I love money. We all do. Don’t try to lie and say you hate money because it buys you food and clothing. I used to lie about it too. But now I guess I’m coming clean.

Money isn’t really a huge necessity for me during the semester, but sometimes it’s nice to have. Money can’t buy happiness – it’s true – but it can buy me new clothes. The only thing I really don’t like about money is the things I have to do for it.

Any job you can think of, I’ve probably held it. I sold extremely hormonal pregnant women their cow-shaped cookie holders at Linen’s N’ Things, I’ve said the nicest things about Pad Thai for three years (still going strong), and I’ve steamed your milk for your cappuccinos. These are all reputable jobs.

I don’t mind making minimum wage and barely being able to cover my gasoline expenses, as long as I’m having fun doing it. At my coffee shop job, I mostly just drank free drinks, moved pastries around on their respectable trays and listened to whatever music I wanted. I felt sort of bad for the customers though, as I’m sure they weren’t as into the Spice Girls as I was.

I’m not incapable of keeping a job. I’ve had a couple jobs in my life but whether or not I choose to stay with them is the issue, not incapability. Around finals week last semester, hours at my Thai restaurant were scarce, so I decided to find another job, and to Craigslist.org I went.

Honestly, with a tagline like, “Base Pay – $20/Hour!” nobody is going to pass that up. I called the number and scheduled an interview. To get you to come to the appointment, they don’t tell you what the job is. I guess in retrospect, this was some sort of investigative journalism.

I went into the interview in my “professional attire,” and I still didn’t know what I was being interviewed for, but I really liked the sound of $20 per hour. Turns out, my job was to hawk “Cutco” to customers face-to-face.

What is Cutco exactly? They’re knives. They’re alright knives. They’re expensive knives. Point is, I had to make them seem like the best knives in the world in order to sell them.

In the end, I was only able to work for about a week and a half. Like I said, I’m not incapable of keeping a job, but it this case, I thought I was going to have an anxiety attack.

The job consists of showing your friends and family knives over college breaks. Knowing your family, they probably aren’t going to say no, and that’s what the company counts on.

The way you make money is appointments. You call your acquaintances that are of a specific age and you ask them if they’d like to see a presentation and you set a date and time. If I had scheduled six appointments for the next two days, my managers would be down my throat about why I didn’t schedule more.

I would have to call the office multiple times a day to let the suits know how much I sold that day. If I reported that I made no sales for that day, their usually chipper voices would sort of go down to a somber tone and they’d want to know what I did wrong. Usually my answer was “nothing,” but since their knives “sell themselves,” it must have been my fault.

In the company’s favor, I ended up selling about $4,000 in those 10 days I worked. That’s what they expect. They bribe you with dream vacations, free cutlery, and even free pizza (that’s what got me), to do the best you can with sales.

It’s sort of the perfect equation for them. The $20 plus they pay for each presentation you do is nothing compared to how much the company makes a year.

The economy right now is in the trash. Gas is almost $3 per gallon sometimes. Sure, people can afford the knives, even if some of them are ridiculously expensive, but the way that the company preys on college students is unprofessional.

Most college students make $7 to $8 an hour at work-study jobs to do tedious things like data entry or put plants in soil. Some students even have off-campus jobs where they can make more, but the usual hum I hear from friends is “I need a job.”

Companies like this one are throwing parties at the thought of this. They want to offer an alternative and a light at the end of the tunnel, but to be honest, I would rather steam a thousand lattes before reading a script in front of my family and friends again.

Haley Navarro is a Collegian columnist. She can be reached at [email protected].