Limits of time, and other things

“How do you spell neighbor?”

The whisper was at first so quiet, and the face of the whisperer so discreetly turned away from mine that I didn’t realize it was addressed to me until it was repeated. The woman at the library computer next to me seemed the prototypical lower-middle-class white American: tired-faced, with her slightly overweight wrapped in a lilac T-shirt, her light brown hair pulled back into a low-set ponytail. I looked over at what she was typing and almost told her to add a ‘u’ after the ‘o’, but remembered the difference from the British spelling.

“It looks okay,” I said. “There’s this website called dictionary.com, let me check...Yeah, it’s fine.”

“I guess I could have gotten a real dictionary.” Again the mumble nearly so low as to be inaudible. She was filling out an online application form for working at Copps [an American grocery chain]. As she typed, a young boy came to ask her for something and was rebuffed with “I’m busy, go look at the...” A few minutes later I peeked and saw the few brief sentences she had typed in the input text box..

“I am a mom...”

“...have helped my neighbor take care of kids...”

Having several years of helping various friends edit application essays, including my med-school-bound roommate, I was itching to ask her if she wanted help with her application. Those choppy sentences, dripping self-conscious inadequacy, cried out for someone to rewrite them, reassemble them into a curriculum vitae which would let the reader know that here was a real live person who, despite her lack of fancy education, would work hard, learn quickly, and be reliable because she had a kid to feed and a house to pay for.

Some time later the whisper on the threshold of sensibility addressed me again. “How do I save my stuff?” The dreaded, “This is your final warning! You have two minutes left!” window had popped up (the Madison public library system is untactful when enforcing computer usage time limits).

“Is there a button somewhere on the web page that’ll let you save your application?” I offered lamely. Vet school applications had accounts that let you save. I doubted grocery store applications did.

“What time is it? Four-thirty? That hour went by quickly...”

She was on page 16 of 28, according to the Copps page (twenty-eight pages to hire a grocery store worker? sampat!). She typed and re-typed the datum in first box on that page, “Name of School”, trying to decide whether an acronym should be entered as MATC, M.A.T.C., or M A T C. Then another window popped up with its ghastly cheerful “Goodbye!” and her application disappeared.

“Now I have to do it all over,” she muttered. She went to the reference desk and I watched anxiously out of the corner of my eye as she spoke to a librarian.

“Can you log on again?” I asked when she came back to collect her purse.

“You can only have one hour a day,” she said.

“Are you looking for a job?”

“Yeah.”

“Me too. Good luck.”

She disappeared. The UW-Hospital had a few openings for various assistant jobs that I could do. Covance had an animal technician-something which sounded like it might be interesting, albeit a bit depressing. I’d only been searching for a few minutes. We joke about how liberal arts education doesn’t give you any financial benefits, we whine about how hard it is to find a job, but really? We soar on wings like eagles compared to the woman in the purple shirt who’s not sure how to spell ‘neighbor’. We have no right.