Techniques:
1) Setting—emotional—reversal: “I was perfectly content with working in exhausting conditions—until my boss decides to offer us more money.”
2) Parallel Catalog of Gerunds: “We were sighing, moaning, sulking, and shouting, and a student would come up to us with heaps of questions, and later more students would be encouraged to do the same.
3) Short definite topic sentence followed by complication: “I’m sitting there grading papers and frantically trying to find a good excuse as she inches closer and closer….”
4) Inserted dialogue: “My boss finally came up to me and whispered in her most innocent and delicate voice, “will you be able to come in tomorrow?”
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Oppressed Seventeen Year old I was perfectly content with working in exhausting conditions—until my boss decided to offer us more money. For twelve hours each week, every employee was expected to be treated like a communist worker under Mao Zedong. Every week, my co workers and I had our backs arched in a cold and mindless setting. We graded a stack of homework while still tutoring multiple children. We were sighing, moaning, sulking, and shouting, and a student would come up to us with heaps of questions, and later more students would be encouraged to do the same.
Typically, everyone works Mondays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. The week before school started, my boss emailed all the workers to come an extra day for more money. She underlined, bolded, and capped “MORE MONEY,” to emphasize her desperate need from us, impoverished high school students. As appealing as that sounded, a whopping twenty eight dollars for four hours, no one wanted to work that Friday. On Thursday, because no one responded to her message, she made everyone stay for a bit as she gave a lecture on how important it is. All seven of us were focused on our work but our thoughts whispered to each other, “Someone volunteer to do it, already.”
No one responded to her yet again. At that moment, she went to each person individually and personally asked them to do it. Every person had cleverly composed an excuse. One guy said he couldn’t make it because that Friday was the last day of Rosh Hashanah and he had to stay home. He was Indian.
I’m sitting there grading papers and frantically trying to find a good excuse as she inches closer and closer. But then I thought about how I didn’t have plans the next day. “Twenty eight dollars,” I kept repeating in my head. Was I really that desperate for a measly twenty eight dollars? I could buy about three chipotle bowls with that money! I thought. Plus, my parents were out of the country and bills started to appear. Did I want to enjoy that last