During the spring of last year, I had two main goals for my summer. One was to make money, and the other was to do it as close to my parent’s house as humanely possible. It’s not that living in my parent’s house is exceptionally comfortable, or that my mommy makes my bed or anything. (Note: she doesn’t and never has, but my parents do know how to have a good time.) I just didn’t want to have to pay expensive rent somewhere. I’d rather save my money for something else (i.e., the exorbitant cost of buying 10 books per class as a history major). So I got a job working for the government at the now-commercial Air Force Base about a half-hour bike ride from my house (which is a five-minute drive).

My first mistake was assuming that riding a bike would be a responsible thing to do. Not only is the area around my house and on the way to work non-bike friendly — there is frequently broken glass, cracks in the road and crazy drivers — but Sacramento also hits, on average, 95 degrees throughout the summer. So not only did I have to ride my bike in a dangerous area (where I crashed three times throughout the summer), but I had to wear “business casual” in the blistering dry heat of Sacramento. I had to recover from heatstroke a number of times throughout the summer.

This all probably would have been fine with me if I a) hadn’t become a spoiled brat from living at Stanford, and b) if my I didn’t have the most oppressively boring and useless job on the face of the planet.

When I showed up at work, I was expecting it to be menial secretary kind of work. But I didn’t consider the fact that I was working for the government, and not the exciting part of the government, either. The commissaries. In Public Affairs. For the record, I am not anti-military, so I had no moral objections to this, but the commissaries are often the best and only place for the soldiers to shop. So why we need that much work to be done in Public Affairs is completely beyond me, even after the summer. In fact, I came into my job very gung ho about it and was told to chill out because it didn’t matter whether I got my work done quickly or not. Sometimes I was working on a deadline and sometimes I wasn’t, and typically the deadline was flexible. I was going to get paid as long as I showed up on time.

I ended up spending most of my summer shredding documents, sitting on the phone with Store Directors (managers for those not in the commissary business) and trying to figure out how to make things pretty. This is not my strong suit.

What I learned from my job is that the government wastes a lot of money — on hiring people like me. I feel like we could probably train monkeys to shred documents, but, of course, that would be animal cruelty. Now, admittedly I have almost no marketable skills as a history major (except that I speak Chinese), so, unlike CS majors, there is a pretty good chance that I will never be hired for what I’ve been trained to do.

I thought at first that my job would be relaxing. No thinking? Shredding documents? Writing nice PR advertisements for something that doesn’t need PR? Sweet, I’m taking a vacation. Instead, I learned that I am really awful at vacationing. Hopefully, this summer will be better, although it’s good to know that the government will always be willing to use tax dollars to employ me, no matter how useless I am.