I worked at this store, that was part of a chain. Frankly, it was nothing special and it no longer even exists. But at the time, I felt like this was a worthy use of my time and I was making enough to afford rent, groceries, bills and fun money. Except that I secretly hated the job. But I convinced myself to love it, because of whatever I thought I could gain from that attitude. It didn’t work out.
I grew up in a family full of carpenters, handymen, vintners, plumbers and realtors. My life was making myself useful and being yelled at like a child. I thought striking out on my own would save me from that, and it worked for a while but not forever.
When I needed a job, this place hired me. I was really good with difficult customers, strong from summer construction gigs, knew enough Spanish to hold my own a r a jobsite, and I knew how to use tools. So this place felt like it was a good fit for me. For a while, it was.
Then, one day, I heard my coworker call out my name and she sounded just like a needy child. She actually whined my name loudly. I helped her with whatever it was, but I found our interaction disturbing. Like, what the hell was that?
A few weeks later, another coworker bellowed my name. A few days later, another one did it. Another did it that day, and I guess at that point, it just became the way people asked for my help. I hated it, but I didn’t speak up. I know not saying anything, and not telling people to stop, was my fault. But I had just never encountered this problem before, so didn’t know how to handle it.
Then, one day, I was at work. Literally every moment, I had someone crying out my name. I literally ended up in the middle of the sales floor, and my name was being screamed at me from every direction, and people were shouting over each other.
I actually yelled “would you all stop yelling my name all at once?” Then the whole staff started chanting my name and eventually telling me I do everything, and cheering for me. Then my boss sternly told me to get back to work.
I actually did just get back to work. I had a few coworkers tease me about me yelling like that, and tell me it was funny, as if the whole thing was some hilarious thing I said ironically.
I was also the safety inspector and corporate actually refused to fix a safety issue I put in a request for and nobody seemed to care that they couldn’t do their jobs without me fixing something that occasionally went wrong.
I was still at the point where I felt like my job mattered. Like what I was doing, was somehow making a difference. I also somehow had the illusion that I could someday work my way up to running this place. It was the ideal I’d been raised with, though I think I actually misunderstood the logic behind the lessons I needed to learn.
What I only learned much later, long after I burnt out from this job and got fired, was that I tried too hard to make difficult people happy.