Published: May 18, 2007 09:23 am      

Can You Spare a Dollar?

“Can you spare a dollar?” they would plead.

I used to feel sorry for the homeless, because they had no job, no home, and some of them had kids to feed. I thought it was all very sad. Yeah, some of them would take money from people and buy drugs and alcohol, but others would actually buy food. I wasn’t comfortable with giving them money but I knew where a lot of homeless people would hangout so I would take them a plate of food, especially if it was Thanksgiving or Christmas when we had excessive amounts of it.

My mother and I got a job at a place called Allegiance Staffing. It was a staffing agency. We put people to work, like homeless folks and drug addicts. If they worked a full day they would get $40.00 a day. I know it doesn’t seem like much but when you’re homeless it is a lot. They also got a weekly check. The $40.00 was just so they could afford to get food and a room for the night. There was a hotel up the street from our work place where a lot of them would go. It was $30.00 a night, which allowed them to spend the rest on food if they chose to do so.

There were a lot of good workers there; they would work hard for their money. If the foreman thought they were good workers, after a certain amount of time he would hire them on full time. We mainly dealt with construction, but we did have two factories that went through us to get temporary workers. Working at the factories, it was required to drug test the temporary workers. On the construction sites, they only got drug tested if they got hurt on the job and they wanted to get workman’s comp. Some of them would work seven days a week if we would let them, but we were closed on Sundays.

I gained a lot of experience working there. I also learned a lot about life. Working there is one of the main reasons for me going to college. I didn’t want to end up like them. I met this man who was addicted to drugs, lost his job, pretty much lost everything. When he came to us for work I thought he looked familiar, then I realized that I saw him on TV. He was a football player for the Jacksonville Jaguars. That really made me think, he went from making millions of dollars to making forty dollars a day. That is a big change. You see, it can happen to anyone. The rich, the poor, the famous, anyone and that is one reason why I am so cautious about who I am associating with anymore. Nine times out of ten if you hang out with someone who does something like that then you are likely to do it also. I saw way too many homeless people to end up like that.

Finally, I no longer feel sorry for homeless people. I know they can get work. I have put them to work before. It is just the fact of them wanting to work. People feel sorry for them and they give them money. When I lived in Florida one of the news teams did some researching and interviewing. One of the homeless people they interviewed told them that they get more money being on the streets and begging for money than they would if they got a job. Don’t get me wrong some of them have really sad stories but they can still get work. If they are injured, our other office at the beach had office work that all they would do was sit down and answer phones all day. It is their choice to get a job or not. A lot of them just choose not to work.