It's no lie, working a minimum wage job can be painfully frustrating. I've worked at Abercrombie & Fitch for about a year and a half, within that time I've learned that I'm afraid of middle-aged stay-at-home moms, that patience truly is a virtue, and working a minimum wage job isn't glamorous (as it shouldn't be). Not very many people LOVE getting yelled at by customers who you have to serve with a smile and a whole lot of tolerance to be paid $11.50 an hour.

I'll be honest, when I applied for my first job, I thought, "How hard could this be? It's just folding clothes and being nice to people."

I guess I didn't take into account that you still have to be nice to people who yell at you because you can't return their shirt without a receipt.

Or you have to wait on people who change their minds while they're at the cash register while there's a line behind them of even more angry people. Or refolding a pile of shirts just to turn around for a second a finding out that it's been ruined again.

Needless to say, if there's one thing working a minimum wage job has taught me is that people are incredibly selfish. Because although these seem like minor acts that shouldn't matter, they do when it's all happening simultaneously and you're trying to keep your cool. The list could go on and on about how to piss me off while I'm at work and I find myself exhausted mentally and physically every time I leave my job.

If you're thinking, "Wow, what an upper-middle-class problem." You're completely right.

I am so humbled and privileged to be able to work not out of necessity but because I want to be a little less financially dependent on my parents. Sometimes I might forget that in the heat of the moment because I get to go home to a roof over my head that I don't have to pay for our food that's already made for me and a lot of people in this world don't have that luxury.

Don't get me wrong. This isn't an end goal that people should be striving for and by no means, is it my end goal but for now, it's extra cash that gives me the freedom to do as I please without having to worry about asking my parents for money. I've spent a lot of time watching my parents, who immigrated to America when they were 19, struggle to make ends meet by working minimum wage jobs when they could barely speak English and working their way up to the jobs that they have now and I'll be damned if they traveled all this way for me to end up working a minimum wage job for the rest of my life.

Although I may stand at the cash register pulling my hair out at the fact that a customer wants to return 20 pairs of jeans that they ordered online because they weren't sure of their size.

Please stop doing that, I'm losing a lot of hair.

I've not once forgotten that it's also a privilege to be able to work a minimum wage job. It's a privilege to be able to learn that the real world is rough and I am more than happy to be able to say that I work for what I want instead of having everything handed to me. And all of this just makes payday all the more satisfying. I'm thankful every day that this is an "issue" that I have because I know it could be far worse.