Will Work for Free

I go to college. I am a student of higher education.  I have a book bag from Gap, a map of my college campus, and for seventy dollars per year they let me park in the parking garage.

I pay, no—strike that—my husband pays an exorbitant amount of money for me to go to a private college with an excellent reputation and a parking garage. When I say exorbitant, I mean stupid. My husband forks over stupid amounts of money for my education.

Why?

Because I sleep with him. That’s why.

Oh, you mean—me. Why do I go to college?

I go to college because when I’m done I’ll be able to get a good job working for an evil corporation that will suck my life’s blood like a giant tick, thus turning me into an empty, fluttering sack of desiccated skin stuff, while that very corporation crushes the “average, regular American” under its evil feet like Godzilla stomping Tokyo.

I am an English major. Can you tell?

Thus we come to the crux of the higher education dilemma.

Parents, or in my case, a sugar daddy, spend stupid amounts of money so that students of higher education can go to school where they are told, often and emphatically by famous authors that CEO’s making stupid amounts of money are both greedy and practicing the moral equivalent of beating up five-year olds for their Halloween candy. Note:  These famous authors never GIVE their books away but always take CHECKS OR CASH for their books.

The students who listen to these famous authors are then encouraged to graduate, with honors, so they can make stupid amounts of money, which is cool as long as said students donate stupid amounts of that greed money back to their colleges.

It’s called the alumni association.

Higher education is like one of those Chinese finger traps, where you stick your fingers in a tube of cheap, brightly colored paper and pull. The harder you pull, the higher your tuition will go.

I’ve fooled everyone and outsmarted the evil Tokyo stomping corporations. I never plan to graduate or get a “real” job.

For thirty years, I’ve listened to folks whine about: their rotten bosses, their rotten jobs, their mind numbing work related responsibilities, their crap salaries, their crap retirement, their idiotic co-workers, and lest we forget—the crap evil corporations which crush us all by importing Chinese finger traps from China, forcing us to buy them with their clever marketing ploys which they learned how to do by hiring COLLEGE GRADUATES WITH DEGREES IN MARKETING.

End the proliferation of evil corporations now! Don’t go to college! Be a stay at home mom and paint the baseboards! Because that’s as NON-PROFIT as it gets.

Bang a drum in a public park and demand to be paid the same amount of money as, oh let’s go crazy here and say, a lawyer.

Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned as a student of higher education it’s that societies can never have too many lawyers or too many drum bangers or too many graduates with student debt greater than the average cost of a Hollywood mansion  . . .  

And don’t forget that we can never have too many kiosks at the mall selling Chinese finger traps imported from China where they shoot the factory manager when the Ministry of Embarrassment finds out he’s been using cheap, lead based inks and dyes to cut corners and pocket the difference.

Linda (Will Work for Free) Zern