Wanted: A Nostalgic imagining of the Job Market

Well, it's that time of year again. The last chilly days are quickly dwindling and some of the more petulant flowers are forcing their way open as Spring begins. For me and most college students what that really means is another mad dash for a summer job.

If you will allow me to wax poetic for a few lines about a better time that I only know about through skewed representations on old Nick-at-Night re-runs of the classic television canon like Happy Days or Saved by the Bell. And still, I feel like I do remember the good old days just outside of my grasp when jobs were plentiful and the resume and cover letter were foreign documents replaced instead by an affirming grin and an eager look in your eye. Why can't I step into a restaurant and ask for a job in the kitchen? How else am I supposed to learn? How can I overcome this closed circle of flawed logic that insists on years of experience for even the dingiest of food joints? And what exactly is this NYC food certificate that I keep hearing about, like an initiation tattoo I don't have. Surely it is just another bureaucratic 5-hour class where no one learns a thing they didn't already know.

And where are all the jobs picking up empty glass bottles of milk from people's doorstep to replace them with their filled counterparts, rich and creamy thick at the top. Don't golf courses need caddies? Is anyone still looking for a pool boy?

Suddenly i'm lost in a world of job websites and endless facsimiles of the same cover letter being printed and sent off to every corner of the earth for jobs where you don't have to move a limb past your knuckle joints which flitter about all day on keyboards exchanging endless sets of information with other working drones. How can an entire anthro-centric world exist if all of the people refuse to be unseated?

Like I said this might be useless nostalgia - the kind of superfluous information I just readily criticized - but it leaves me unsettled nonetheless. Particularly because I feel as if I do understand how things are meant to work on a more fundamental level. It takes months to accumulate enough biomass for rich soil. Hours on your knees to spread the seeds and cover them in earth and water. Anywhere from two weeks to three months of near daily attention to reach the time of harvest when you can reap the benefits of all of that work. And that is just one aspect of the most simplified existence I can imagine.

Maybe I am just thinking in the wrong terms. maybe this argument has a lot less to do with the mystic disappearance of daily toil and everything to do with the oddities of economics, the difficulties of absorbing immigrants into our society, the use and abuse of fossil fuels and the determined blindness we force upon ourselves to the immense difficulty of others. All that I know for sure is that students are encouraged to go out unto the world and gain experience, to temper their education and round out their cognitive growth, but the only lesson I seem to be able to learn is that work is outdated, antiquated, a relic to be left in the past alongside Fonz and his Jukebox.