Monday, November 19, 2007

Emma and the Terrible, Horrible, No-Good Day

This was a lousy day at work. People were rude; people were obnoxious. We ran out of large turkeys half-way through and started selling ANY turkeys with the coupons, at ANY size. The lines were long right up until I left at 9:30. I worked 1:30 to 9:30 and was dead tired by then. I wish I was used to working eight hours, but I'm not.

It wouldn't have been so bad if I hadn't gone and done something stupid about fifteen minutes before I finished. An old man wanted to buy crab legs and a can of crab meat. He got so upset when the crab meat came up what he thought was the wrong price, he refused to sign his credit card slip! No amount of begging or cajoling could get him to do it. He left me standing there with crab legs, crab meat, an open register, and an unsigned credit card receipt.

That cantankerous old jerk was the last straw. I threw the pen across the register. Hard. It thankfully missed the next customer in the line and ended up in the next register! The customer was a familiar face and was really sweet about it, but I felt absolutely horrible...and just felt worse when Jill, the manager in charge, took me out of the line and tried to send me home! I told her I had to stay; I needed the money. Besides, I'd just feel even worse than I already did if I didn't finish my shift, like a real adult.

I'm not a real adult. Real adults don't throw pens when they're upset. They act calmly and rationally. They have husbands, children, and/or pets. They have lives. Their friends live down the street, not across the state or the country. They don't bite their nails and they don't bunk with stuffed animals. They don't come home from work everyday feeling worthless and stupid. They have real jobs, jobs where they sit down and work with their peers and feel respected and wanted.

Why can't I do something right? I'm sure I'm going to get written up now, maybe even suspended. Greg, the other manager on duty, said he had to handle the old guy with the crab after he stormed away from me, and the guy gave HIM just as hard of a time as he gave ME. He STILL wouldn't sign for Greg either...and when Greg finally did get him to sign, he stormed off without anything!

And this at the holidays! Why do people have to be so stressed around the holidays? Why can't they just enjoy themselves?

I wish I could work from home, or at least from somewhere less stressful. Everything went fine at home this morning. I got the bathroom and the kitchen cleaned, and they both needed it badly. (I needed soap, but for some reason, in addition to a run on turkeys, there seems to have been a run on the cheap Ivory soap. Every last bit of it was gone when I went back there, and I wasn't going to chase after it. I guess everyone wants to be REALLY clean for Christmas.)

1 comment:

Linda said...

Well, I hope your punishment will be minimal. They have to say something to you. It's not a good thing to throw pens at people--but you know that already. You feel guilty about having done it. You are sorry. THAT makes you an adult. Adults lose their temper, too. If you had just flipped him the bird and said to your supervisor, "It served him right," then you would have been acting childish.

You have a conception of an adult as someone who never does anything wrong. That simply isn't so. (As someone who needs to keep her feet washed because they're so often in her mouth, I can assure you of this!) And there's no standardized conception of an adult. Some don't have friends nearby, and aren't married, can't or don't want pets, have a stash of stuffed critters or comics. (What's the difference between having stuffed animals and having a collection of bobble-head baseball dolls? Or sports equipment?)

Don't be so hard on yourself. Yes, you shouldn't have thrown the pen. But it doesn't make you bad and it doesn't make you not an adult.