Go Jump the Moonshot!

Caught a hyperfix on a random ship from Zero Escape💘

She looked at my files and said “So…what are your plans?”

“My plans?” I asked.

“Yes. You’re a dishwasher. You don’t want to do that forever, do you?”

“Maybe not, but I’m happy with it right now. It pays surprisingly well, I never have to work weekends or overtime, and it’s the sort of job I don’t have to bring with me home mentally. It frees up a lot of time to do the things I like”

“Like what?”

“Hobbies, my family, friends, my pets. I don’t want to hate my job but I don’t want it to be my whole life either, eating away at the things that give my life meaning”

She looked at me for a few seconds then said “You know…the older I get I understand that mindset more and more”

And then she went into a very long, very personal rant about how she has started feeling like she wasted her life on high demand jobs and how taxing and mentally draining her current job is because she has to make huge decisions that can ruin people’s lives and how do you not take that home with you? She loved drawing too but she hadn’t picked up a pen in years and-

So the conversation went from “Your life must be a bit shit with a job like that” to “Oh my god my job is shit and I’ve wasted my life on it!”

I used to work at a TV station in Ohio. On weekends, we only had an 11pm news broadcast. Not much happened on weekends, ya know? I worked Monday-Friday 9-5, but someone on the weekend shift quit, so I also had to come in at 9pm on Sat/Sun to work the 11pm news. It was brutal. I worked seven days a week, even if two of them were ~3hrs.

This was a particularly bad winter. One Saturday, we had a level 2 snow emergency: That means you should only travel if you absolutely must. Like, it's not uncommon for cops to pull you over in level 2 emergencies to ask where you're going and why. It is genuinely dangerous to drive in that much snow.

I told my boss as much, how I almost crashed on the way home at 12:30am after a news broadcast. I told him I would need to call off if there were a snow emergency again during a night snow.

He told me, point blank, "If you ever call me about the goddamn snow, I will take it as a call of resignation."

And that was that! The very next Saturday, snow fell again. It was a level 2, but would become level 3 by sunup. Level 3 means driving is literally illegal except for ambulances and snow plows. I stared out the window, watching the snow, and I had to make a choice.

"Will I die for this? Will I kill myself to keep this job?" I made $11/hr.