The Wrong Way

As I wade through the current job market, it is becoming more apparent to me with every passing day that I made the wrong decisions in school. While I was whittling away at math and English specialties, my comrades were working their hands to bare bones in shop class. While I stretched my brain to mush figuring integrals and verbal clause conditions, they became masterful welders and drillers. While I learned to express real-life conditions as equations, they learned to wire electrical sockets and bend conduit. All this time I thought I would surpass them in wages and working conditions. But I have news for you...who's laughing now?

I'm on unemployment. Because of that, I have to keep an eye on the state job board and apply at least three times a week to keep my money coming in. And to keep that money coming, I have to peruse through all the openings that call for everything I didn't learn. This is proof to all you people who think doing well academically in high school will merit something for you. I got near straight-A's in weighted classes, took physics my junior year, et cetera, et cetera, and what has it gotten me? Nothing. All because I had a drinking and drug problem and didn't complete college because of it.

You know those commercials that say high school graduates on average make double what drop-outs make? What they don't tell you is the roughly-one-fourth of high school graduates who go on to complete college end up making about eight times as much as just plain high-school graduates, which make roughly the same as their high-school dropout counterparts. It's not high school, people. High school means nothing.

Unless you took shop.

I scrolled down the list of job openings and could not believe what my eyes were telling me. Job after job for welders, truckers, machinists, CAD users. And not a single thing requiring excellence in high school academia. I am currently quite angry and intoxicated as I try to cope with this reality...the reality that I chose the wrong path. I should have learned how to use oxyacetylene instead of its chemical structure.