Chicago Matters: Money Talks

Recipient: Erin Cisewski Occupation: College Student, Bartender Responded On: March 24, 2005 Bill Received: From a Friend in Milwaukee, Wisconsin Originally Dropped At: India Book House and Journals 2551 West Devon Avenue Chicago On: January 21, 2005

 

Erin Cisewski's Comments

Are people fairly compensated for the kind of work they do?
Oh! That’s a great question. You know I used to think so as a kid because I always heard about garbage truck drivers being paid so well. And I used to really think that the crappier the job the more you got paid, and that just seemed so fair. It just seemed really good and fair. But now the more I see friends becoming professionals and the work they do, I don’t think that they do get fairly compensated.

I think the biggest example is educators. The money that they earn for the hard work they do … It’s not your nine to five job … it’s work that comes home with you. It stays with you … And everyone uses the excuse—well they get the summers off, but I don’t think that they are fairly compensated for the work that they do …

My only other comment is about the waitressing industry, which kind of cracks me up in this country. I work in a bar. I’m a bartender. I feel like I get a fair wage for a bartender. But I think the standard wage for waitresses is about $3 an hour. And often-times you’ll go to work and you won’t have a single table that night. Or you’ll have one table, that’ll leave you a $4 tip. It’s pretty rough and a lot of waitresses that I work with have children. They have other lives besides just waitressing. They’re not just young kids going to high school and waitressing on the weekends. A lot of them have just as much financial responsibility, if not more because they’re forced to go into debt a lot more than other people with higher wages. They don’t have insurance opportunities and just kind of dig themselves more and more into debt and that just seems a little unfair.

In American society, do people define themselves in terms of money?
Hmm … I think so. I think so, more though in terms of defining themselves in terms of not having money. I feel like I’ve had a lot of friends especially who, you know, live these sort of transient lifestyles. And a lot of times, it’s the less money they have and the more sort of like, urban raccons they can be, the more respect that they get for living that sort of lifestyle.

You used the word “racoons.” By that did you mean people sort of gathering things and living on very little?
Definitely. It was like the most fun afternoon activity to go around the streets looking for who threw out furniture. You know, you could redecorate your whole apartment with things that people threw out. You know curtains and furniture and pots and pans and all those sorts of things.

Have you done that personally?
Oh, definitely.

Tell us what dumpster diving is.
Dumpster diving is the art of finding your treasures in other people’s trash. I’ve gone and dumpster dived at grocery stores where something will have expired that day … a bag of chips or anything could have expired that day and you can just find it in their dumpster and have it for free, even though you could have gone that morning and paid $8 for it in the grocery store. Especially with food, I think, in this country, people are so used to having produce that is so perfect … And if it’s at all dented or misshapen people would just throw it out … We would dumpster dive for clothes … This is a passion of mine (laughs), if you can’t tell … A great thing to do is, after any semester is ending in any university, it is just this beautiful, beautiful opportunity for dumpster diving because you have all of these university students that have been just collecting so much stuff and just don’t want to move it at the end of the semester … So the dumpster will be teeming with—we found stereos, and DVD players in dumpsters … lots of pornographic magazines, believe it or not, bottles of beer … I suspect that they don’t want their parents to come help them move and see these bottles of beers that they have.

Do you dumpster dive today?
I don’t as much anymore actually. Probably the last time I dumpster-dived would have been over a year ago.

How come?
I think a lot of it is becoming older and sort of fitting into this whole image of being an adult, I guess … And maybe caring a little more what people think. And as a kid or being 18 years old and just traveling around we didn’t care at all what people thought. I think the older I get the more I’m willing to live with less to not have to dumpster dive … I suppose I’ve gotten to the point where I’m a little bit more concerned with the image and I’ve just lost all of my friends that I’ve done it with … There’s something completely different about doing it by yourself, than doing it with a group of friends.

Was there sort of a reverse chic in being really poor like that, getting along with just the little you could get?
Absolutely. There was a sense of pride in it. It almost sort of made us feel like we were the wiser ones of the financial classes. I sort of laugh about a situation where my friend—he really started getting into dumpster diving. He went from dressing like this grungy kind of ripped-up pants sort of guy to dressing really well, because a lot of the clothes that he would find in dumpsters would be really nice polo shirts and Abercrombie and Fitch shirts and all these really nice name-brand things that he would find in dumpsters. So he just started wearing them, because that’s what he was finding and that sort of cracked me up how he made this transition through dumpster diving to being a better dresser that dressed in nicer quality clothes. And I think we always felt a sense of definitely pride about it … like we were somehow coming out above. Because here these people were spending $80 on a shirt, wearing it for maybe a year—or sometimes maybe they would never wear it. A lot of stuff we found was brand new. And we’d find it in the dumpster for free! Our attitude was, what a bunch of suckers! We just found their great clothes for free in this dumpster!!

What is the cheapest thing you've ever seen somebody do?
The modern day version of phone-scamming is you can do a sound recording of the sound of money going into a phone and a lot of times when you get to an operator they’ll say, “Put in so much money” and if you play the tape-recording of just the sound of the money going into the phone, the operator will allow you to make your phone call.

In your household, how do you economize?
I guess not necessarily in this house, but in the last house that I lived in, one way that we economized that was kind of interesting was we would often use gray water to flush out toilet to save on the cost of water. Which is basically we would put a bucket under our sink and detach the pipes that went down below the sink so if we would brush our teeth of wash our hands all the water goes straight down into this bucket. And it would be kind of murky, gray water which is where the name comes from. And then when the bucket to half to 3/4ths of the way full, we could use that and pour it into the toilet and the gravity of that would flush the toilet! And we felt like number one like we were being eco-warriors because we were saving on all this water … And … we were.