Serving in Florida

In the essay Serving in Florida one part really struck me the most. Towards the end of this essay she says ". I had gone into this venture in the spirit of science, to test a mathematical proposition, but somewhere along the line, in the tunnel vision imposed by long shifts and relentless concentration, it became a test of myself, and clearly I have failed." This struck me because after reading the whole thing this appears to me to be the point, she was testing herself to see what she can endure not in the long run but on a day to day basis, like most people are working these types of jobs and she failed. Being in a position where you are just trying to make it through your work day isn't what the American dream was built on, yet that is what most people have been forced into doing just as a means to survive. Failing to the people actually doing these jobs isn't an option this is their lively hood, so that's why this part struck me most she says she failed, they don't have the option of failing. Barbara Ehrenreich did this as a scientific experiment and she failed to do what people do everyday to stay off the streets. 

 
I work at Wedgewood Country Club, I began working there over a year ago. It was my second day of work and I was told to brush the clay tennis courts using a golf cart, and pulling a ten foot wide broom behind the cart. I thought this would be a piece of cake just pulling a brush behind a cart, oh how wrong I was. On the clay tennis courts there is an irrigation system that waters the court, they're sprinkler heads that stick up about a foot from the ground. My boss had neglected to tell me that if you break one of these sprinkler heads it cost roughly three thousand dollars to fix one sprinkler head. So I'm driving along in the cart and I hear a crack all of a sudden its like a fire hydrant erupted behind me, I had just snapped one of the sprinkler heads in half and the courts were flooding. I'm desperately trying to stick the sprinkler head back on, needless to say it wasn't affective. I was on probation for six months after this accident, and that's how I started off my new job.