In many cases, students who have work on top of classes face many different complications.
Jobs can be difficult. In the beginning, you want to be early to show you care about your job. You want to go above and beyond the expectations that your employer has bestowed upon you. You want to stay late to prove that you are the best employee that has ever been hired at your place of work. That’s a great quality to have in any workplace, especially if you don’t get paid for overtime, or if you need more hours because you’re a server at a restaurant that only pays $2.13 an hour, meaning that you live off tips.
Staying late at work to either finish or help clean up is a quality most employers enjoy seeing in an employee. Bosses love to see an enthusiastic worker who, even if they don’t like what they do, does their job to the best of their ability. In the restaurant world, that means asking to open and close just to serve the lunch rush before noon and the dinner stragglers after 9 p.m. for the extra tips.
More so, even if you do your very best in a restaurant, you don’t mess up anyone’s meals, you keep beverages full and you make sure each of your customers has a great experience, you still have no idea how much you are going to make that day. In a different job you can pretty well add up your hours and get an average idea of your pay, but when working for tips, every day is a mystery. Some days you can go home with just enough for gas money, other days you can make two times more than a minimum paying job can give you for three full work days.
So the real question is whether going in early and staying at work late is worth it. Yes! Be a good employee! Be the best employee you can be! I grew up in a house that the popular phrase was, “Do your job to the best of your ability, even if you’re scrubbing toilets.”
