January 5–13, 2003 — Going nowhere, going nowhere

My schedule has been very consistent lately. Three days a week, Saturday through Monday, each an eight-hour shift (give or take 30 minutes). The days blur together, which makes the four days I have to myself seem longer.

Instead of writing about each day of work individually or stealing snippets from a day here and a day there, I’m going to write about the worst parts of one day. You can extrapolate the rest however you like.

Because I take the bus, I always arrive at work around 45 minutes early. It depends on which bus I catch, and I don’t have much of a choice but to arrive this early if I don’t want to risk being late.

I am very slow at changing into my uniform. I am trying to develop the perfect technique of tucking my shirt into my pants and then untucking it just the right amount so as not to look overwhelmingly unfashionable while still following uniform guidelines. I have yet to succeed. Still, I am convinced that one day I will walk out of the change room looking almost normal in spite of the tucked-in, collared and extremely yellow shirt that I am wearing.

Most days I swipe in exactly five minutes before my shift begins. Then I walk to the store’s cash office to count my tray. It is on this walk that I work myself up to the intense level of cheerfulness required to make it through the day. I need to make sure that I’m at the peak of cheerfulness as I walk through the door of cash office. When I ask for a returns tray, the person handing it to me should be convinced that I’m aching to get to my station.

Most of the time I fail. On this particular day, I mostly succeeded. It was my last day before four days off, so I was happy to be at work because I knew I wouldn’t be there again for five days.

The first two hours went well. There were no major problems, no angry customers, no supervisors to call. Then I took my first break. When I returned to my station, things started to go wrong.

Most customers acknowledge that even though I work for the company they are frustrated with, I am not the person who caused all of their problems, and it would not be fair for them to verbally abuse me as a way to work through their frustrations. But not all customers feel this way; some customers consider a chipped piece of furniture their cue to be as soul-destroying as possible towards the person doing his or her best to solve the problem. It is my job in these cases to try even harder than usual to make the customer happy.

On this particular day, it was a woman whose chest of drawers had a chip in one of its sides. I called the warehouse to have a new one brought over. It took a long time to arrive, and I was with another customer when it was dropped off on the other side of the returns area. The customer waiting for a replacement side became very upset with me for not abandoning the customer I was dealing with, yelling at me and saying I was wasting her and her friend’s time. I rushed to finish with the customer that I was serving and opened the box for them. The same piece was chipped.

The woman glared at me, gave an exasperated sigh, and told me to get another, beginning a long, animated diatribe about having spent $400, expecting better service, and so on.

Another new box came. Same problem. And it was the last one in the store.

The woman had a friend with her and they began talking about my incompetence loudly enough for me to hear while continuing to rant about expecting better service for $400. I asked them what they would like to do. They said return everything. I said I could only return the entire unit if they brought the entire unit back. I offered to hold the box they had brought with them, but they became more upset with me, saying they didn’t trust me with it. Just before they left, while I was still being yelled at, one of them started dancing to a Shania Twain song. I watched them fill out a negative comment card about me as I called the next customer.

This time, it was a woman who wanted to exchange a seat cushion. The one she purchased was beige, and she wanted to exchange hers for the exact same cushion, but less beige. I told her that because finding a lighter shade of beige would be subjective, she should probably allow me to credit her VISA for the cushion she didn’t want and then go back into the store to buy a lighter one. She scoffed at this, saying it would be a waste of her time. So I called textiles and had a beige seat cushion brought to me. It was the exact same shade of beige. The woman gave me an exasperated look and sighed before telling me to credit her VISA and making comments about me wasting her time by not doing this in the first place.

Next, I had two reasonable, friendly customers.

A few minutes later, I started to smell gasoline and mentioned as much to the person working beside me. The customer on his way to my station began laughing and announced, “I think that’s my return you’re smelling!”

The gas container in his trunk had spilled all over the wall cabinet frame he wanted to exchange. Apparently throwing out the items he had destroyed and buying new ones never crossed his mind.

I started processing the return, calling security to ask them to take the gas-soaked merchandise away from me as soon as possible. It took fifteen minutes, and I began to feel dizzy before the box was taken away. The customer cheerfully discussed gas huffing with me in the meantime. I felt nauseous.

I wasn’t due to take lunch for awhile yet, but I begged to go. I went outside and breathed cleaner air. There were a few calls about gas leaks before I left. I hoped the smell would be gone by the end of my lunch break.

When I came back from lunch, the smell of gasoline was mostly gone, but I was still more irritable than I had ever been at work. I had four more hours to survive, and every customer seemed set on ruining my life. Customers I’d normally have no problem with suddenly seemed present only to make me suffer.

I decided that if I was fired that day, I wouldn’t complain. It had been a good run, but I’d get two weeks pay as I left, and I would never again have to smile while being yelled at about the tenets of CYA, “Cover Your Ass”, a doctrine stating that my offer to be helpful by holding onto a box that would be returned in a matter of hours was in fact an attempt to sabotage the return of my Shania Twain-loving duo of sadists.

I went home without being fired.

Four days later, I was able to cope with customers again, and I worked three days with an almost genuine cheerfulness, days that had moments as bad or worse as the ones above (though with fewer thinly veiled psychological attacks).

And somehow I still think this is the least stressful job I’ve ever had.