In "What I Wouldn't Do," the narrator tells of a whole string of "drifter" jobs, which occupy her until she moves on to another. The jobs are quite different one from the other. She doesn't seem to hate these jobs, nor does she love them either. She gets what she can out of them. For example, she says, "Cleaning houses was fine, dusting the knick-knacks of the rich" and then describes a crystal bell and the sound it made. She describes herself as drifting, "an itinerant" from job to job. The word itinerant means traveling from place to place, so perhaps these jobs are in different towns. The job she liked best was working alone at night in the bakery. This job is the only one in which color is mentioned in relation to herself. She pictures the neon light in the window flashing and casting colors across her white uniform. To show herself as "colorful," implies interest in the work. We can guess why she likes this job. it's quiet (compared to the Laundromat, for example, where children scream and dryers roar noisily). She can think and reflect as she bakes. A kitchen is a friendly place ("surrounded by sugar"), and the dough waiting in "mounds" to be turned into donuts implies soothing meditation. The donuts, cookies, and bread will make people happy, too -- unlike the job she couldn't do.
The job she really didn't like was selling TV Guide subscriptions over the telephone. Since she begins and ends with this job, it seems to be what she started out to tell us about, and the title, "What I Wouldn't Do" implies this too. She couldn't stand the reaction of the person on the other end of the...
People were always disappointed when they realized it was just somebody calling to sell them something. Of all the jobs this is the only one in which she shows herself interacting with another person and the negative aspect of the interaction ("their disappointment when they realized I wasn't who they thought I was, the familiar voice, or the voice they loved and had been waiting all day to hear"). "After the first shift" she quits. The job only lasted about 8 hours. it's the only job she quits because she doesn't like it. The other jobs she quits when she moves on to another place. There is a sense of acceptance that the narrator has to earn a living and can adapt to most situations. In this way she is different from the first poet who lived with his parents and didn't have to earn money in order to eat and pay the rent.
Both poems allow the reader to experience the powerlessness of working for someone else in a job where you can easily be replaced. Both poets describe jobs in which they seem to be "paying their dues." Except for the very rich (and there aren't very many of them), most people start with menial jobs in order to gain work experience. Fast food restaurants, for example, are a common starting point for young people. Many young people don't really know what they want to do with their lives. Working for awhile at a low-status job gives them a sense of what they want to accomplish, and how to proceed, or as in the case of these two poems, at least a sense of what they do not want to do for the rest of their lives. it's valuable information to know what does not make you happy.
