GRADUATED WAITER
Illustration: Argjira Kukaj
You graduate, family and friends are very happy about your achievements that day. Multiple and sincere congratulations come your way. Some congratulate you because they hope you will be employed in your profession and will serve the community with the knowledge gained, or others maybe congratulating you only to please your ego on that day, because in reality everyone is aware that you won’t be able to be employed in the study field you’ve chosen and are passionate about. There won’t be justice for you who has sweated and with effort and sacrifice achieved in your academic life. It’s clearly noticeable that meritocracy isn’t being valued for quite some time now. Those that deserve to be valued aren’t given the chance. And to walk forward some have decided to conform to this state.
After a bit of time, then the enthusiasm of being a graduate passes and you “wake up and rub your eyes”, then you see that everything was only a pretty and now meaningless dream. Then, you get to work to compete in your field, but then you face a bitter reality. The first confrontation is the most severe because you observe the many connections through nepotism, you see that job vacancies are only for show because the job position for which there was an opening is de facto already taken, you don’t get called for a job interview or others.
After all this misfortune, you see that everything is a big fix-up and you’re a graduate out of the game. This after a few months is turned into a normality with which you agree because you don’t have another alternative. You lose hope that you can contribute to society with your field of choice and you only have two choices in front of you: escape your country and look for work in other places of Europe or to stay in your country and grab the tray to ensure a salary with which not only you can’t take care of your family but you can’t even take care of yourself until the end of the month.
Those who leave to Europe work mainly illegally because you also have to cross the border illegally. Then those that stay continue to face a bitter reality at the workplace. Firstly, you don’t get offered a work contract in which case the boss can fire you whenever he likes. If you get hurt at the workplace you should get better by yourself because you have no health insurance, you get treated inhumanely, you get used, you do your job for three people and not for a moment are you allowed to sit and rest even if you don’t have any client to serve.
You must clean and you should know how to become a clown to take care of the client’s child when they cry. You must smile even when you get offended and undervalued. You must conform to the boss’ authority even when he tells a bad joke. If the boss is in a bad mood, you should learn to act the fool to entertain the boss. You get served cold and stale bread/food because if there’s work there’s no lunch break until the wave of costumers is calmed down. Everything looks pretty in the cafeteria where you drink your morning coffee or a beer in the night, but everything pretty is built on a backstage of odd systematic oppression toward the employee.
You get oppressed and they try to violate your dignity. You get denied your weekly break and they don’t care if you quit your job because they’ll find another young person to slave away, another young person graduated from Law, Psychology or Engineering.
The psychological pressure toward the employee only gets stronger. The boss tries to make you an inside spy by asking you about other colleagues’ work. If you don’t become a spy, then you get an even bigger workload and also constant critiques and complaints from the boss about not committing to your workplace. The latter catches on to things you don’t even expect, on the most absurd things birthed from the rampant imagination of a brutal and inhumane employer. You bear as much as you can and the moment comes when you can no longer face the psychological pressure and get an urge to slap the tray on the exploitative employee’s face. You get half a salary and begin to wander around the streets for a similar job where oppression is smaller.
When bringing the tray, in your mind the unrealized dreams of early adolescence come to mind and in front of you, you see the years that go by and turn around like a car tire that once moved fast and has now become obsolete. You’re swamped in thoughts, you experience anxiety during the day and nightmares during the night. You weep for your miserable fate, for not having the power to oppose. A miserable person who is tired and can no longer bear it. Only the person who has passed through this journey can understand your biggest sorrow.
In a moment of desperation, when the space to act is small, then when the options are few, in those moments when you’re inside a narrow room, you always seek to find a door which you decide you must open. The door is the will and strength, and the opening of the door is the change you make in your life. You decide to give yourself will and power to make change. When you get out of your comfort zone, then, outside of the narrow room in which you’ve lived for years, you see that there are others who suffer and have almost the same problems, there are others who’ve decided to step out of their rooms to empathize with each other’s pain, to commonly share the pain they experienced from years of systematic oppression. You see that everyone faces the reality in their own way. From a loner you turn to an individual inside of the group. Your inner rebellion becomes a collective rebellion. Each of our realities are transformed into social realities in which problems are articulated, concerns, life situations and moments of daily oppression. Here you see that your part of society and as such should contribute to wholeness, for the general, for the common. Therefore, social commitment is a determinant for the social changes we want to claim. So, you decide to get active and give your contribution to society. You decide that in your name and in the name of thousands of oppressed in the workplace, to rise up and fight for justice, for a future with perspective and prosperity for all.
And you don’t stop fighting for freedom; and you don’t stop opposing injustice; and you don’t stop until you win the war for full social equality; and you don’t stop being a guide for younger generations who could potentially have the fate of being a graduated waiter; and you don’t stop until you fulfill all of your trampled class’ ideals.
Long live the resistance, long live life!
About the author: Veron Hasani is a 24 years old young man from Prishtina who has attended studies in Psychology in the University of Prishtina.
