In a message dated 06/09/00 11:25:59 AM Central Daylight Time, b1caez01@home.com writes: << The summer break, of up to four months for University students, is like a cattle market with kids clamouring over each other to get the few to none really good jobs, with the rest having to hunker down in restaurants and deal with the most hardened of owners and patrons. A job not worth a slave's time of day. They are abused and overworked like castoffs from society. But that is the way it has always been. Farmers won't hire them, so they import West Indian and Mexican workers, that work slow but can tolerate the heat and humidity. >> It is not so much that the farmers would not hire them as the students would not apply for the work. The money picking the fruit and in my time tobacco, was fantastic, but the work was hard. When I was in Canada I would try and hire students and found the vast majority, especially from McGill and then U of Ottawa or God help us Carleton were as useless as the preverbal bull. The summer work is a very important part of the education of a child, but the fact is too many are just not worth the price of the paper work to hire them. Now get a kid that has done a year or two at McDonalds or Burger King and you usually have a dam good employee and not some whiny snot who thinks life 101 is to cater to them. As for the cost of University Canada is extremely cheap, try going to school in the States. When the wee one left high school, she had, against my advise, had a job at Baskin Robins for a year and become an assistant manager, she left there to Go to community college for a year to get her University credits and went to work and school full time and became a manager at the telephone sales company she went to. The treated her like crap, but she had a goal and when she resigned she gave proper notice and was earning darn close to $30,000. a year, not bad for a19 year old. She just entered her 2nd year, (first year attendance) at the U of Texas Arlington and was given a job by the school, and because of her reputation she was sought out by a banker she knew to be an assistant manager there. So she works about 30 hours a week and goes to school full time and has refused any offers of help we have given. I am allowed to buy her the odd groceries, and slip her a twenty every now and then, or steal her truck first thing in the morning and fill it up with gas. She is an honour student, and made the deans list every year, and has a very busy social life. Dragging home every loser in the world like she used to drag home the puppies, frogs and everything else as a child. (I do question her taste in males and wish she would wait 10 r 20 years to date but so does every father. My fear is she will bring home someone like her father.) I have noticed in life it seems that the people with the least amount of time are the ones who do the most stuff. Does this have a lot to do with the topic? Probably not but I needed to brag about the wee one a bit. So would I hire a student? Yes, but usually not one from a university although it would really depend on the kid. Dave M.