I Am So Bad At Understanding Accents. And People.

It’s just so awkward when I have to ask the nice Scottish man to repeat his question four times, only to realize that he’s asking about “key rings,”–sounded like “keedling” to my ears–which are apparently what Scottish people call key chains. Maybe I’m just not an auditory learner (too much reading as a child), but I literally have the hardest time understanding people, which sucks because 90% of my job is answering people’s questions, and 75% of those people do not come from ‘Merica. Even the ones that do can be hard to understand depending on where in the States they’re from. And I get spoken to in Spanish probably twenty times a day, since I look Hispanic. Thanks, Dad, for not speaking Spanish to me when I was a kid. Now I have to deal with upset Latinas every day because I don’t know what they’re saying.

So lots of awkward situations. Which become even more awkward when people are constantly asking me for directions in a city where I’ve lived for exactly two weeks and a theme park that I’ve been in, say, once in the last four years. So I have no more clue than you do where anything is. And no, extraordinarily drunk man, I do not know where you parked your car, because I am not physic.

Also, why are you people angry that I don’t know where the disabled parking is? Since I’m not disabled, I have never had occasion to use disabled parking, and unfortunately I was not given a map of the parking garage here (I wish they had, the number of times I’ve lost my own car!). But you should have done what I failed to do my first day and remembered where you parked instead of yelling at me because you didn’t pay attention. Like me, you should have realized the consequences of your unobservance and wandered around the parking garage for half an hour until you found it. (In case you were wondering, no, unobservance is not actually a word.) Yelling at me for not knowing something you should have known yourself was pointless.

And thank you, lady, for yelling at me for walking past your loud and obnoxious group standing on the moving walkway. It’s a walkway, not an escalator. The point of those things is so you get places faster, not so you can stand there and block the people who just finished an 8-hour shift and want to go home (of which I was not the only one). It’s not like my threading my way through your group after four people had already done so really messed up the chi of your standing on a moving walkway.

I just don’t get people. Why are you yelling at other people? I honestly can’t remember the last time I’ve actually yelled at another human being. Maybe it’s because I rant on this blog instead of taking my anger out on people, but seriously… Now I get yelled at for things that are not my fault on a daily basis, and I just don’t understand it. Why is everyone so angry all the time? Chill, drink some tea, read a book, relax. It won’t kill you to not freak out about having to stand there and wait because your key chain doesn’t have a barcode so I have to look it up. Oh, you’re sweating there why you wait? I have been standing out here sweating for six hours, so suck it up and stop being mad at me.

Of course, all of this is in my head. I’m never sarcastic to customers, promise. I’d get fired so quick. I’m also a firm believer that being rude in return to rude people just makes the situation worse. But being sarcastic in my head makes me feel better, so I figure it’s okay.

Customers are, however, very sarcastic to me. Like today a British guy walks up to my kiosk thing and asks me where he can “go out.” I thought he meant the exit, so I pointed him toward the parking garage. Then he was like, no, go out to party, and I thought he said “the party,” and so was referring to the strip of restaurants and music clubs and whatever that are near the park entrance so I pointed him there. Then he was like, “No, we want to go to a night club. Where are the good ones? You look like you would know.”

Really? I do? Because: 1. I don’t “party.” I’ve been to exactly one club in my life and it was a line-dancing club during a bachelorette party and it was honestly a super tame club. I don’t drink ever because I’m not quite 21 and I’m a law-follower. And 2. I’ve lived here two weeks. I don’t know where the Wal-mart is, much less any clubs. I also don’t know any street names except the ones I take to work, so I wouldn’t even be able to point you in a direction.

Needless to say, the man was very disappointed and surprised that I couldn’t answer his question. My eye makeup was a bit heavier today than usual. Maybe I looked like a party girl, I don’t know. I told him I was new to the area, and he said to me as he left, “Well, you were helpful.” I’m sorry? I guess I am totally to blame for not being a partier or knowing where things are in a city I just moved to?

I’m sorry I’m the most un-helpful sales person ever? You should ask me about the price of that stuffed animal sometime, that I know. Actually just kidding, I don’t know, but did you know it has a tag with a price listed on it?

I don’t know when this post about me being bad at understanding accents turned into a rant about angry customers, but I’m just gonna go with it. And now I’m gonna go to bed, and tomorrow enjoy my first day off in a full week. Yay!

Retail Etiquette

In honor of my summer retail job, I’d like to give you all some nice reminders on how to not make all the sales people in the store want to kill you. It’s nice, ya know, when you can get through a day without making another human being want to commit a homicide. Some people haven’t figured out quite how to do that yet. In case you are one of those, here’s a few basic rules to help you get by when you’re shopping.

1. Contrary to your extraordinarily obtuse belief, the people who work in the store are NOT responsible for the prices of ANYTHING in the store. That all comes from much higher up than the people who make nine bucks an hour to ring up your items and ask if you’d like your receipt in the bag. So there is absolutely no point in complaining about the prices to the nice broke college student who was innocently restocking candy, just trying to earn a little dough so she can go to Europe next year, when you stormed up to her. There is definitely no point in rudely demanding to know why the store doesn’t sell any sweatshirts for less than $50.

It’s a theme park gift shop. No, there aren’t any sweatshirts under $50. And it is not that poor college student (aka me)’s fault. It’s not like I could afford them either, even with my employee discount.

2. It is possible, when you decide you don’t want to buy an item after all, to walk the 20 feet back to the other side of the store to put it back where it came from. Because, strangely enough, when you leave something in a random place, someone with a nametag on her shirt has to put it back where it came from. Which isn’t a huge deal until she literally has to do it fifty times a day. When she’s having to stand eight hours a day for five days straight and her feet are killing her. And when I say killing her, I mean feeling like they are about to fall off and she has to hobble all the way to her car at the end of her shift. So thanks, for stuffing that cute stuffed animal you told your kid she can’t have on top of a t-shirt rack and making the saleslady take it back for you.

3. It is similarly possible to not destroy a pile of shirts when rifling through for your size. I confess, I’ve done it too. I’ve accidentally ruined the nice, orderly pile of t-shirts to find the medium at the bottom of the stack. And I, too, decided that I didn’t have time to put it aright. Which was a lie, because I did have time. You know who doesn’t have time? The person who has to re-fold the same stack of shirts five times an hour. The same exact stack. Five. Times. An. Hour.

4. It’s also possible not to screw up the displays. Did you know that there are people whose sole job is to decide how items should be displayed in a store? Well, there are. And it’s the people who work in the store’s job to try to keep the displays the way the powers-to-be said that they should be, from the number of t-shirts there ought to be on a rack to the way the mugs are arranged on a shelf. Even if it looks disheveled, like a messy bun there’s an art to perfecting the careless look (unless it’s disheveled because the customers before you screwed it up). So when you pick up an item, put it back in the exact same way that you found it.

5. If you don’t see it in the store, it’s probably not there. Obviously, this does not apply to sizes of t-shirts–although if you don’t see your size, it might be because the store is out. But when you’re staring at a wall of t-shirts and trying to find a onesie in that same t-shirt design and don’t see one, it’s probably because the store doesn’t carry onesies in that design. Some people are under the delusion that there’s a gigantic backroom somewhere that, like a museum, has all of these wonderful items that you can only get if you’re creative enough to ask if they’re there. Well, there is a gigantic backroom…holding exact replicas of everything in the store. I know, shocking. And if the store is anything like the one I work on, the stockers are excellent at making sure that the store shelves never run out of items. So if you don’t see it, it’s probably not there. Unless you’re just really horrible at finding things in stores for yourself, in which case, ask away.

6. Finally, be nice. Just because you are The Customer, you do not the right to be a jerk to the people who work there. They are people, too. We have lives and bad days as well. One of my coworker’s mother-in-law died this week, and she was really torn up about it…and I just watched several customers be extremely rude to her and I felt so bad because she was already having such a rough day. Yes, it’s our job to do everything we can to please you. But that doesn’t mean you get to be difficult to please.

 

Actually, if people did half these things, like taking stuff back and not messing up displays, I probably wouldn’t have a job. But it’s a shame, though, you know, that I have a job because people are too lazy to practice common courtesy. Eh, human nature, I guess. Anyway, be nice to the salespeople. Their feet hurt.