Two Jobs for the Price of One

I've pretty much been a fan of The Rake magazine since it first hit the streets... gee, was it over five years ago? I usually read it on a Thursday night at the original Dunn Brothers coffee shop at Snelling and Grand while waiting for my daughter to get out of her art class, which is held around the corner.

Some personal favorites over the years include Eric Dregni's story on his (and his wife's) experience having a baby born while living in Norway, Ann Bauer's essay on her son's multiple misdiagnoses that led to a terrible acceleration of his autism symptoms, and Cory Doctorow's short story "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth," which appeared in one of the fiction issues. (Each of these pieces spent some time in the filing cabinet before I reluctantly consigned it to the recycling pile, because -- as the tagline says -- you can't keep everything.)

A new favorite in the February 2008 issue is by publisher Tom Bartel, titled "Discounting the Value of Work: Working a double shift in a political fantasy land." Here's an excerpt:

As I was checking out at Costco, stocking up on over $100 worth of stuff, the checker mentioned that I sure was using a lot of coupons. The young woman who was reloading my cart as the items came off the scanner said that I was buying a lot of stuff that she needed, too, but she couldn’t afford to use the coupons this week because she was “short.”

The checker offered: “They’re good through next weekend, too.”

“Next week, I’ve got to pay rent,” she replied.

The guy in line behind me was buying a new vacuum cleaner. The cheerful checker kept up the banter: “This must be cleaning supply day,” she said to him as I was signing my credit card slip. “Yeah,” the guy said, “my cleaning lady told me I needed a new vacuum.”

“That’s good,” said the checker. “I’m a cleaning lady too, and I hate it when the vacuum’s no good. My husband and I do it one day a week. He does the downstairs and I do the upstairs.”

Pushing my cart toward the parking lot, I thought of the first George Bush and his amazement at the electronic bar-code scanners when he went through a grocery line during a campaign stop.... the story was used to great effect by his rivals to show how “out of touch” Bush was with quotidian America.

Similar charges could more honestly be leveled at Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, who recently said she was proud to be from Minnesota, “where we have more people that are working longer hours, we have people that are working two jobs.” Of course, she’s probably not as proud as George Bush fils, who two years ago told a single mother of three, “You work three jobs? … Uniquely American, isn’t it? I mean, that is fantastic that you’re doing that.”

Never the wordsmith, Bush of course has no idea that “fantastic” doesn’t really mean “great.” It means “beyond rational belief.” What is fantastic is that Bachmann is proud that someone needs a second job in order to have the money to buy discounted shampoo by the gallon....

You'll have to go to the Rake site to read the rest of it. All I can say is, it made me think about my favorite cashier at the grocery store, who has occasionally mentioned his second job delivering the newspaper at 4:00 a.m. the same day that I see him working at 8:30 p.m.