I should probably be treated with more respect, I bet Queenie never had to scrub out a toilet). 

But really it's pretty hypocritical of me to complain of misguided superiority and then try and justify my own. Does the fact that I'm applying to university really make me any better than my cohorts who aren't? By working here I have been exposed to people who have suffered more heartbreak and sadness than you would ever care to think about. That kind of sadness that makes your bones ache and your chest wonder if you'll ever breathe normally again. I've met people who work until stupid-o'clock just to avoid the war zone that they have to come home to. How can my paper-thin qualifications match up to such integrity?

 I am blessed in that I have met people who wake up every morning with the blackest cloud hanging over their heads, yet they can keep going and going. No matter how many customers sneer at them or how much their managers under-pay them: they'll be there, plastering on a smile over the jagged cracks of their souls, offering their sincerest apologies for putting the wrong sauce on your sandwich when last night their boyfriend cheated on them and they haven't slept since. 

Perhaps if people took the time to gain a little perspective and stopped trying to pigeonhole people based on their job, maybe we'd stop spitting in your food when you weren't looking.