Girl on the Brink: Surviving Desperate Times with Desperate Measures

There are questions in most interviews designed to get you on your knees, metaphorically speaking.  The interviewer wants you to say how much commitment you will have to your new job, if you get picked.

Will you work late and on weekends to meet deadlines?  Will you travel as necessary?  Will you come in early and skip lunch and stop taking work breaks and just keep your fingers on the keyboard during all daylight hours banging away until you get your buffet lunch and can retire?

The answer to these questions is, of course, oh yes, please yes, yes, yes, yes.  But you have sound sincere.  If you sound obsequious, or conflicted, the interviewer will smell your hesitation, and your application will be tossed in the circular file.

The days of indentured servitude are over; you can’t actually be a slave.  But you can definitely be held as a wage slave, with a small salary that doesn’t pay the bills but with no place to go except back to work each day.

If you don’t want the job someone else will take it. That’s the clear implication of HR girls, managers and supervisors everywhere.  If you need a starker example, witness Jeanice McMillan, the Metro operator killed in last month’s tragic collision.  The term “working poor” was made for women like her.  Her aging Volvo with more than 250,000 miles on it finally died so she gave up driving.

McMillan had to choose between a new car or paying her son’s college tuition. She chose the path of sacrifice. When she worked too late to get home and return for her next shift or had no one to give her a ride home, she camped out on a cot at Metro headquarters.

In an environment like the Washington Area Metropolitan Transit Authority, wages are, no doubt, fixed by seniority, and she didn’t have much.  But she wanted to keep that job, despite it all, and show her superiors her commitment.

But when does dedication to work mutate into being bound to your employer and its needs?