It’s really pitiful what people are willing to do for money. This topic is fresh in my mind because I’m a little hurtin’ myself right now.

I doubt I’m alone. Buying books is always one of the low points of the semester. The only thing worse is when you have to sell them back.

Making matters worse is that they always insult you with little “perks” that are supposed to soften the blow.

“Sell your books here and get a free three inch Blimpie’s Sub!”

Listen, I just got handed a dollar for a book I paid $50 for, so a bologna sandwich and a Pepsi will not quench the fire in my soul.

But anyway, what the hell was I talking about … oh yeah, ya’ got no money.

So you just got screwed over on books, your rent is due, and you’re baby’s mama won’t get off your back. Or at least some reasonable facsimile of that situation.

At that point you may begin to look for employment. I have spent a fair chunk of my life gainfully — although not lucratively — employed.

Friends, I have come to an epiphany: working sucks.

In fact, the dilemma of human existence is that working sucks only slightly less than having no money. Only in hindsight do I realize how ridiculous some of my jobs have been.

A friend of mine, who was a co-worker at a rather trashy fast-food restaurant once pointed something out to me that I will now share with you.

At the average fast-food job, you’re making about $6 an hour — which breaks down to around $1 for every ten minutes.

Now the average disgusting job at a fast-food dive takes around ten minutes: cleaning a grease trap, taking out the garbage, talking to a customer, what have you.

If someone came up to you on the street and said, “Hey Floyd, I’ll give you $1 to empty these huge buckets of grease into cesspool out back,” you’d tell them to go to hell.

But for some reason, in the context of your job, your willing to bend over time and time again to get your dollar.

So at what point is it that these forces even out? Why is it that when you get paid $100 for a month of line-cook sodomy you feel you’re coming out ahead? Have you forgotten all the crap you had to go through to get that money?

The discrepancies become even more extreme when you consider what you spend the money on.

Using my previously established scale of fast-food earnings, I will now illustrate some examples of what you may be working for.

If you choose to eat at the same dive that you work in, and let’s say you go all out and super-size your meal, you’re looking at about $4.

That breaks down to cleaning two grease traps, making a trash run, and doing a line sweep. Extra-value meal my ass!

Let’s say you want to pick up that hot new CD from that hot new band Days of the New. We’ll assume you didn’t get into them the first time around when they were Alice in Chains.

For that CD, you’re looking at nine grease traps, three trash runs and probably cleaning a urinal — and that’s if you go to Peeples. If you buy it at Sam Goody or Musicland, you’ll probably have to mop up some puke as well.

Now CD’s and extra value meals are fun things. So let’s see how your hard work pays off for things that aren’t so fun.

We’ll pretend for kicks and giggles you decided to take developmental psychology this semester. And we’ll just say that there’s a required book that costs a modest $40.

That’s 23 grease traps, 14 trash runs, two arguments with some jerk-off at the drive- thru and one refilling the ketchup dispenser during lunch hour with a bunch of impatient construction workers looking like they want to kick your ass.

So what if halfway through the semester you realize you hate children and drop the class? You’re out a helluva lot of work. At least you know you’ll get a sandwich when you sell it back.

You have no one to blame but yourself, and you know it. After all, you took that lousy job, you wore that ugly uniform and you said “Sure, I’ll stick my hand in that.”

And then you swore that one day you would go to school at Iowa State University of Science and Technology and acquire job skills so you would never have to take it from the man again.

But now you realize that the man takes on many forms; from the 400 pound spastic crew leader with tourettes, to the mumbling egotistical professor with the Ph.D..

May we all have the presence of mind to realize exactly where we’re getting screwed. Hopefully, we can all take steps to make sure that we get screwed the least, whether that involves sitting through a Physics 221 lecture or peddling grease-burgers.

P.S. The irony of a middle class white boy complaining about the man does not escape me.

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Ben Godar is a junior in sociology from Ames. Donations can be sent: Care of the Daily.