Jobs, they’re hard to find and easy to hate. With teen unemployment hovering around thirty two percent, holding down a job in high school sounds like something your friends should be jealous of. In reality having a job is time consuming, monotonous and everything you don’t want in high school.

For me, the most tantalizing thing before I got a job working at Walgreens was how prestigious the experience in the business world would look on college applications, and the valuable work skills I would learn from my experience. After spending every weekend for the past six months in a “Somewhat depressed slash bored mood,” like sophomore Matt Jirsa who works at Cherry Berry. Or trying to hide from the customers as I restock the women’s hygiene area, I have found that work skills are not commonly found in the realm of blue collared juveniles. As for college applications, maybe it will look good, but it is extremely difficult to put up with a co-worker that blames you for everything someone else does until ten o’clock at night every Saturday, when I could be out doing what everyone else my age does, and to be honest I have forgotten exactly what that is.

In an attempt to be proverbial, time is money, but only if money outweighs the desires for normal human relations. In the summer, working three or four days a week for six or seven hours at a time is actually pretty nice. It gives you a reason to put pants on in the morning and emancipates you from the excuse of not having enough money to go do something with your friends. Fast forward to the school year, when you are already wearing pants in your sleep and the one thing you want to do on the weekends is absolutely nothing, work becomes a nuisance.

It’s tough to complain, only working fourteen hours a week and only on the weekends, but completely giving up your weekends every week is like eating just one potato chip, it’s hard to give up. Target employee and Junior Ben Kilberg said that, “Some people come through the lane with bags of candy and a movie and say ‘Don’t judge me this is my Friday night’ and I say ‘Don’t judge me I’m checking you out.’”

We are all just working to work, we don’t need the money, we are not working to gain skills and we certainly are not working for the weekend. Priorities are what we need, and figuring out what is important before you sign up is a life saver. Going into get a job and then realizing that you are already on the Ultimate Frisbee team and would have to sacrifice Doctor Who Club in order to make it work is definitely worth taking into consideration before you sacrifice your weekends to become a wage slave.