Daycare
Daycare, huh? Let me guess--babysitting is the only job you've ever done? Really? Okay then, it will probably go something like this:
You'll go to college for four years to get your degree in Eary Childhood Education--even though you might not want to teach preschool, you'll need the qualification anyway. It won't really be that demanding--it's one of the few university degrees where finger painting isn't just a metaphor, but actually on your transcript.
Once you graduate you'll go to work for some licensed daycare facility. The only difference between licensed and unlicensed is that yours gets inspected once a year and you actually have to pay taxes on your income.
Your dating life will suck. As the junior person, you get the early 6 a.m. start that nobody else wants, which means you don't have many late nights, and when you do go out and meet guys, they're turned off by your job. Face it, guys in their early 20s don't want to think about kids and they assume since kids are your chosen career you're just itching to start a big family. Plus, when some jock tells you how he broke his ankle hang-gliding, he doesn't want to hear the patronizing first person plural comfort ("we got a boo-boo on our ankie") that you offer instinctively.
You barely eke out a living, and it irks you that a kindergarten teacher with similar years of college training earns twice what you do and has full benefits. Fortunately, your employer likes you and offers you the chance to buy into the day care, so as part owner you can begin to improve your financial picture. Unfortunately, you aren't aware that your afternoon relief, her son, has an inappropriate interest in some of the young clients of the daycare and when the lawsuit and criminal investigations happen, you escape charges, but your personal share of the liability cost, as one of the owners, forces you into bankruptcy.
You try to rebuild your career, but your references--you worked the last four years for a daycare that is infamous due to the publicity around the scandal, and you have a bankruptcy that makes people wary as well--simply make it impossible for you to be hired by any daycare in the area. Finally, you turn to one of those job placement services for the truly desperate, and they place you as an au pair with a wealthy family in another city.
Unlike most other live-in nannies, you are not looking for a way past immigration restrictions, but you suffer the indignity of a pathetic wage just the same. You realize how your employers view you when they keep forgetting and slipping into spanish to give you instructions. The wife insists you do all manner of menial labor that means you have little or no free time for yourself, and when she's not around to nag you about dusting, the husband is creeping you out with his inappropriate advances.
Eventually he goes one step beyond what even your virtually nonexistent self-esteem will tolerate and you quit. You go to the same lawyer that handled the class action suit against your former daycare, but before you get to trial, you are shown a video of the rich couple's maid explaining tearfully how she caught you stealing from them and you threatened to kill her if she exposed you. You remember that she had been a successful actress in her home country before the revolution and it comes in handy when she sobs her suspicions that you have a serious drug problem.
Your lawyer advises you to take the offered settlement and forget about court. It isn't what you deserve, but it's enough for you to make a down payment on a big old house in a bad neighborhood, where you open a group home for foster kids. A steady stream of deeply troubled kids move through the home, and you soon have spent a fortune on padlocks and smoke detect0rs.
One of these troubled teens will be responsible for your untimely death--either the abuse victim whose anger at authority finally gets out of control, or pyromaniac who found where you hide the matches. Either way, your next of kin will hear the words "beyond recognition" uttered at your inquest.
Hey--might be a good idea to make sure your dental records are up to date.
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