Discussion Leader. Section 1. Pages 1-29. Kassi Bierman

1. How did you find the first section personally relatable to your own life? How does the author make this part relatable?
     She was very descriptive about her serving job; I myself was a server and I directly related to nearly everything she explained.  She writes in an easy, casual tone of voice that makes it simple to relate to her.  She explains her story well and doesn't put herself above her co-workers.  This makes the reader feel like she is at the same level as themselves, who may also be struggling with money. 


2. How do you think her story and struggles would be different if she had gotten the housekeeping job instead of the serving job?  Would it have been easier or harder? 
     I think it would have been easier because she would have had to deal less with people and she would avoid having the risk of people knowing what she was up too.  It also would have been easier because she would have a more steady paycheck and not relied on tips.  Something that would have been harder is with less human interaction she wouldn't get that extra angle of view from her experiment. 


3. She tries to make the experiment as accurate and realistic as possible, but how accurate do you think it actually is?
     I think it's fairly inaccurate because of how she starts off with her experiment.  First off, she has a well-working car as well as health insurance and other advantages.  She also had start-up money and a back-up emergency fund.  She leaves out a lot of aspects regarding this possible situation including have children, having poor health and other daily complications.

4. What do you think her overall goals are in conducting this experiment?
    I believe she has a few goals.  First, and most obvious, is to figure out weather it is in fact posible to live and support yourself off of minimum wage jobs.  With this, she wants to write her book to inform anyone who reads it of her findings; she wants the common population to understand all of these diffuculties.  Lastly, I feel that she may partly be doing this to prove it to herself that she can do this task without failing, as if she can prove that the current poor workers are doing something wrong.