15

Nickel-and-Dimed On (not) Getting by in America

B A R B A R A E H R E N R E I C H

At the beginning of June 1998 I leave behind everything that normally soothes the ego and sustains the body—home, career, compan- ion, reputation, ATM card—for a plunge into the low-wage workforce. There, I be- come another, occupationally much dimin- ished “Barbara Ehrenreich”—depicted on job-application forms as a divorced home- maker whose sole work experience consists of housekeeping in a few private homes. I am terrified, at the beginning, of being un- masked for what I am: a middle-class jour- nalist setting out to explore the world that welfare mothers are entering, at the rate of approximately 50,000 a month, as welfare re- form kicks in. Happily, though, my fears turn out to be entirely unwarranted: during a month of poverty and toil, my name goes unnoticed and for the most part unuttered. In this parallel universe where my father never got out of the mines and I never got through college, I am “baby,” “honey,” “blondie,” and, most commonly, “girl.”

My first task is to find a place to live. I fig- ure that if I can earn $7 an hour—which, from the want ads, seems doable—I can af- ford to spend $500 on rent, or maybe, with severe economies, $600. In the Key West

area, where I live, this pretty much confines me to flophouses and trailer homes—like the one, a pleasing fifteen-minute drive from town, that has no air-conditioning, no screens, no fans, no television, and, by way of diversion, only the challenge of evading the landlord’s Doberman pinscher. The big prob- lem with this place, though, is the rent, which at $675 a month is well beyond my reach. . . .

So I decide to make the common trade- off between affordability and convenience, and go for a $500-a-month efficiency thirty miles up a two-lane highway from the em- ployment opportunities of Key West, mean- ing forty-five minutes if there’s no road construction and I don’t get caught behind some sun-dazed Canadian tourists. . . .

I am not doing this for the anthropology. My aim is nothing so mistily subjective as to “experience poverty” or find out how it “really feels” to be a long-term low-wage worker. I’ve had enough unchosen encoun- ters with poverty and the world of low- wage work to know it’s not a place you want to visit for touristic purposes; it just smells too much like fear. And with all my real-life assets—bank account, IRA, health

Barbara Ehrenreich, “Nickel-and-Dimed,” Harper’s Magazine, January 1999, pp. 37–52.

136

C o p y r i g h t 2 0 1 8 . R o u t l e d g e .

A l l r i g h t s r e s e r v e d . M a y n o t b e r e p r o d u c e d i n a n y f o r m w i t h o u t p e r m i s s i o n f r o m t h e p u b l i s h e r , e x c e p t f a i r u s e s p e r m i t t e d u n d e r U . S . o r a p p l i c a b l e c o p y r i g h t l a w .

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) – printed on 7/11/2022 12:17 PM via SUNY ALBANY AN: 1795599 ; David Grusky.; The Inequality Reader : Contemporary and Foundational Readings in Race, Class, and Gender Account: s4879604.main.ehost

Nickel-and-Dimed 137

insurance, multiroom home—waiting in- dulgently in the background, I am, of course, thoroughly insulated from the ter- rors that afflict the genuinely poor.

No, this is a purely objective, scientific sort of mission. The humanitarian ratio- nale for welfare reform—as opposed to the more punitive and stingy impulses that may actually have motivated it—is that work will lift poor women out of poverty while simultaneously inflating their self- esteem and hence their future value in the labor market. Thus, whatever the hassles involved in finding child care, transporta- tion, etc., the transition from welfare to work will end happily, in greater prosperity for all. Now there are many problems with this comforting prediction, such as the fact that the economy will inevitably undergo a downturn, eliminating many jobs. Even without a downturn, the influx of a mil- lion former welfare recipients into the low- wage labor market could depress wages by as much as 11.9 percent, according to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) in Wash- ington, D.C.

But is it really possible to make a living on the kinds of jobs currently available to unskilled people? Mathematically, the an- swer is no, as can be shown by taking $6 to $7 an hour, perhaps subtracting a dollar or two an hour for child care, multiplying by 160 hours a month, and comparing the re- sult to the prevailing rents. According to the National Coalition for the Homeless, for example, in 1998 it took, on average na- tionwide, an hourly wage of $8.89 to afford a one-bedroom apartment, and the Pream- ble Center for Public Policy estimates that the odds against a typical welfare recipient’s landing a job at such a “living wage” are about 97 to 1. If these numbers are right,

low-wage work is not a solution to poverty and possibly not even to homelessness. . . .

On the morning of my first full day of job searching, I take a red pen to the want ads, which are auspiciously numerous. Everyone in Key West’s booming “hospitality industry” seems to be looking for someone like me— trainable, flexible, and with suitably humble expectations as to pay. I know I possess cer- tain traits that might be advantageous—I’m white and, I like to think, well-spoken and poised—but I decide on two rules: One, I cannot use any skills derived from my educa- tion or usual work—not that there are a lot of want ads for satirical essayists anyway. Two, I have to take the best-paid job that is offered me and of course do my best to hold it; no Marxist rants or sneaking off to read novels in the ladies’ room. . . .

Most of the big hotels run ads almost continually, just to build a supply of appli- cants to replace the current workers as they drift away or are fired, so finding a job is just a matter of being at the right place at the right time and flexible enough to take whatever is being offered that day. This finally happens to me at one of the big discount hotel chains, where I go for house- keeping and am sent, instead, to try out as a waitress at the attached “family restau- rant,” a dismal spot with a counter and about thirty tables that looks out on a park- ing garage and features such tempting fare as “Pollish [sic] sausage and BBQ sauce” on 95-degree days. Phillip, the dapper young West Indian who introduces himself as the manager, interviews me with about as much enthusiasm as if he were a clerk pro- cessing me for Medicare, the principal questions being what shifts can I work and when can I start. I mutter something about being woefully out of practice as a waitress,

EBSCOhost – printed on 7/11/2022 12:17 PM via SUNY ALBANY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

but he’s already on to the uniform: I’m to show up tomorrow wearing black slacks and black shoes; he’ll provide the rust-colored polo shirt with Hearthside embroidered on it, though I might want to wear my own shirt to get to work, ha ha. At the word “tomorrow,” something between fear and indignation rises in my chest. I want to say, “Thank you for your time, sir, but this is just an experiment, you know, not my ac- tual life.”

So begins my career at the Hearthside, I shall call it, one small profit center within a global discount hotel chain, where for two weeks I work from 2:00 till 10:00 P.M. for $2.43 an hour plus tips. In some futile bid for gentility, the management has barred employees from using the front door, so my first day I enter through the kitchen, where a red-faced man with shoulder-length blond hair is throwing frozen steaks against the wall and yelling, “Fuck this shit!” “That’s just Jack,” explains Gail, the wiry middle- aged waitress who is assigned to train me. “He’s on the rag again”—a condition occa- sioned, in this instance, by the fact that the cook on the morning shift had forgotten to thaw out the steaks. For the next eight hours, I run after the agile Gail, absorbing bits of instruction along with fragments of personal tragedy. All food must be trayed, and the reason she’s so tired today is that she woke up in a cold sweat thinking of her boyfriend, who killed himself recently in an upstate prison. No refills on lemonade. And the reason he was in prison is that a few DUIs caught up with him, that’s all, could have happened to anyone. Carry the cream- ers to the table in a monkey bowl, never in your hand. And after he was gone she spent several months living in her truck, peeing in a plastic pee bottle and reading by candle- light at night, but you can’t live in a truck in

the summer, since you need to have the windows down, which means anything can get in, from mosquitoes on up.

At least Gail puts to rest any fears I had of appearing overqualified. From the first day on, I find that of all the things I have left behind, such as home and identity, what I miss the most is competence. Not that I have ever felt utterly competent in the writing business, in which one day’s success augurs nothing at all for the next. But in my writing life, I at least have some notion of procedure: do the research, make the outline, rough out a draft, etc. As a server, though, I am beset by requests like bees: more iced tea here, ketchup over there, a to-go box for table fourteen, and where are the high chairs, anyway? Of the twenty-seven tables, up to six are usually mine at any time, though on slow after- noons or if Gail is off, I sometimes have the whole place to myself. There is the touch- screen computer-ordering system to master, which is, I suppose, meant to minimize server-cook contact, but in practice requires constant verbal fine-tuning: “That’s gravy on the mashed, okay? None on the meat- loaf,” and so forth—while the cook scowls as if I were inventing these refinements just to torment him. Plus, something I had for- gotten in the years since I was eighteen: about a third of a server’s job is “side work” that’s invisible to customers—sweeping, scrubbing, slicing, refilling, and restocking. If it isn’t all done, every little bit of it, you’re going to face the 6:00 P.M. dinner rush de- fenseless and probably go down in flames. I screw up dozens of times at the beginning, sustained in my shame entirely by Gail’s support—“It’s okay, baby, everyone does that sometime”—because, to my total sur- prise and despite the scientific detachment I am doing my best to maintain, I care. . . .

138 B A R B A R A E H R E N R E I C H

EBSCOhost – printed on 7/11/2022 12:17 PM via SUNY ALBANY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Sometimes I play with the fantasy that I am a princess who, in penance for some tiny transgression, has undertaken to feed each of her subjects by hand. But the non- princesses working with me are just as in- dulgent, even when this means flouting management rules—concerning, for exam- ple, the number of croutons that can go on a salad (six). “Put on all you want,” Gail whispers, “as long as Stu isn’t looking.” She dips into her own tip money to buy biscuits and gravy for an out-of-work mechanic who’s used up all his money on dental surgery, inspiring me to pick up the tab for his milk and pie. . . .

Ten days into it, this is beginning to look like a livable lifestyle. I like Gail, who is “looking at fifty” but moves so fast she can alight in one place and then another with- out apparently being anywhere between them. I clown around with Lionel, the teenage Haitian busboy, and catch a few fragments of conversation with Joan, the svelte fortyish hostess and militant feminist who is the only one of us who dares to tell Jack to shut the fuck up. I even warm up to Jack when, on a slow night and to make up for a particularly unwarranted attack on my abilities, or so I imagine, he tells me about his glory days as a young man at “coronary school”—or do you say “culinary”?—in Brooklyn, where he dated a knock-out Puerto Rican chick and learned everything there is to know about food. I finish up at 10:00 or 10:30, depending on how much side work I’ve been able to get done during the shift, and cruise home to the tapes I snatched up at random when I left my real home—Marianne Faithfull, Tracy Chap- man, Enigma, King Sunny Ade, the Vio- lent Femmes—just drained enough for the music to set my cranium resonating but hardly dead. Midnight snack is Wheat

Thins and Monterey Jack, accompanied by cheap white wine on ice and whatever AMC has to offer. To bed by 1:30 or 2:00, up at 9:00 or 10:00, read for an hour while my uniform whirls around in the landlord’s washing machine, and then it’s another eight hours spent following Mao’s central instruction, as laid out in the Little Red Book, which was: Serve the people.

I could drift along like this, in some dreamy proletarian idyll, except for two things. One is management. If I have kept this subject on the margins thus far it is be- cause I still flinch to think that I spent all those weeks under the surveillance of men (and later women) whose job it was to monitor my behavior for signs of sloth, theft, drug abuse, or worse. Not that man- agers and especially “assistant managers” in low-wage settings like this are exactly the class enemy. In the restaurant business, they are mostly former cooks or servers, still ca- pable of pinch-hitting in the kitchen or on the floor, just as in hotels they are likely to be former clerks, and paid a salary of only about $400 a week. But everyone knows they have crossed over to the other side, which is, crudely put, corporate as opposed to human. Cooks want to prepare tasty meals; servers want to serve them gra- ciously; but managers are there for only one reason—to make sure that money is made for some theoretical entity that exists far away in Chicago or New York, if a corpora- tion can be said to have a physical existence at all. . . .

Managers can sit—for hours at a time if they want—but it’s their job to see that no one else ever does, even when there’s noth- ing to do, and this is why, for servers, slow times can be as exhausting as rushes. You start dragging out each little chore, because if the manager on duty catches you in an

139Nickel-and-Dimed

EBSCOhost – printed on 7/11/2022 12:17 PM via SUNY ALBANY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

idle moment, he will give you something far nastier to do. So I wipe, I clean, I con- solidate ketchup bottles and recheck the cheesecake supply, even tour the tables to make sure the customer evaluation forms are all standing perkily in their places— wondering all the time how many calories I burn in these strictly theatrical exercises. When, on a particularly dead afternoon, Stu finds me glancing at a USA Today a cus- tomer has left behind, he assigns me to vac- uum the entire floor with the broken vacuum cleaner that has a handle only two feet long, and the only way to do that with- out incurring orthopedic damage is to pro- ceed from spot to spot on your knees. . . .

The other problem, in addition to the less-than-nurturing management style, is that this job shows no sign of being finan- cially viable. You might imagine, from a comfortable distance, that people who live, year in and year out, on $6 to $10 an hour have discovered some survival stratagems unknown to the middle class. But no. It’s not hard to get my co-workers to talk about their living situations, because housing, in almost every case, is the principal source of disruption in their lives, the first thing they fill you in on when they arrive for their shifts. After a week, I have compiled the following survey:

• Gail is sharing a room in a well-known downtown flophouse for which she and a roommate pay about $250 a week. Her roommate, a male friend, has begun hitting on her, driving her nuts, but the rent would be impossible alone.

• Claude, the Haitian cook, is desperate to get out of the two-room apartment he shares with his girlfriend and two other, unrelated, people. As far as I can

determine, the other Haitian men (most of whom only speak Creole) live in similarly crowded situations.

• Annette, a twenty-year-old server who is six months pregnant and has been abandoned by her boyfriend, lives with her mother, a postal clerk.

• Marianne and her boyfriend are pay- ing $170 a week for a one-person trailer.

• Jack, who is, at $10 an hour, the wealthiest of us, lives in the trailer he owns, paying only the $400-a-month lot fee.

• The other white cook, Andy, lives on his dry-docked boat, which, as far as I can tell from his loving descriptions, can’t be more than twenty feet long. He offers to take me out on it, once it’s repaired, but the offer comes with in- quiries as to my marital status, so I do not follow up on it.

• Tina and her husband are paying $60 a night for a double room in a Days Inn. This is because they have no car and the Days Inn is within walking distance of the Hearthside. When Marianne, one of the breakfast servers, is tossed out of her trailer for sublet- ting (which is against the trailer-park rules), she leaves her boyfriend and moves in with Tina and her husband.

• Joan, who had fooled me with her numerous and tasteful outfits (host- esses wear their own clothes), lives in a van she parks behind a shopping center at night and showers in Tina’s motel room. The clothes are from thrift shops.

It strikes me, in my middle-class solip- sism, that there is gross improvidence in some of these arrangements. When Gail

140 B A R B A R A E H R E N R E I C H

EBSCOhost – printed on 7/11/2022 12:17 PM via SUNY ALBANY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

and I are wrapping silverware in napkins— the only task for which we are permitted to sit—she tells me she is thinking of escaping from her roommate by moving into the Days Inn herself. I am astounded: How can she even think of paying between $40 and $60 a day? But if I was afraid of sounding like a social worker, I come out just sound- ing like a fool. She squints at me in disbe- lief, “And where am I supposed to get a month’s rent and a month’s deposit for an apartment?” I’d been feeling pretty smug about my $500 efficiency, but of course it was made possible only by the $1,300 I had allotted myself for start-up costs when I began my low-wage life: $1,000 for the first month’s rent and deposit, $100 for initial groceries and cash in my pocket, $200 stuffed away for emergencies. In poverty, as in certain propositions in physics, starting conditions are everything.

There are no secret economies that nourish the poor; on the contrary, there are a host of special costs. If you can’t put up the two months’ rent you need to se- cure an apartment, you end up paying through the nose for a room by the week. If you have only a room, with a hot plate at best, you can’t save by cooking up huge lentil stews that can be frozen for the week ahead. You eat fast food, or the hot dogs and Styrofoam cups of soup that can be microwaved in a convenience store. If you have no money for health insurance—and the Hearthside’s niggardly plan kicks in only after three months—you go without routine care or prescription drugs and end up paying the price. Gail, for example, was fine until she ran out of money for estro- gen pills. She is supposed to be on the company plan by now, but they claim to have lost her application form and need to begin the paperwork all over again. So she

spends $9 per migraine pill to control the headaches she wouldn’t have, she insists, if her estrogen supplements were covered. Similarly, Marianne’s boyfriend lost his job as a roofer because he missed so much time after getting a cut on his foot for which he couldn’t afford the prescribed antibiotic.

My own situation, when I sit down to as- sess it after two weeks of work, would not be much better if this were my actual life. The seductive thing about waitressing is that you don’t have to wait for payday to feel a few bills in your pocket, and my tips usually cover meals and gas, plus something left over to stuff into the kitchen drawer I use as a bank. But as the tourist business slows in the summer heat, I sometimes leave work with only $20 in tips (the gross is higher, but servers share about 15 percent of their tips with the busboys and bar- tenders). With wages included, this amounts to about the minimum wage of $5.15 an hour. Although the sum in the drawer is piling up, at the present rate of accumulation it will be more than a hun- dred dollars short of my rent when the end of the month comes around. Nor can I see any expenses to cut. True, I haven’t gone the lentil-stew route yet, but that’s because I don’t have a large cooking pot, pot hold- ers, or a ladle to stir with (which cost about $30 at Kmart, less at thrift stores), not to mention onions, carrots, and the indispens- able bay leaf. I do make my lunch almost every day—usually some slow-burning, high-protein combo like frozen chicken pat- ties with melted cheese on top and canned pinto beans on the side. Dinner is at the Hearthside, which offers its employees a choice of BLT, fish sandwich, or hamburger for only $2. The burger lasts longest, espe- cially if it’s heaped with gut-puckering

141Nickel-and-Dimed

EBSCOhost – printed on 7/11/2022 12:17 PM via SUNY ALBANY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

jalapeños, but by midnight my stomach is growling again.

So unless I want to start using my car as a residence, I have to find a second, or al- ternative, job. I call all the hotels where I filled out housekeeping applications weeks ago—the Hyatt, Holiday Inn, Econo Lodge, HoJo’s, Best Western, plus a half dozen or so locally run guesthouses. Noth- ing. Then I start making the rounds again, wasting whole mornings waiting for some assistant manager to show up, even dipping into places so creepy that the front-desk clerk greets you from behind bulletproof glass and sells pints of liquor over the counter. But either someone has exposed my real-life housekeeping habits—which are, shall we say, mellow—or I am at the wrong end of some infallible ethnic equa- tion: most, but by no means all, of the working housekeepers I see on my job searches are African Americans, Spanish- speaking, or immigrants from the Central European post-Communist world, whereas servers are almost invariably white and monolingually English-speaking. When I finally get a positive response, I have been identified once again as server material. Jerry’s, which is part of a well-known na- tional family restaurant chain and physi- cally attached here to another budget hotel chain, is ready to use me at once. The prospect is both exciting and terrifying, be- cause, with about the same number of ta- bles and counter seats, Jerry’s attracts three or four times the volume of customers as the gloomy old Hearthside. . . .

I start out with the beautiful, heroic idea of handling the two jobs at once, and for two days I almost do it: the breakfast/lunch shift at Jerry’s, which goes till 2:00, arriving at the Hearthside at 2:10, and attempting to hold out until 10:00. In the ten minutes

between jobs, I pick up a spicy chicken sandwich at the Wendy’s drive-through window, gobble it down in the car, and change from khaki slacks to black, from Hawaiian to rust polo. There is a problem, though. When during the 3:00 to 4:00 P.M. dead time I finally sit down to wrap silver, my flesh seems to bond to the seat. I try to refuel with a purloined cup of soup, as I’ve seen Gail and Joan do dozens of times, but a manager catches me and hisses “No eat- ing!” though there’s not a customer around to be offended by the sight of food making contact with a server’s lips. So I tell Gail I’m going to quit, and she hugs me and says she might just follow me to Jerry’s herself.

But the chances of this are minuscule. She has left the flophouse and her annoying roommate and is back to living in her beat- up old truck. But guess what? she reports to me excitedly later that evening: Phillip has given her permission to park overnight in the hotel parking lot, as long as she keeps out of sight, and the parking lot should be totally safe, since it’s patrolled by a hotel se- curity guard! With the Hearthside offering benefits like that, how could anyone think of leaving? . . .

Management at Jerry’s is generally calmer and more “professional” than at the Hearthside, with two exceptions. One is Joy, a plump, blowsy woman in her early thirties, who once kindly devoted several minutes to instructing me in the correct one-handed method of carrying trays but whose moods change disconcertingly from shift to shift and even within one. Then there’s B. J., a.k.a. B. J.-the-bitch, whose contribution is to stand by the kitchen counter and yell, “Nita, your order’s up, move it!” or, “Barbara, didn’t you see you’ve got another table out there? Come on, girl!” Among other things, she is hated for having

142 B A R B A R A E H R E N R E I C H

EBSCOhost – printed on 7/11/2022 12:17 PM via SUNY ALBANY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

replaced the whipped-cream squirt cans with big plastic whipped-cream-filled bag- gies that have to be squeezed with both hands—because, reportedly, she saw or thought she saw employees trying to inhale the propellant gas from the squirt cans, in the hope that it might be nitrous oxide. On my third night, she pulls me aside abruptly and brings her face so close that it looks as if she’s planning to butt me with her fore- head. But instead of saying, “You’re fired,” she says, “You’re doing fine.” The only trouble is I’m spending time chatting with customers: “That’s how they’re getting you.” Furthermore I am letting them “run me,” which means harassment by sequen- tial demands: you bring the ketchup and they decide they want extra Thousand Is- land; you bring that and they announce they now need a side of fries; and so on into distraction. Finally she tells me not to take her wrong. She tries to say things in a nice way, but you get into a mode, you know, because everything has to move so fast. . . .

I make friends, over time, with the other “girls” who work my shift: Nita, the tat- tooed twenty-something who taunts us by going around saying brightly, “Have we started making money yet?” Ellen, whose teenage son cooks on the graveyard shift and who once managed a restaurant in Massachusetts but won’t try out for man- agement here because she prefers being a “common worker” and not “ordering peo- ple around.” Easy-going fiftyish Lucy, with the raucous laugh, who limps toward the end of the shift because of something that has gone wrong with her leg, the exact na- ture of which cannot be determined with- out health insurance. We talk about the usual girl things—men, children, and the sinister allure of Jerry’s chocolate peanut- butter cream pie—though no one, I notice,

ever brings up anything potentially expen- sive, like shopping or movies. As at the Hearthside, the only recreation ever re- ferred to is partying, which requires little more than some beer, a joint, and a few close friends. Still, no one here is homeless, or cops to it anyway, thanks usually to a working husband or boyfriend. All in all, we form a reliable mutual-support group: If one of us is feeling sick or overwhelmed, another one will “bev” a table or even carry trays for her. If one of us is off sneaking a cigarette or a pee, the others will do their best to conceal her absence from the en- forcers of corporate rationality. . . .

I make the decision to move closer to Key West. First, because of the drive. Sec- ond and third, also because of the drive: gas is eating up $4 to $5 a day, and although Jerry’s is as high-volume as you can get, the tips average only 10 percent, and not just for a newbie like me. Between the base pay of $2.15 an hour and the obligation to share tips with the busboys and dishwash- ers, we’re averaging only about $7.50 an hour. Then there is the $30 I had to spend on the regulation tan slacks worn by Jerry’s servers—a setback it could take weeks to absorb. (I had combed the town’s two downscale department stores hoping for something cheaper but decided in the end that these marked-down Dockers, origi- nally $49, were more likely to survive a daily washing.) Of my fellow servers, every- one who lacks a working husband or boyfriend seems to have a second job: Nita does something at a computer eight hours a day; another welds. Without the forty-five- minute commute, I can picture myself working two jobs and having the time to shower between them.

So I take the $500 deposit I have coming from my landlord, the $400 I have earned

143Nickel-and-Dimed

EBSCOhost – printed on 7/11/2022 12:17 PM via SUNY ALBANY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

toward the next month’s rent, plus the $200 reserved for emergencies, and use the $1,100 to pay the rent and deposit on trailer number 46 in the Overseas Trailer Park, a mile from the cluster of budget ho- tels that constitute Key West’s version of an industrial park. Number 46 is about eight feet in width and shaped like a barbell in- side, with a narrow region—because of the sink and the stove&

Our website has a team of professional writers who can help you write any of your homework. They will write your papers from scratch. We also have a team of editors just to make sure all papers are of HIGH QUALITY & PLAGIARISM FREE. To make an Order you only need to click Ask A Question and we will direct you to our Order Page at WriteDemy. Then fill Our Order Form with all your assignment instructions. Select your deadline and pay for your paper. You will get it few hours before your set deadline.