I am now in the final days of my work at the ice cream store and I’m sure you, the reader, are just as excited as I am, because after next Tuesday you won’t need to hear about it anymore.
Even though I have a couple more days to go, I feel I have already been blessed with a little bit of hindsight and can already look back on the experience from a week and a half from now: I think I would describe my ebb and flow relationship with work as similar to that of the 7 Stages of Grieving.
I started work with the idea that I wanted to practice my Hebrew, make friends and learn a little bit about the ‘minimum wage’ culture of Israeli society.
The first Stage was ‘Shock and Denial’:
I was definitely in a numbed state disbelief that I had in fact got a job in Israel, “how exciting!” I thought with wide-eyed naivety.
Then the ‘Pain and Guilt’ set in:
I was struck with insufferable pain and guilt of my decision to work there, both physical and emotional.
The physical was just the other week when the carpometacarpal join in my left hand was sprained from scooping the Dark Chocolate ice cream. My thumbs were also swollen from overuse (mainly from texting out of boredom), so I had to learn to scoop with my right hand.
The Third Stage is ‘Anger and Bargaining’:
I started bargaining with my boss as to how many shifts a week I had to do; he wanted 7 double shifts, I wanted two. I started saying “why me?” and muttering profanities as the ice cream behind the sneeze protecting glass.
Then the ‘Depression’ sunk in. I pictured my corpse frozen in the ice cream display and the other workers scooping my body into sugared covered cones.
When I reached the 5th stage, “The Upward Turn”, I decided to give my notice of retirement from the gelataria business and pull myself out of that half dug grave.
‘Reconstruction and Working Through’ came next, I now can look to the future, and become a more productive member of society.
The final stage is ‘Acceptance and Hope’ – I’ve accepted the experience and decided to bottle and repress it in the back of my mind, to later seep out in forms of physical abuse to small kittens.
As they say in Israel “היה טוב, אבל טוב שהיה” “It was good, but good that it was” (rough translation).
In reality it wasn’t as bad as I thought I was while I was in it.
