Call Me the Working Man

It always kills me when I hear someone say that they have bills to pay, you know, like as an excuse, like it's their very own special personal problem that no one else could possibly understand.  They get a sour puss on their face and they cop this big attitude and go, "Well, I have bills to pay."  Really!? You don't say? When I get down to the end of the month, I usually just put all the money I have left over in a burlap sack and let two stray cats fight over it.  What are these "bills" you speak of?  Oh geez, am I pronouncing that right!? 

Another good one is, "I work for a living."  I honestly have no idea what that's supposed to mean.  Am I supposed to be impressed?  I know that people say it sometimes as a half-hearted joke or some kind of philosophical musing about their place in the universe, but I actually had a woman say this to me one time in complete seriousness.  We were in a parking-lot arguing about whether or not I had hit her car with my door.  I was, naturally, pushing the opposing side of the debate when she suddenly blurted out, "I work for a living!"  Umm, okay then.  I don't know if she thought I was surviving off the Lord's good graces or I had a job as a product tester down at the blow job factory or something, but somehow she apparently thought this stunning revelation would break up the stalemate between us and give her an edge over me.

The point here, obviously, is that most of us work for a living; nearly everyone pays bills.  Sure you get the occasional millionaire playboy or drug dealer or thirty year old idiot man child that's somehow slipped through the cracks of gainful employment and responsible adulthood, but the rest of us are holding down jobs and living on a budget and doing just fine.  We need to stop telling each other this shit like someone is going to pop up and pin a medal on our chest.  We need to stop going on about our bills like we're all scrappy street urchins struggling to get by on our wits.  This is life.  This is what we do here.  Get over it.
  

Somehow, I strongly suspect that this is a specifically American quirk.  It's meant to be folksy and endearing, a way of saying, "I'm just a regular Joe."  But the regularity is precisely why I don't need to hear about it.  It's a big giant boat and we're all in it.  It's that classic American paradox.  Politicians spend so much time buttering us all up and appealing to "hardworking, middle class families" that some idjits out there start to get it into their heads that they're some kind of grassroots folk hero because they're holding down a job at the steel mill.  "I work for a living."  Well yee-fucking-haw hoss, I've heard of creatures like you, but I never seen one up close like this!

The same goes for constantly telling people about how you "get up early."  What is this shit?  Let me tell you something.  Getting up early is a relative concept.  I've had jobs where I had to be there by 6am.  At my current job, my shift starts at 1am on some days, and other days I don't have to be there until five in the afternoon.  But no shift is easy to get up for when you have to pry yourself away from a dream where you're rowing down a milkshake river with peppermint candy canes for paddles.  There aren't three, exclusive, magical, hours on the clock that are rough to wake up at, so you can stop your moaning and groaning. You get up early to work for a living, so that you can pay your bills.  You and six billion other people on the planet. Congratulations!