Thanks for Nothing, Terminal Degree. (Just Kidding. I Still Love You, Baby.)

Yesterday I told Diana that finding a summer job was going surprisingly slow, and the hunt was surprisingly difficult. I told her I thought this was God's little way of telling me I'd been riding my high horse when I started the job search and that I needed to be bucked right the hell off of it.

When I first started this summer job search, I said both to myself and out loud that it would be a piece of cake, that it would be no big shake, that I would be able to find waitressing work with no problem. Even if it came to it, I could probably go back to my old place of employment because they loved me there, they adored me, and they'd take me back in a hot second.

It turned out nothing was that easy.

In a fit of desperation a week or so ago, I turned into the driveway of a local sit-down pizza place because their sign had broadcast SERVERS NEEDED for the last month. It wasn't really the type of place I had in mind. It wasn't really the type of place I wanted to work for. But still I walked inside, asked to speak to someone about the needed servers, and was referred to the manager.

The manager made me wait five minutes just to speak with him. He took me into the closed-off section of the dining room, which is decorated with wood paneling and filmy watercolors circa 1972, and he started asking me questions. He wanted to know where I'd gone to school, what I'd studied, what kinds of jobs I'd held, what kind of waitressing experience I'd had.

When I listed the places I'd waitressed before, he nodded but seemed unimpressed. Then he sighed and shook his head.

"I don't know," he said. He sucked air in through his teeth, the universal signal for This is gonna be a close call. "See, I'd have no problem hiring you if you'd come to me maybe three months earlier. But you're not really worth it now."

I raised my eyebrows.

"Well," he said, "you see, it would take at least three or four months to get you trained in, and you only want to work for three months before you go back to your other job. I just don't see how that's worth it."

Three or four months? I looked at the man and thought, Surely you must be joking. This wasn't a four star restaurant. It was a quasi-Italian joint that served up plates of spaghetti to senior citizens and families with three screaming children who would've been thrown out of any other restaurant. When I was hired on at my last waitressing gig, we were all under the assumption that it was going to be a three month stint, and no one was worried about getting me trained in before those three months were up--and this was a restaurant that did banquets, had a full bar, and served things like Surf & Turf, not chicken bombers and french fry baskets. I wanted to tell this manager to give me an apron, show me the pop machine, introduce me to the cooks, and let me be on my way.

But instead I just smiled. "I understand," I said.

"You have pretty okay qualifications, though," he told me as some sort of peace offering. "How about I take down your name? I'll give you a call if I think we can work something out."

So I said sure and signed my name to a legal pad that was thick with the names of at least fifteen other women who must've come by and had similar experiences with this man. Just looking at those names--names like Ethel and Betty, and even names like Ashley and Lacey--I knew he'd turned away his fair share of the two best subsets of waitresses out there: the grizzled old-time waitresses who remember fondly the days when they could take their smoke breaks inside the restaurant and the cutesy just-graduating-from-high-school numbers who wear their hair in peppy blond updos and decorate their name tags with hearts and daisies. What else, I wondered, could this man be looking for?

But he was already herding me out the door. "It was a real pleasure to meet you," he said, and shook my hand. "No, I mean that. A real pleasure."

But today I had a little more success. Today I went on a job interview and actually landed a job. The head waitress who hired me didn't seem concerned that she wouldn't have enough time to train me in or that I wouldn't be able to grasp the nuances of the business in three full months. She just seemed to care that I knew I couldn't wear open-toed shoes or have my hair in my face. I told her sure, I was used to it, I knew the routine. I'd done this for five years of my life, after all. I said I was ready to give it another go--a lie, but a necessary one.

As I was gathering my things--which, now, included employment paperwork to be filled out and returned next week when I come for my first shift--she took one last look at my application. "I was looking at this the other day when the owner was in the room," she told me, "and I said to him, 'I think this has to be wrong. This girl is way too qualified to work here.'"

She laughed, so I laughed, even though I wanted to run back into the kitchen and jab myself with one of the biggest knives I could find.

"But, seriously," the head waitress continued, "I'm assuming this is just a summer thing, right? You'll be wanting to go back to school in the fall?"

I think she thought when I listed the university at which I work she must have confused that and thought I was going on to get a PhD because it was already listed quite plainly in front of her that I had both my BA and MFA. "Well," I said, "I'm not a student."

"You're not?" she asked.

"No. Actually, I teach at the university."

That's when she fanned herself with my application, like she'd been hit with a tidal wave of oppressive heat. "Oh," she said. "Oh. Well. You're definitely too qualified for this job. But I'm looking forward to working with you."

And my heart broke a little bit right then and there, standing in that cramped and disorganized office. I was feeling awful and nauseous and like I needed to have myself a good cry on the way home, but I was also feeling repulsed for feeling that way. What a brat, I thought as I drove the winding roads home, thinking about all the times over the summer I would drive that route, stinking of fish and grease. What a snobby, snobby brat.

But this is what it is, and it's unlikely that it will change, so I'll take my lumps. After all, a girl as snobby as me probably deserves them.