by Zoë Pollock
I'm loving everyone's stories of life on the job. From a former bookstore manager:
Ten days before Christmas, I had the flu. I called my assistant manager only to learn that she also had the flu and therefore I was trumped on calling out sick. I got to the store and learned that the two clerks scheduled to work with me were also sick. I called around frantically and got one replacement to come in a couple of hours after we opened. By ten in the morning the small store was overflowing with people, the phone was ringing off the hook and I was alone. And that was when the people of Roxborough taught me a thing or two about decency and community.
First a woman that wanted her books gift-wrapped asked if she could just come behind the counter and do it herself rather than trouble me. Of course, I said. She was there for thirty minutes as she wrapped books for other customers, too. Other customers started helping each other find books they were looking for. The retired guys that always browsed the magazine rack while their wives ran errands elsewhere in the shopping center started joking around with customers to lighten the mood. One of them brought me a coffee. Around one in the afternoon one of my sick clerks stopped in after picking up antibiotics for his pneumonia at the pharmacy next door, looked around, and just put on his apron and started working. That whole day, no one complained, ever. It really might have been the best day I’ve had at any job in my life.
Many touched on the fine art of tipping:
Back in college, I worked as a coat-man in a four-star restaurant in Washington, DC. The most interesting thing I learned is that I could predict – with a fair degree of accuracy – how much of a tip I would get, based on a person's coat. If the person had a regular jacket, they would always give a $1-2 dollar tip, without fail. But, if the woman had on a fur coat, one of two things would happen. About four out of every five of them would give no tip at all, regardless of the level of service. But the fifth one would give not only a $10 tip, but a big smile and a short conversation. A good chunk of those people would comment on how they remember working a similar job back when they were younger or in college.
So, lesson learned: If I ever make enough money to get my wife a fur coat, I'm also going to make sure my daughter works a customer service job to start. And I'll always tip the coat-guy.
And from the other end of the spectrum:
During college I worked for 3 years at Jimmy John's and spent most of the time delivering sandwiches. During that time I learned that people generally lose all concept of time. If I delivered food within 20 minutes from the time it was ordered, people were sometimes shocked and amazed. If I did that enough, a 30 minute delivery time became an "I ordered this an hour ago" complaint. I learned that some people will invite a complete stranger into their house and offer food, beer, and weed. … As a poor 21 year old working for tips, a $20 bill for an $11 order once made my day. Pot smokers tipped better than most.
Another writes:
As a seasonal employer, Six Flags got a lot of its workforce from local job fairs, usually held at area high schools. Whether by circumstance , or some hitherto unexplored interest in uniform apparel, I wound up in the park’s wardrobe department. Before you go picturing measuring tapes and sewing machines (a detail which was handled by three lovely off-season home ec teachers named Barb-yes, all three of them named Barb), what this work actually entailed was providing daily uniforms changes for every single employee of the park, from rides to games to park services (what would in an earlier era have been called janitors) to food service. Uniforms changed with theme areas: one day you could be dressed as a French Quarter-style busker, another day as a tasseled leather-jacketed frontiersman of the Yukon. We manned the counter at the front of a large warehouse, handing uniforms to park employees hundreds at a time at the start of their shifts. Many of them were bused in from as far north as Greater Milwaukee. A large number of them were foreign students on creatively titled “internships”. The rest was a mixture of upper middle class suburban kids like myself and kids from the much more hard-up towns along Lake Michigan; kids with names like Kizziwanda and Rigoberto.
I might have pitied them for some reason. I felt like I was lucky.
Why? Well, for one thing I got to work indoors in the summertime in the Midwest. For another, the type of employee drawn to this wardrobe work tended inevitably to be older, middle-aged, and female with children my age. Though I was at no loss for a mother figure in my life, I had your typical sixteen your old relationship with one’s parents and, on this level, it was fun to be around people you could identify as in loco maternis without any of the nagging or the suspicion that a teenager tends otherwise to sense at home. Moreover, this dynamic socialized me in a very interesting way. It took me more than a few encounters to realize that you cannot talk to a woman of certain age the same way you would talk to any of your friends. Not at that age, at least; they would put you in your place in short order. And a lot of the time they did. Most importantly, I was out of the view of park guests. Nobody would have to know where I worked; that I was working. I wouldn’t be one of those kids holding that kind of job (a job, in retrospect, meaningfully no different from any other summer job anybody else had at the time) and, because of this, I felt safe.
But looking back at it all, still fondly, I remember thinking, “God, I was such an entitled little shit back then”. I would hop from one retail position to the next in the cluster of big boxes popping up around the Six Flags before I left for college, but even then I felt already pegged as the oddball smart one in each setting; the Annabeth Gish character in Mystic Pizza, as it were (only even more sex averse and of the opposite gender). Maybe, in retrospect, I was made for office work, involving a desk, a secretary, a reliable gold-plated health insurance plan. But I wonder how much more interesting (and fun and useful) I could have turned out to be if I risked exposing myself a little, if I let myself look sweaty and uncomfortable in public, handing out redemption prize tchotchke in a royal and scarlet pinstriped uniform. Once could cringe, but then one hasn’t really lived if one can’t cringe at their past selves from the vantage point of the present. It’s better than simply pitying them.
The Dish 