A few years ago, I read Barbara Ehrenreich’s NICKEL AND DIMED: On (Not) Getting By in America. Ehrenreich is a PHd who debated the merits of minimum-wage jobs with a colleague. She worked several low-paying jobs to see how difficult life is for the working-poor. Conclusion? Life is miserable.

I did an experiment of sorts of my own yesterday. I have a lot of free time on my hands but not enough intelligence to know how to use it productively. I saw an ad in the newspaper for a job cleaning McMahon Stadium after the football game of Saturday night where the Calgary Stampeders defeated the Montreal Alouettes 38-31. It paid $9 per hour and I had to be at an office at 5:00am. Here’s what I learned:

- Showing up for a low-paying job at 5:00am is not enough. I arrived at 5:10am only to be told there were at least 35 people ahead of me. Many of these men and women came from a nearby homeless shelter. The first arrived at 3:30am.
- They were a mixture of people from all walks of life: young and old; several were sleeping at a table. There were hipsters, grifters, and midnight drifters. Turns out that some were harder working than I have ever been.
- Vans shuttled us to the stadium just before dawn.
- We put on plastic gloves, were given plastic bags, and assigned to sections of the stadium to collect recyclables and trash. You would not believe how much garbage people leave behind! These football fans are absolute pigs. It’s as if they didn’t know trash bins were steps away. Bottles, cans, wrappers, popcorn, peanuts, sunflower seeds, cheap memorabilia, and annoying clappers used to cheer on the Calgary Stampeders. All of it just dumped on the ground like a baby uses a diaper.
- First shock to my system: lifting my head to see a guy younger than me taking sips from near-empty beer cans, repeatedly. This prepared me for the breakfast buffet of workers grazing on leftover popcorn and Pepsi. One guy saw me picking up a tray of his collected goodies, and yelled out, “No!” as I was going to throw it out. He was saving licorice and peanuts to take home with him. Several of my fellow workers had backpacks to horde treats.
- I appreciated having the foresight to bring my radio and headphones with me so I could tune things out and get on with the work. Most people just went about their trash-collecting with their heads down like cattle. Every half hour the news would come on and I would calculate how much had been earned. Then I started wondering how much the agency was billing us out at. No matter. Just keep cleaning the thousands of items left behind by the fans.
- 4 hours into the shift, we were provided with coffee and donuts.
- Quitting time was noon and we were each given a bag lunch to take home. Nice touch! Still, I felt grateful that I didn’t have to do this job again if I chose not to. Others looked forward to the next home game. Go Stamps go!
- Take home pay for 6 hours work: $54. Lesson learned. It put things into perspective as I thought about the $4,000 hit I took from a dvd deal gone bad recently. Sometimes you win. Sometimes you lose. One man’s trash is another man’s opportunity to clean it up on a Sunday morning.