I think one step in maturity is understanding we are going to have to do things we don’t enjoy to get what we want. I’m not talking about anything shady, but I heard somebody at the grocery store tell me that it was just a ‘transition’ job for them. While I knew exactly what he meant, I decided to question him further. We all want those greener pastures, and the more we look at them from our lonely hills, the more enticing they become. If the grocery store we worked at is just a transition, then what about the older people who are making their living there? Are they caught in the transition? I saw a grown woman, another cashier, break down and hug a customer because of a crisis they were going through. Nobody seemed to want to give their attention to them, but they were in tears. Comparing this with what he had told me five minutes before, I knew that once you accept something as a ‘lesser’ job, you tag the workers as lesser people. Does that make them less than human? We are all real people with real problems. I know tidbits, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable exposing anything about anybody else on the internet. Maybe for some of us this Customer Service job is temporary, but to define yourself by where you’re going and where you’ve been seems to hold little weight with me. It’s what you do with what you have. Right now, I have a couch full of books and a cousin waiting to pick me up for Chinese food. There is no transition moment of your life, you kind of have to live through it. If you look back and say that you are too good for your previous employment, have you evolved?
I was pushing carriages yesterday. Suddenly, the temperature dropped and the sky begun to drop little snow flurries—not the ideal situation. The parking lot of the grocery store wasn’t particularly bad, but the collective attitude was depressing. Everybody expects you to go out of your way to make their lives easier. I hear a lot of, I’d hate to have your job when it snows. There is a cart-pushing machine the store purchased, however, barely any of us are trained on it, so we have to resort to stacking carriages and doing all the work the old way. We have one row of smaller blue carriages for the entire store. Everybody who works their despises it, and everybody who shops their adores them. We usually try to keep the sidewalk full as well, in case of an emergency. I had placed three little extra blue carriages in the sidewalk, not unusual, and began walking back to one of the corals for more. When I turned around, I saw a little old man with a Chaplin hat, probably no taller than five feet, waving to me. His wrinkled face was concealed by a large pair of glasses. He pointed to the blue carriages and pushed them into the room. What he said was, “It’s okay, I got these.” However, what he meant was, “I know exactly how you feel right now. Let me help you out.” While he made my job harder, he made my day a lot better. I ended up moving the blue carriages back to the sidewalk when he left.
Stage Fright 