It's no secret where I work.

I make steamed bagel sandwiches for a living at Ripple Bagel and Deli. It isn't an awful job. Sure, the pay sucks and we're routinely harassed by slurring intoxicated customers on late weekend nights. But it isn't difficult work, I have great coworkers, have met other great people through the deli, get to listen to good music, and, hey, there's cable there, too! It's an all right gig with not much stress.

Except for one small, $30,000-a-year problem: I have a college degree. And during my time at university, I was under the cockamamie assumption that, upon graduation, there would be a decent paying job somewhere that would utilize this expensive degree. I still operate under the assumption that there are definitely employers with jobs who would hire me. I've yet, however, despite my looking, to find these gracious employers in this city.

It would be easy to just forget the bitching of one kid like me, though, right? To read my little column (which, by the way, is a blessing, considering it's one of the only things I do that actually uses my Creative Writing degree), roll your eyes, and move on to the next article. But it isn't that it's just the bitching of one underpaid, overqualified kid. At the bagel deli alone, three of my coworkers are college graduates. And we all make steamed bagel sandwiches for a living. Right on to fancy educations.

But I'm usually not a complainer. I like to be constructive, to find solutions to what ails me. And I know when to ask for help.

So. Here it is. We need help. All of us are college alumni with no real jobs yet. Some of us will wait it out, and some of us will go to graduate school, and some of us will move far, far away just for the experience of it. But we'd like real jobs, too, all of us at the bagel deli, or those ones waiting tables, or those of us serving up coffee at Starbucks, selling shoes in department stores, working in kitchens, laying tile, working the register at gas stations, grabbing stray carts at grocery stores. We're everywhere, with these expensive pieces of paper framed by our parents and hung up on bedroom walls. We want to put our degrees to use very badly and we're trying to figure out how to do it. We got our straight A's. We brought up our GPA's. We were told that stuff was important, so why doesn't anyone care outside the academic world?