Hard Days Work

When I got to the office on Monday, I sat at my desk for around two hours to figure out what to write about. Tired from the week before, I came in half asleep from a long week of hard work.

As I mentioned in columns past, freelance writing/reporting isn’t my only job. I work as the head of security at a bar in Milledgeville called Ned Kelly’s. If you ever frequent Milledgeville’s night life, or have in the past, you will know that this building is right under what is commonly known as Capital City.

With freshmen from GCSU moving in this past Thursday, we were slammed the entire weekend. I estimated around 1,300 patrons in/out of the building on Saturday night.

I was exhausted, but in a way also proud. Because there’s nothing better than the feeling of knowing you worked hard and earned your keep.

I started bouncing really as a bit of a joke. My longtime friend GT was a veteran bouncer at the time at Capital and they were really short on staff on one Saturday in September 2021. I had always joked around and said I wanted to bounce, but I never actually meant it. I stand at 5’8” and weighed maybe 125 pounds at the time. Needless to say not the bouncer material. But they were desperate for people to work and so I got the call asking “Do you want to work for some cash and a free t-shirt?”

So of course I said yes.

Over what’s now almost been two years, I worked my way up the ladder there. I’d take every shift I could get when I wasn’t scheduled. I’d spend countless time in the gym trying to get bigger and stronger so I could bulk up.

I’d do the grunt work people didn’t want to do, like work the “trashcan” spot which is considered the lowest spot on the totem pole there. I did all of that so that in due time I could get a leadership position, something not typical for someone my size. But with time and patience, I did it.

So why am I talking about this? Well the number one thing I hear when it comes to our generation is that “we don’t want to work.” I heard this specifically in the county forum this past Monday. Quite honestly, I don’t think that could be any further from the truth.

Employers are making job applications and processes harder than ever before. In my job search, a number of entry-level classified jobs require years of experience. Why list it at entry level then?

If you do land a job, companies are less enticing as ever to satisfy the needs of its employees with both compensation and benefits. Contrastingly, in some cases it makes more sense to draw unemployment from the government simply because you make more doing that than working. Crazy, right?

In most cases, it’s not that we don’t want to work, but rather we don’t have the proper platforms that were once there in the past to be able to work. Without that platform, how could anyone have the chance to develop that working spirit?

I am one of the fortunate ones in this case. I had the opportunity to find that over the years, as I’ve been working since I was 16 years old. But not everyone gets that chance. We have to realize this. Let’s all be a bit more courteous of this before we are so quick to judge and dismiss people as “lazy” or “incompetent”. But hopefully one day that will change, because there’s nothing better than the good feeling of a hard day’s work.