One
The problem was that I’d never held a job with dental insurance. The problem was that I didn’t want one. The problem was ancient. The problem was teeth. The problem was urgent. The problem was money. The problem was that I hate to work and I always have.
When we were little, my sisters’ stuffed animals became astronauts and firefighters and chefs. Mine took vacations and naps and watched TV. My sisters started working as soon as they could at the local ice cream shop, which employed children through some legal loophole because it was on farmland. They showed off the little biceps they’d developed from scooping, hard knots on their ropy eleven-year-old arms, and tried to recruit me. But I didn’t work until sixteen, when I had to start paying for my share of the phone bill. “It’s called a family plan for a reason,” I tried to argue, but my father put his foot down.
My first job was in a specialty pet store for reptiles, cleaning snake shit from the tanks—wet, oblong pellets full of hair. The owner told me that he normally only hired teen boys, but he was making an exception because I reminded him of his daughter, who was in jail at that point, for reasons never disclosed to me. The snakes eyed me curiously, sometimes wrapping themselves around my wrists as I worked. If a tank was too clean, I was to soak the snake in warm water, a surefire cure for reptilian constipation.
A few months after I started, my colleague, Justin from Geometry, left a heat lamp on overnight and baked a chameleon to death, its mouth gaped open like it was screaming, and I was promoted from snakes to chameleons. “A promotion in title only,” the manager clarified when I asked about a raise.
I surprised everyone, even myself, by embracing the role. I read every online chat board I could find and all of r/Chameleons. Every post underscored the enormity of the task ahead of me. “This is an animal for people who love this animal so much, they will arrange their life around it, and do not mind that it not only won’t love them back, it doesn’t ever want to see them,” wrote a reptile breeder named Donna. “This is worse than an orchid. This is an orchid that hates you.” Chameleons, I learned, do not suffer fools.
I increased the cycles on the automatic misters, created a drip system, and learned everything there was to know about gut loading. It wasn’t enough to feed the chameleons a healthy mix of insects; for the chameleons to thrive, the insects themselves needed a varied and nutritious diet too. At night, before close, I liked to see the tanks all lit up, the habitats I had built inside. It was like looking in the windows of other people’s houses.
For a while, I didn’t hate it, and I thought that maybe I had been wrong about myself. Soon, I had the highest chameleon survival rate the store had ever seen. Under my care, a brood of twenty-five baby chameleons was born, one by one in clear little sacs of goo. I was excited to tell the owner, expecting praise for printing money in the form of two dozen fingertip-sized lizards. Instead, he fired me for the “resource burden” I had created. Meanwhile, Justin had been promoted to the cash registers, failing his way to the top. On my last night at the store, he brought four nips of peach vodka in his backpack. We drank them in front of the glowing vivariums and I knew that I was right about work after all. There is no such thing as a good job.
In college, I took the loans and spent every summer at home, told everyone I was taking online classes to keep them off my back, and hid out at the public library, watching TV on my laptop in the reservable study rooms. I had to be home by 3:00 p.m. every day to ferry my sisters to various extracurriculars, but the glorious hours before then were mine.
The summer after college, I moved to the city and, as the last of the loan money dried up, applied to anything that had an easy application. I didn’t interview well, because when they asked me why I wanted the job, my mind went blank. Dozens of applications later, I finally landed a spot with a third-party contractor that handled whistleblower complaints, answering calls to an 800 number given out during HR trainings. The contractor worked with thousands of companies, in retail and food service and mining and manufacturing. Each day people in every position and from every industry called to tell me all the ways work had failed them. Sometimes the problems were trivial, disputes between coworkers over fridge real estate and perceived personal slights during the white elephant, workplace drama reported in excruciating detail and faux legal language like it was a deposition. But much of the time the issues were serious and draining, every imaginable flavor of sexual harassment and accidents caused by coked-out managers operating heavy machinery and people fired for being too sick from chemo to hand out seasonal cheese samples. Horror after horror until I numbed to it, which happened quicker than you’d think, just like the manager had told me.
At the call center, I rationed the number of times I let myself look at the clock, saving up little moments of delight when more time had passed than I had expected, trying to hold out so I could avoid the letdown when it’d only been two or three minutes. I felt like I was buying my own time back.
But the call center had flexible hours and livable pay and was driven by juicy gossip. It also had Libby, who looked like a young Parker Posey with lip filler. Libby who was unafraid to pluck her eyebrows at her desk in full view of our coworkers and who regularly dosed the communal break-room coffee with CBD oil. Libby who had quickly become my first friend in the city after the night we went straight from happy hour to the trampoline park across the street, then threw up our Long Island iced teas in neighboring stalls. What the call center did not have was dental insurance.
Copyright © 2026 by Sarah Anderson
