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firstborn to get the job, it’s hard not to feel mystified and more than a little nervous as to what to expect. The good news, however, is that there will be a few constants when it comes to workplace hazards. No matter where you go, you will always find four things: your best friend, your worst enemy, a reason you want to quit, and a reason you are terrified of actually quitting. Every job, in every sector, has these. What will they be? Based on my humble experience in the three major fields of work you might be getting into, I feel more than qualified to take you on a mini-tour of the Carnival of Horrors that awaits you.
Your Best Friend
FOOD SERVICE JOB
    Here you will learn to love your drinking buddy. Since one of the major pluses of working in food service is not having to get up until around 2:00 p.m. (with the agonizing exception, perhaps, of Sunday brunches), going out after work for a few rounds is pretty much the professional sport of the restaurant world. Everyone likes to meet at an after-hours place, get shitty on Rumplemintz and whiskey, and get on the merry-go-round of casual sex partners the work environment provides. If you can find your own personal drinking bestie among the crew, you have found your savior. With her, you can gossip about coworkers, bitch about front-of-house bullshit, rag on customers, and cover each other’s backs while you eat like a squirrel, crouched behind some refrigerator. In food service, a workplace best friend is indispensable.
OFFICE JOB
    One thing that is often notably lacking in office work environments—something which food service tends to have in abundance—are people who can just kind of chill. They don’t have to be the weed dealer of the HR department, but they should at least be able to shoot the shit and kick back at a decent happy hour. Oftentimes, the stress of the “let’s-gouge-each-other’s-eyes-out-to-get-ahead” work environment manifests in coworkers who arelegitimately afraid of relaxing with one another, lest they get Brutus’d sometime in the middle of March when their guard is down. If your office doesn’t have a cool person, I recommend suicide.
RETAIL JOB
    If there is one thing that you need for a happy life in a retail environment, it is someone who is looking for shifts. It’s 9:00 a.m., you went out drinking the previous night, you are too hungover to even look out the window, let alone go deal with eight hours of refolding stacks of T-shirts, and you are supposed to open the store in two hours. If you don’t have a trusted colleague who is always looking to pick up some last-minute hours—you, sir (or ma’am, I don’t know you), are nobody.
Your Worst Enemy
FOOD SERVICE JOB
    You will undoubtedly encounter, during your time as a food service worker (whether you’re spending it as a food runner, busboy, waiter, hostess, or—holy of holies—bartender), the dreaded Evil Manager. This is the person whose entire life is based on making the dining establishment a living hell for her employees, an endless labyrinth of redundant napkin folding and petty corrections over minor errors. For, you see, the Evil Manager has just the smallest, most lethal dose of power over a very concentratedpool of victims—and she is going to wield it in the fullest.
OFFICE JOB
    There is one person who, no matter how much you enjoy your job or feel that you perform to a satisfactory degree in the eyes of your bosses, will make you want to wipe him off the planet with an oversized bottle of Windex: the go-getter. This is the person who consistently comes in way before it would be considered appropriate, leaves later than anyone else in the office, and is deliriously happy to take all that sweet, sweet extra work that no one else wants to do. The thing about an office environment is that it’s a delicate balance of demonstrating what you can physically do as opposed to what it is realistic to do. Yes,