Chapter 2

Barbra chose Maine “for its whiteness”. It was mostly white people that spoke English so it was easy to get a job. In her motel she stays at she stated that she was obsessed with her stuff, how much of it there was and how long it would last. Which to me sounds like something a homless person would say. She talks about how easy “interviews” are for low wage jobs. For one job at a torilla facorty it was just a “Hi,how are you?” , her her job fair she had “opinion survery’s” which had no right or wrong answer.She states that Portland is just another $6-$7 an hour town.p60. To get these jobs you need no experience all you need is energy and a smile.She takes a job as a maid at a nursing home working weekends for $7 an hour. There is a lot of gossip in the nursing home, things that were promised in the interview like a 30 min lunch break. Barabra finds our most of her coworkers are “poor”. She says “Do the owners have any idea of the misery that goes into rendering their homes motel-perfect?”p.89. Like the waitressing job she had she notices that people team up against the higher authority. Her attitude changes,”If I am now a productive fake member of the working class it’s because I haven’t been working , in any hard physical sense, long enough to have ruined my body”.p.90 She sees how hard you have to work for just a min. wage job. At the end of the chapter she states how the maids work so hard to keep it clean but in the end there is not going to be anyone that tells them good job or praises them for their work. “Work is suppose to save you from being a outcast as Pete puts it, but what we do is outcast’s work, invisible and even disgusting”. She says “the poor have disappeared from culture at large even religion seems ti have little to say about the plight of the poor”p.118.