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This whole billionaire vs toilet cleaner comparison is just stupid. Sure, there are some trust fund ppl that have never worked a day in their life. But most of the wealthy that I know have flat out busted their ass. So, here's my experience with 2 different kinds of hard work. 1/
When I was 15 (in 1987), I took a job as a bag boy at Kroger. Of course the job was more than bagging groceries. It was basically doing whatever shit the manager foisted on me. Part of my responsibilities was cleaning the in-house bathrooms--used by over 100 people a day. 2/
And I also had to clean the public bathrooms. Cleaning the employee bathroom was bad. People are lazy. Men piss everywhere and women manage to clog up half a dozen toilets almost every day. BUT the public bathrooms were just an absolute nightmare. Especially on Sunday morning. 3/
So, I'd roll in Sunday morning about 6:30 and always the first thing my boss would say was to clean the public bathrooms. I dreaded it. In a store open 24 hours, you get lots of drunk people coming in during all hours of the night doing horrible things. 4/
There were upper deckers in the tank. There were people that shit on top of the tank. Sometimes they'd manage to get crap on the walls. Other times there would be vomit from one end of the bathroom to the other. The womens' toilets were often clogged with feminine products. 5/
People would dump diapers in the floor. Sometimes they'd crap in the sink or the trash can. Some days there were used condoms. Others I'd find bloody bandages. It was really disgusting work. So, every day I'd hook up a garden hose to a hot water outlet, get a gallon of bleach, 6/
find some rubber gloves, put on a butchers apron & make a mask out of a bandana. I attacked those bathrooms like I worked for the CDC. Thank God there were drains in the floor. Scalding water and bleach killed almost everything. There were times I threw up & added to the mess. 7/
That was just one of the terrible, filthy, labor intensive things I did to pull down $3.35/hr. I also had to physically climb into grease traps & clean them in the deli. Several times I had to climb into empty dumpsters & shovel out the sludge that built up from rotting food. 8/
And there were many more I won't bring up for brevity's sake. It WAS hard work, but I also worked with friends that I have until this day. Shared misery makes strong bonds. Now as an adult, I'm the owner of a small manufacturing company that employees 50 people. 9/
Most of my job is sitting in front of computer being a jack off all trades: managing people, HR, marketing, web development, accounting, and on and on. I work 12 to 14 hours per day six days a week. I generally take 3 days of vacation per year. 10/
It's absolutely brutal work. I have to make everything work. I'm responsible for the livelihoods of 50 people. If I fail, so do they. Sometimes it's soul crushing. Sometimes it's very rewarding. There has been years that I made so much money I paid cash for a house addition. 11/
And there has been years like last year where I went 6 months without paying myself so my employees would get a check. In 2018 if you took my pay and divided it by the hours I put in, it would come out to less than the $3.35/hr I made in 1987. 12/
I keep going on. Some people ask why. I tell them because I like the freedom & the challenge and I feel like I owe it to my employees. But there are many times I long for the days at Kroger. And it's not just me. My best friend is the watch commander for the Sheriff's Dept. 13/
I get texts from him all the time that says, "You wanna go out or get some buggies?" Or I'll get a pic of the abandoned building that Kroger used to be in that he snapped when he was out on patrol. He tells me he'd go back to those days in a heartbeat. 14
But why? Why go back to a disgusting, low pay job? Because it is mindless work? Sometimes it was almost therapeutic. You do a job and it's finished. There's a beginning and an end. And at the end of the day you go home and don't even think about work until the next day. 15/
To me, that would be heaven. No. I wouldn't want to do it forever. Men need to challenge themselves. To build things. And that's the difference between someone that cleans toilets & a billionaire. They BOTH have to do hard things, but the results are dramatically different. END/
