I had forgotten how completely retail takes over a person's life. Anytime I'm not working I'm sleeping, or preparing to sleep. My favorite time of day happens when I come home, usually at an ungodly hour of the evening, to brew a cup of herbal tea and curl up in bed with the electric blanket cooking the sheets and the headboard smothered in pillows to read for an hour or so before surrendering to unconsciousness.
Christmas doesn't mark the end of the holiday shopping season; it generally lasts well into January, and this year has seen a lot more traffic than even my managers expected. On New Year's Day I dragged myself to work before the store opened at 11:00 a.m. and through a bleary fog I saw people sitting in their cars, waiting. Shouldn't you people be in bed with a hangover? I thought with as much incredulity as my tiredness allowed me to muster. In the few minutes before we unlocked the doors people started lining up, pressing their faces to the glass and staring at us, and in those minutes I objectively hated all of humanity. They looked about to chew their way through the doors just to get inside...and when we let them in (cracking jokes about getting trampled and killed), they bought things like...WWF books. As one of my coworkers said, after our first customer left with his wrestling book safely in hand, "...Really? You had to get out of bed on New Year's Day and make this emergency purchase and it's a WWF book? Really?"
My karma took a stand against me this past week: Anytime I found myself behind the registers, helping cash people out, I got all the evil customers. The company changed its return policy a few months ago, eliminating all returns except those with receipts. This only makes sense to me. In a big store, with tons of media retailers all over the place, people have plenty of opportunities simply to rip something off the shelves and return it (hello, Garden State), or buy a used book or CD and bring it back to our store to make money. Sure, this might not always be the case, but the policy is certainly understandable -- and not uncommon.
But the company might as well have announced that returns must be accompanied by ritual child sacrifice for as reasonably as my customers took it. I seriously watched them devolve a few links in the chain when I patiently explained that they couldn't return merchandise without a receipt. Their faces collapsed into simian snarls and all their words ran together: WhaddayameanIcan'treturnthis? [Breath]
Unfortunately I'm not exactly allowed to respond with things like, "Do you have any idea how much I don't care?" Or, "I am a leeetle cog in a biiiiig machine. I can't do anything for you."
So of course I always delivered the policy politely and professionally, and for good PR I called up the managers and let them handle it when people got really upset. Since just about everyone got really upset -- these people seemed to wait to come to my register, and mine alone: I, the high priestess presiding over the altar of the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey -- after a few hours of this I stalked out from behind the registers and growled at one of my managers, "I need a drink. Of something strong."
"Like...coffee?" she asked.
"No. Like 80 proof."
I can't quite figure it, but the pre- and immediately post-Christmas shoppers render the idea of peace on earth fairly incongruous, while the New Year's crowd so far has bounced in cheerily like children released to the playground. Admittedly tired from the long hours, I nonetheless enjoy this spirit of shopping, as ridiculous as I find all the traffic (don't these people have jobs? And if they don't, why are they buying books?). A certain jocularity pervades the atmosphere -- for the most part. Do people really like New Year's so much? I don't doubt that everyone is glad to bid 2008 farewell (or maybe not farewell, exactly), but this strikes me as odd. New Year's generally doesn't affect me all that much. Once I decided to stop living in guilt, I didn't really care about New Year's one way or the other, except for Mom's amazing pork and sauerkraut dinner which appears to be traditional among German or Polish Americans. But other people seem to revel in the fresh start, the optimism, the buoyant hope that someone invented at some point in history, that a new year means better things.
It's not that I don't believe any of that myself; it's that I don't know where this hope received its particular foundation. I find it enjoyable, certainly, and I too love the start of the new, the finish of the old, the shaking out of the yearly cycle like a slightly tired tablecloth snapped free of its crumbs and settled back in freshness over the table. I just find it peculiar. Human beings seem generally given to hope, whether or not there's any reason for it. I like this. I still find it strange.
In any event, I also rediscovered the disarming power of kindness. Mean, nasty, grumpy, rude people I can handle -- I usually brace myself for it before walking in the door. I might get thin-lipped, tight-jawed, rigid with anger and stress (Look, I didn't make the policy, okay? Would you mind not yelling at me? Thank you so much), but I take it pretty much in stride. What can you do? As Pete says in The Muppets Take Manhattan, "Peoples is peoples." Which usually means that peoples is jerks. No surprise there. So you deal. All in a day's work.
But kindness? It comes completely out of left field and launches a javelin in the tear ducts. The other day as I rang people up at the registers, a man in his thirties came up and requested a DVD pack being held for him there (our box sets are kept locked in glass cases to which only staff have keys. Customers are not permitted to carry the box sets around the store with them. So when I remove a box set for someone and they reach for it, I always smile and say, "I'll be happy to put that up at the register for you. What name shall I put on it?" This isn't hard to interpret, right? But some people don't, so then, still smiling, I say, "No, actually, I have to put this up at the register for you. What name would you like me to put on it?" This is received more graciously than I would ordinarily expect). As I retrieved it and started to ring it up, I noticed that it had an old, old sale price sticker on it -- twenty dollars less than the list price -- which shouldn't have been there, and, even though the DVDs have been on sale, the new sale price is more than the old one.
Shit, I thought; I dragged the preparation for rudeness up from my gut and radioed a manager before the guy could cause any fuss. The answer I got didn't surprise me -- the usual, Try to explain the policy first. I raised my eyes to him and started to say, with palpable despair, "Sir, this sale price is an old one that shouldn't have been left here..."
And he waved his hand, sympathy all over his face. "Don't worry about it," he said softly -- I must really have looked upset -- "I didn't think that was right. I'll just take it for what it's ringing up as now."
Right there, for the first time since I started that job, I felt, to my overwhelming horror, tears begin a sudden swim in my eyes. I blinked hard and focused intensely on the box set as I deactivated the security tag. "Thank you," I said.
"No problem," he said.
For some reason, the rest of the day was great. Not smooth, necessarily, but peaceful. You don't expect people to be nice. It catches you totally off guard. Most of the time people seem to think we retail workers live at the store -- maybe we sleep curled up in our lockers in the back room, but surely we don't have lives. We are the omniscient automatons personally responsible for all the store's doings. And yet, after New Year's, I've experienced a lot of jocularity, understanding, sympathy and good manners.
Maybe everyone's just glad Christmas is over.
So the new job starts Monday, I'm enjoying this job, have managed to keep myself out of trollery, and look forward to a return to a more normal schedule. I keep praying about the specifics of my future and keep getting Wait as a response, so I'm casting about for ways to enjoy, and make good use of, what I'm doing now. There's a certain relief to being absurdly busy. Also to listening to music again. Simon's not a fan -- the house usually isn't this loud -- but he'll live. He's a remarkably adaptable feline. And I find myself quite grateful for my surviving houseplants who have stuck stubbornly by me through all the winters -- and springs, and summers, and autumns -- of my discontent. Unsurprisingly, they're all desert plants.
To my delight, I noticed the other day that one of my jades, which I bought at Aldi three and a half years ago -- eight little cutlets sprouting in a circle in a tiny pot -- has, in addition to growing tall, begun to sport woody stems. And, though the watering hasn't been frequent in the past year, it looks happy.
I like green and growing things. I miss pottering around in dirt. Well. Once I get my financial feet back under me, we'll see about restarting my indoor garden. A house full of plants has richer air and brighter light.
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