Taking a 30-minute break in between her food delivery gig and the beginning of her eight-hour super market shift, Nadine Gordon, a 33-year-old woman with four jobs, said she felt “completely useless and lazy.”
“I should be organizing my closet, working out, or helping my ex with his grad school applications,” the Sacramento, CA resident said with a sigh, “But instead, I’m just sitting here like a total sloth.”
Nadine works over 100 hours a week.
“Ugh, I can’t even look at myself in the mirror right now, unless I want to see my lazy ass reflection staring back at me,” she said, affixing her nametag to her Grocery Outlet shirt.
As she bit into a nutrition bar, the only thing she’ll have time to eat for the next 12 hours, Nadine apologized for “being so lame and useless right now.”
After she finishes her bagging and cashier work, Nadine will rush over to a downtown pub where she tends bar into the early mornings. “I have about 20 minutes in between those jobs to quickly change clothes, but honestly I could be using that time more industriously if I figured out how to work smarter and harder,” she reflected.
“It stresses me out that I’m sitting in the car for so long basically doing nothing,” said Nadine, whose workday began at 6:00am when she clocked in as a driver for a rideshare company. “I mean, besides my fourth job.”
Unable to take bathroom breaks due to being stuck in freeway traffic for hours, Nadine occasionally urinates into empty Gatorade bottles while at stoplights. “If I was more disciplined, I guess I would train my bladder to hold it longer so I wouldn’t need to pull over to empty out the bottles. That takes extra time.”
“Time that I could be using to better myself and the world around me, if I wasn’t so pathetically lazy and unproductive,” she clarified, before wondering if she should sleep in her car tonight in order to extend her planned four hours of sleep by an extra half hour.
