Back in 2011, I think Mickey D's hired at least 30,000 newly graduated college students. You will not be in poor company if you happen to be hired working there. I have known stockbrokers and financial advisors who have retired or gotten laid off and they now work at supermarkets. Either way you will interact with people with ideas, life experience, and you can have intelligent conversations with at least some of your colleagues.

The fact is, people are always working a full time job they may not like but will pursue other things that they do like. The multi-sided nature of people seems to be lost on some posters here. I think trolling for responses like forcing us to make a choice on "working in china" or "working at supermarket/fast food chain" shows how unintelligent these people may be. I sometimes wonder reading what they wrote if they have ever held a job before in their lives. A son or daughter of some rich yuppie type who likes dicking around and doing nothing certainly would not have a firm grasp of what work entails, and how it broadens your perspective.

This is a surprisingly important thing. What can demotivate me with teaching English in China, is that I find most co-workers to be insecure or immature arseholes with too much of a point to prove. I kind of like my current job, but I keep my distance from the other teachers and find that I can have far more intelligent and stimulating conversations with my students that come to see me than any of the foreign teachers. At least I am at a university these days and am therefore not penned in with the other foreign teachers in the office at the same time.

In fact, in a weird and bizarre way I miss the supermarket work that I used to do part-time when I was young. You got to work with old and young staff alike. I had a strange job where I worked in the children's clothing department originally until a few structural changes took place and I covered a few other things like electricals too. My mates took this piss and said that this job was gay, but I actually found that being the only male non-management member of staff on that department proved to be absolutely excellent on a social level and I was even able to date colleagues that were completely out of my league.

Sure, the managers were arrogant arseholes with a lack of respect for the staff that work for them, the best managers were usually not the well-educated guys from middle-class backgrounds, but those who worked up from the bottom, they could relate to their staff far better and understand their needs. One such guy, even told me to prioritize my school work over my job, despite the fact it was probably not in his best interests when it comes to getting people to do overtime for him.

The best example I can give of stupid colleagues being the ultimate demotivator, was a brief 2 week period where I was unemployed, skint and had far too long of a university summer holiday to endure than I'd like. I took some warehouse work with an agency and found that I was working with people that I just couldn't relate to at all, they were thick as pigshit and only ever talked about the same old laddish topics of beer, birds and holidays at shitty resorts in Spain or Greece. Being a university student who did not need to pay tax or care quite as much about life in such company was not a good thing either. They were also very racist to the foreign employees on the site, who despite having very poor English worked far harder and had a better attitude than any of the local staff. This job was so depressing, but thankfully I got a website design/marketing project that I had also applied for at the same time and left straight away for it with no notice period.

That experience did not half motivate me to study harder at university though!