Working in retail I often feel like my job is to breathe in negativity and breathe out joy and friendliness like some kind of talking tree. On a daily basis the sea animal of my emotions swims around in the watery depth of my stomach tucked away from the world, while the person I have to be makes sure everything can be fixed and everything is fine.
More often than not the people I serve are unhappy in some way or another. This may be with the products they are buying, or the service they’ve recieved. Sometimes it’s less serious then that, they’re not happy with how the card reader works or how I have to charge for a plastic bag (or how I pack the bag or how I don’t seem to laugh at their jokes in the right way). With the real me tucked away I tell myself it is not me that is the problem, because they don’t know me, therefore the problem lies with them. However, after a while the number of negative interactions start to mount up and I wonder why exactly people feel the need to be unkind to those working in minimum wage jobs. Do they think of me as a respresentative of an organisation out to con them? Little do they know I am not this all powerful being like my capitalist master. I am paid minimally and have no on the job training. The customer is protected by their buying power. I am protected by myself and how thick I can grow my own skin. Is this evidence of how are people inherently cruel and out to take whatever they can get? It’s easy to start to spiral and feel hopeless when I have thoughts like that.
In a bid to take more self-responsibility I’ve started doing data analysis on how I come across. With each interaction I think, ‘Okay. Next time be more patient’ or ‘Try a kinder tone of voice’. I have tried taking really deep breaths and tending to the customer in front of me like I’m experiencing tunnel vision. This helps a little, but it does not make me immune to abuse. I look over at my colleagues who are much more beautiful, more patient, more charming and wonder if this is something I can learn. In a blink I am reminded of when I pretended to be someone else on a dating app.
I was living in the city and having no luck meeting people. At a low point, I wished for things to be easy, so I created a fake profile of someone much better looking than me. I found a few photos of someone that I thought would be irresistable and made a short bio that was charming enough to gain some swipes. I waited to see what would happen. Strangely, I didn’t get that many more matches and the chat I had was more or less the same standard as before. I got a few more obvious compliments, but that was all. I can’t say whether this made me feel better or not, but I had hoped that if I had more luck as a hot person, it would give me the key to what I needed to do – become hot!
Watching my colleagues now I know that not even beauty can protect you from the truth of being a human. Just as all of Don Drapers wives found out, eventually people get to know you and find out you’re not beautiful all of the time. I suppose, now I think about it, why strangers are mean to me at work isn’t really important. Yes the power dynamic is important, and sure they might not like my looks or my personality, but on the person to person side, I know what they’re going through. I know what it’s like to have a bad day and let yourself down. Maybe on that day they met me they are just letting themselves down. At first in my frustration I did honestly wish for endless happy days where everyone is nice to me but now I am understanding that this is unrealistic but not for the reasons I previously thought. It’s not unrealistic because the the world is an inherently bad place, it’s unrealisitic because I am not capable of having endless happy days myself. No one is. Maybe what working in retail does best is it shows you, often in just one day, the full range of the ups and downs a person can experience. Maybe then all I can do is try to sit with the full spectrum of someone else’s humanity in front of me and forgive them for it.
Maybe that’s all I really can control.
(BUT P.s, fuck the structual inequality of customer services jobs!! UNIONISE B**CHES!!!)
