9.05.2008
One of the most recent comic from xkcd.
Showing posts with label Humor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Humor. Show all posts
Grow a Pair
1.14.2008
“Is anyone actually going to help me over here?” A woman asks me, speaking loudly across the candy aisle. “I’ve been waiting for twenty minutes to ask someone questions about treadmills and no one has even talked to me.”
I say that I will page someone and do so immediately. The guy that works that department is the typical no neck macho man. He wrestled in Division I, until he got in a fight with his coach and dropped out of college. As he carries a punching bag to someone’s car I tell him, “There’s woman who’s been waiting to ask some questions. Could you help her when you get back?” He nods and looks over. “Which one?” I point, “The lady with the green shirt on.”
The woman comes back to the cash register ten minutes later, and she’s furious. “I have been waiting a long time and then your associate guy walks right past me and helps a man who just got here.” She moved towards the door, speaking loudly, “I don’t have to take this!”
I wanted to feel compassion for her but all I could think was, At least you don’t have to work here.
Most of the women in the store work as cashiers or in apparel. I find being a cashier a bit demeaning. All that forced perkiness is exhausting. “You want to sound happy and cheerful,” my manager told me. “Make the customers feel special.” To me, if somebody needs the cashier at a sports store to make them feel special, they might also need therapy.
I think being consistently happy has a bad effect on your hairline. My female manager, a woman in her mid thirties, attempts a high pony tail so tight that it appears her hair is receding and her face along with it. Picture an overweight, white Janet Jackson. She trained the cashiers and demonstrated for us how we are to greet people. In a high girly voice she squeaks, “Well how are you today? Welcome. Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.” I think she scares the customers. Her face has become skull-like, permanently fixed with a smile like one of those scary clowns in horror movies.
I can’t blame her, I disintegrate in the same way. After eight hours of being upbeat, putting sugar and happiness into my voice, I begin to feel that I will soon lapse into a diabetic coma. There is one male cashier. He had to fill in when the head cashier went on maternity leave. “I hate this,” he moans. “I should have kicked her in the stomach before she left so that I wouldn’t have to work up here.” He’s joking, I think.
That’s a rough space to navigate, the “I think” territory. The head cashier had her baby on Black Friday--the biggest shopping day of the year. “That’s so selfish,” the senior manager complained. “Couldn’t she have put it off or something?” He’s kidding, I think.
But I wouldn’t put it pass him to be serious. I don’t think there’s much he wouldn’t do to his employees if it meant a higher profit or made him feel more powerful. I once had to scrape glue off a printer. A printer that no one even looks at. So I began rubbing at it with goo gone and a rag, scratching at it with my fingernails. It took me forty minutes to get the sticky mess off. All the while, he was talking and throwing footballs with my male coworkers.
“I think my dog is afraid of me,” he told me. “Him and everybody else,” I respond. I said that, really. Out loud. I dream up a lot of snippy little comments, but rarely let them leave my brain. He laughed and looked at me with a face that said, She’s kidding, I think.
I wasn’t really kidding, but don’t tell my boss. No one likes him, not even the males who get preferential treatment from him. In my store, every promotion has gone to a male. And the commissioned departments are staffed almost exclusively by males. This means that, despite the fact that I work harder than all of them, the men get payed more than I do.
And the manager has covered his ass well. I’m not promoting men because they are male, he could say. I’m promoting them because they have more expertise in these areas. The thing is, these men didn’t come in with more expertise than the women, they went through courses that taught them this knowledge. I have asked several times over the past three months to be trained, but I’m told that there is no company budget for it.
Being trained is a bit overrated anyways. A woman I work with has been the unofficial apparel and footwear manager for three months. She knows where everything goes, how to arrange displays, and actively communicates with the vendors over stock. So when it came time to promote someone to Soft-lines manager the position went to, you guessed it, a male. A male who knows nothing about these departments. He shadowed me for a couple of days to see what needed to be done. Me, the lowest level of the retail food chain, and I showed him how to do his job. I actually had to teach him how to fold.
In his defense, he does have a penis. I wore a softie to work a couple days to see if it would help. In case you don’t know, a softie is a sock or an actual fake penis that women wear in their pants for a variety of reasons. Some women find it empowering; I found it difficult to cross my legs. It was annoying to wear but when my boss started yelling at me, I did have the pleasure of thinking, At least my penis is bigger than yours.
My softie did not improve my job prospects, and so I abandoned the project. It turns out that other people have to know that you have a penis for it to work to your advantage.
Its not that being male is the only thing you can leverage in our store, being cute helps too. A new girl just got hired on in apparel. Within a week, she was promoted to cash lead. She has worked at the register all of three times. “I think the head manager is attracted to her,” one of the women in lower level management told me. “She was supposed to be hired on just for the holiday season, but he’s going to keep her full time.”
He did hire her full time. I’ve been working at the store for four months, but this girl gets more hours than me. I began thinking: Am I not attractive enough? Should I do my hair differently? Does my butt look big in my uniform? Then I realized that I was worrying about how I look to a man I have no intention of sleeping with.
Let me repeat: I have no intention whatsoever of sleeping with my manager. The way he tromps around the store, I have no doubt that he’s into BDSM. While I don’t judge others for this lifestyle, wearing a leather studded collar gives me a rash.
And for all the coaching we’re given on being friendly, he is actually quite rude to customers.
“We can’t refund you your money,” he snaps. “You have no way of proving that the item was damaged before you bought it.”
The customer is obviously intimidated but she doesn’t leave. “I didn’t do anything with it. It was like that when I opened the box.”
Normally returns of this kind are processed with out a problem, but this customer bought a high dollar item and my boss doesn’t want to lose the money. “I’ll make some calls,” he says and walks off.
After he is out of ear shot, I mouth to the woman, “I’m sorry.” She mouths back, “Thanks.”
I was proud of her for standing her ground. It's a tough thing to do. A friend of mine actually consulted a civil rights lawyer about the store. Then she wrote an anonymous letter to the district manager. She never got a response but the head manager asked one of the women to inform him if anything was “going on that he needed to know about.”
“I’m not going to rat anyone out,” she told him.
“Yeah,” he said, patting her shoulder. “Just tell me if, you know, you hear anything interesting.”
I thought of a few “interesting” words to say myself after I heard this. For a while, a lot of the women in the store were on edge. Who did they think sent the letter? Would we get in trouble? It turns out that there was no need to worry, management had already decided who had sent the letter. She works in footwear, and she’s butch. “We think she would be the most bitter,” a manager told me.
Not that she wouldn't have good reason to feel this way. I had heard statistics of women getting paid less than men on average, but now the point is hammered home. If this happens at my one store, I can't imagine how many times it happens nationwide. I'm beginning to feel a little bitter myself.
I try not to let it get to me too much. At least, if it does get to me, I take it out on the lazy male employees. I'm in apparel now and it requires the most work. So every night I run around like crazy, trying to make sure everything gets done. My male coworkers complain. We’re so bored, they say. There’s nothing to do. I offer them things in my department. "You can zip up coats if you want," I tell them. "Or fold these shirts." They tell me that they’re not quite that bored.
I take down signs. I dress mannequins. I clean up the mess left by customers. I never stop moving. As we’re packing up for the night, one of the boys moans, “The manager says we have to set this ad tomorrow morning. I hate having to do that, it takes like 45 minutes.”
“Oh, come on,” I tell him. “Grow a pair.”
Or at least stuff a sock down your pants.
Where Have All the Cowboys Gone??
10.26.2007
It’s nine o’clock in the morning and the store is about to open. I have been at work for over an hour counting money and setting up cashier stations. Ace of Base’s song, All That She Wants plays on the loudspeakers. Again. Spoiler alert: all that she wants, is another baby. Welcome to a day in retail.
“I’m sorry we don’t have much to do,” my manager says to me. “Things will pick up later today.” I ask him if it's okay for me to write while I wait. He thinks about it a second, “I don’t think the head manager would like that.” Other associates are talking to one another, bouncing balls, wandering round aimlessly--but it is my writing that would reflect badly on the company.
I am apparently to just stand. Doing nothing. Even when there are no customers in the store.
“Try to look friendly,” he tells me.
It is at this point that I realize that I don’t want to do retail. If I had any doubts about the validity of applying to masters programs for next year, these doubts are now assuaged.
He calls another manager. “Hey, why don't you bring those shirts forward. I’m going to get Adelaide to fold them. Just thought, you know, that I’d give her something to do.”
I decide that I will start working on my applications tonight.
I am the only cashier on duty, which means no ten minute breaks. While these are legally mandated, it doesn’t really bother me. I would most likely be told to do nothing there as well. “Yeah, just sit there. Try not to drool.”
It is surprisingly hard to not drool, I’ve found. Especially when you’re hungry. But every time I take out my lunch, I get made fun of. It’s hard to take spinach and basmati rice into the public without laughed at as a hippy.
Which is surprising, since Portland is one of the most hippy friendly cities in the country. But in the twenty minutes it takes me to drive from inner Portland to outer Portland, there is a serious shift in demographics. Whereas every barista and bag boy in downtown has bachelors degrees, on my job I am the only one.
A fact that doesn’t seem to be helping me much. “Uh, Jennifer, line one. Jennifer, uh, dammit!” In case you’re wondering, cursing over the loud speaker is never a good thing. Nor is failing to hang up the phone so that the entire store hears you ring up the next customer. I didn’t think it was a big deal until the next day when one of my coworkers said to me, “Did you hear that someone didn’t put the phone down after a page? We were all talking about it this morning. Its hilarious.” Yeah, wow, I say, that person must be really incompetent.
In truth, it's not the incompetence that messes me up so much as the forgetfulness. Take today, for example. Our apartment is really cold in the morning so when my alarm goes off, I jump out of bed and put my clothes and jacket on immediately. I drove to work and parked my car only to realize: I’m not wearing a bra. Worse than that, I am wearing a pretty thin shirt and no bra. I wear my jacket into the store, but its down filled so if I wear it all day I will most likely asphyxiate. And people will wonder, why is that girl wearing a jacket if she is sweating so heavily? It’s against company policy anyways, to wear coats on shift.
I run through the women’s apparel section looking for a sports bra, a thicker shirt, any kind of nipple hiding device. I finally settle on a cami, but, as I am the only cashier, I can’t buy it until the other girl gets to work at three. So, I did what any other sane human being would do in this situation--I taped down my breasts. With packing tape. Which is really not so bad, at least the taping part. It’s the removal of the tape process that’s hard. Suffice to say I have only one and a half nipples now.
No one seemed to notice my improvised bra. At least no one that could potentially fire me. I was worried because the population of outer Portland is pretty conservative, a fact that I continually forget. Take gender issues. A young guy brought a balance ball to the checkout. On the packaging was a picture of a woman mid crunch. He said that none of the balls had men on the box. I told him that her pink sports bra wouldn't really look good on him.
“Really?” he responded. “I think the pink might bring out my eyes. Anyhow, I guess they’re just not marketing these thing towards men.”
“Unless you’re a cross dresser,” I say. He looks at me and then moves back a bit. “Or transgendered,” I continue.
He's looking very uncomfortable and I’m beginning to flounder. “You know f-m or m-f. I’ve forgotten. Anyways...” I trail off, deeming that talking is no longer the best option.
I hand him his receipt and he says, “Well, this was quite the gender bender conversation.” I tell him I’m glad we had this talk.
Luckily, none of my coworkers heard me. They already think I’m weird here. I was talking to another cashier when Brittany Spears’ song, Not Yet a Woman, came on over the loud speakers. “If I never hear this song again,” I tell her, “I will be happy.”
She nods enthusiastically. “Yeah, I hate Brittany Spears. Christina Aguilera is sooo much better.” Of course, I mumble, that’s exactly what I meant.
I can’t blame her for liking these songs. I’ve heard them hundreds of times and they’re beginning to sink into my psyche. Our company has a playlist for their stores and it repeats all day. I find myself spontaneously singing lyrics I don’t even like. "Meet Virginia, I cant wait to, meet Virginia, yeah yeah."
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