an update
i quit my job a week ago.
my mom begged me to. i always get this sick feeling about quitting something, unless i really feel like it's ruining me...but it really was ruining me. and i still didn't want to quit. i could hardly get out of bed in the morning from my back pain and it seemed like no matter how hard i tried to not make work my life it was pretty much consuming every inch of it. on my days off i wouldn't even get out of bed. then i would get upset with myself for not being productive and wasting a day off. i'd come home from work and be in the worst mood ever from stress and pain...it wasn't until my mom came to visit me at work last thursday and take me to dinner on my break that i even thought of the idea of quitting. while she stood behind the register she witnessed one of the managers-in-training talk very demeaning and rude to me, the mit was not aware that this was my mother standing there. once we left the store she asked me if that's how it was all the time at work, and i said yes. that if it wasn't a manager beating you up, it was a customer. i began to vent like crazy all the cons to this job. she then asked me the positive aspects of anthropologie, and compared to the laundry list of bad things she didn't see why i would stay one more day for the few things i loved about working there. she wanted me to quit right then and there, telling me not to go back. i was shocked, because my mom has NEVER encouraged me to quit something. i didn't understand why she thought i had any right quitting my job with rent and bills and responsibilities. but she told me not to worry about it and that her and my dad would take care of me long enough for me to take it easy for a while and look for a more stationary job, where i wasn't hurting myself and having people treat me like dirt all the time. never before in my life had i witnessed so many senarios in which a customer was a complete jerk to a salesperson...and it wasn't until i moved to orange county that i was ever a victim to this kind of treatment in which i was a person's slave, that they could take out their daily frustrations on me over not having a sweater in stock in their size. a couple of instances i remember quite vividly was the morning i opened and one of our first customers was waiting at the other end of the register to do a return. she was on her cell phone, screaming at what a guessed was one of her employees or an assistant or something. she was an older woman...she stood at the other side of the counter and was vigorously writing something on a piece of paper while she ridiculously yelled over her cell phone like she was the only person in the store. i was occupied with my morning duties of cleaning up the cashwrap area and damaging out items and processing charge sends...i figured she was just using the register counter to write before she got in line to do a return. she hung up the phone and in a nasty tone of voice asked me when i was planning on helping her. i politely said that i did not know that she needed my help, and that i would assist her as soon as i finish processing the charge send i was doing. she told me that she had been standing there for five minutes waiting for me, and i replied that i had assumed she was using the counter as a place to write and that i usually respond quickly to people who stand on the other end of the register below the sign that says "line forms here" but that i could help her at my register (which was in the middle) when i finished the charge send. she (still rude) asked why i couldn't help her from another register, that it was "customer service" that i obviously didn't understand. i then replied (still polite) that associates are only assigned one register to use during the day, and that i could not log into another register while logged into this one. by then the charge send was completed and i told her i could help her, this whole time she's still rambling about customer service and how ridiculous i was being. i told her if she'd like she could come over to my register, but she refused saying that she wanted to stay where she was and that she didn't have to move and that it was "customer service." by this time my hands were shaking and my chest was about to explode. my heart was hurting so bad i almost wanted to rip it out. since my accident i've been on anxiety medication which causes you to feel other reactions than anxiety when an attack comes on. without the medication i would have probably fell onto the floor in a little ball, breathing hard, and shaking uncontrolably and in tears...however, if i did that i would have probably scared everyone in the store and would have been hauled off to the psyche ward. so xanax just turns me into the nutcase i would have been naturally, internally, so that no one can see the reaction and only i can feel it. i asked for her receipt and she huffed and puffed while pulling it out of her wallet. i tried to remain as calm as possible but it wasn't working. i picked up a pen and circled the items she wanted to return on her receipt, i looked at it once i was done and it looked as if a baby had attempted to circle these skus...my hands were shaking so hard i could barely write. i walked back over to my register and returned her items, and this whole time she's STILL complaining about how i don't understand customer service. STILL! i wasn't answering, i was too busy repeating to myself to remain calm and normal...and i think she was so upset that i wasn't arguing with her that she was just going to keep complaining until i cracked. A 40+ YEAR OLD WOMAN! picking on a fucking 19-year-old! i was so disgusted by this woman i almost wanted to vomit. if she even knew what her unattainable expectations were doing to me...causing me to almost lose control of myself. i interupted her rambling, still going, she mentioned something about a manager and i replied "may i see your visa card that you paid with?" to credit her account. she asked if she could get cash back. i said no, that we only refund the way the purchase was made. she dug in her purse for her card, and threw it on the table. she turned to her side and peered around the store for a manager, not making eye contact with me when i walked over to get her card. i returned to my register and asked if she wanted debit or credit. she replied debit looking straight into my eyes and then looking me up and down to turn around and get the attention of someone, who wasn't even a manager. i ran it as debit and then asked her to put in her pin at the pin pad near my register. she started again, why did she have to come all the way over there, this isn't customer service, can't i use this pin pad right infront of me? i said that she couldn't, that she had to use mine if she wanted debit. she then told me to run it as credit. now i could understand if she had a broken leg or something and couldn't walk over. i've been injured for that past year too and a lot of things about every day life are hard to do - but i never expected anyone to do things for me. and i knew she didn't have a problem walking, because before she even came to the cashwrap she was dashing around the store on her cell phone yelling. who wouldn't have noticed her...you couldn't even hear the music. she was just being an obnoxious bitch and that's the bottom line. i asked for her id. her address read newport beach. i gave her a receipt to sign and she pushed it away. she grabbed her copy from my trembling hand and i softly said "have a nice day." my voice was just as shakey. i saw her run over to brian, my manager, and complained to him. i ran off into the storage room where we kept the boxes and bags and calmed down for a minute. i came back and brian was just going on and on about it, i didn't even defend myself. i just wrote 'cunt' in my tightest cursive on the dotted line of her receipt and went on with the rest of the day being a punching bag to the rest of our customers when we didn't have what they wanted. later that day, a woman approached me with a fashion magazine, asking me where she could locate the russian teaset pictured in the magazine in our store. i politely told her that we didn't have the teaset in our stores yet while giving her various options in how she could purchase it online or through our catalog. she immediately got upset and began to YELL at me saying "i don't understand why you would advertise a product in a magazine but not have it available in your stores..." i tried to reason with her, but she just kept asking me that same question over and over. i finally got so fed up i told her "i can understand if we were advertising LIVERS or KIDNEYS and you needed one really bad and we didn't have one in our stores but this is a TEASET." i then wrote down the owner of urban outfitter's name on a piece of paper and handed it her and told her to take it up with him. i'm not the one who makes all those big decisions but if she wanted someone to ring her up and wrap all her shit in tissue paper and give her twenty boxes to wrap all her christmas gifts even though she only bought one thing than to let me know. well maybe i didn't say all of that. but i was about to crack. it seemed like everyone that came through that door had some need that was impossible to fill. it got to the point where i started to hate humanity, just because 90% of who i saw everyday was a complete jerk and would get so huffed and puffed over a simple thing like a sweater, like not having their size, like something not being on sale, on how long they had to wait in line, just everything. simple things. things that just shocked and appualed me in comparison to how i was raised. wow, they don't have that dress anymore...it's not the end of the world. to be patient, and kind to everyone. rich people, poor people, corporate people, homeless people, disabled people and young people and elderly people. everyone deserved the same respect. please and thank yous. i was raised this way, and yeah some sales people are annoying. i worked at nordstrom, i hated bothering people because i hated it too...but i was always kind. said no thank you. the people at del taco mess up my order all the time...but i don't treat them like lesser people to me because they work there, because they put red sauce in my burrito. i just check before i leave. but i don't pester them about doing it right the way customers used to coily ask me "did you take all the sensors off?" yes. i'm here everyday, eight hours a day. yes, i took the sensors off. i loved it when they told me how to do my job, and yeah, sometimes i'd get a little smart and as them if they'd like to come behind the counter and show me how to do it. i got so fed up with people that part of the reason i spent my days off in bed was because i couldn't deal with people anymore. it was unbearable to even think of coming into contact with strangers because strangers all the time were mean to me. i was becoming this person that couldn't be around people, just because some pretentious bitches in newport beach thought i was their slave when i was on the clock at anthropologie...and i love people. i've lived my life to help people less fortunate than i, when i vollunteered at food not bombs in high school, and when i signed up to enroll in the peace corp. in 2010. and even after my accident, i immediately became a part of MADD, and even though my mom and dad were so upset with the drunk driver that hurt their two daughters and our friends, they even planned on offering him support to take control of his alcohol abuse once the trial was over. and go to aa meetings with him. and this is how my family taught me to be my entire life. especially during christmas time, after both my sister and i were educated on santa claus, we stopped recieving truck loads of presents and got maybe one or two things we really needed and then donated the money we would of spent on gifts to a family in our area that was less fortunate. every year my mom would take brittany and i to target and we'd pick out toys for a couple little girls and little boys that were in foster care and i remember having so much fun doing it, even at a young age. and to watch all these people at my store freak out about not having this or that to get for themselves or for someone just made me sick. that they spent so much energy on stupid, materialistic things that werent going to make a difference about anything when there are more important things in life to flip out about. on top of that was the fact that i only liked about three people that i worked with. never had i had a job where i was so untrusted with my judgement, with responsibility. sometimes i offered wondered why i was even there when i was completely useless to do anything on my own. the managers-in-training were just having a field day on having some power in the store and would boss us around just to hear themselves boss us around. one manager would tell me to do something, and then another manager would come right behind them and tell me to stop doing that and do something else. i think it was really the breaking point when i went to the emergency room one night after work because of back pain and my doctor gave me an off-work order for a week. i faxed them this paperwork that apparently wasn't spread around and everyday i'd get a call with some manager screaming about how i wasn't there. then i'd clear it up, fax it again. and it would happen the next day. i got so frustrated that i had my mom call them to fax the paperwork again (she has a fax machine) and one of the managers in training TOLD MY MOM that if i wasn't honest about this off-work notice that she would complete the termination papers she was filing out for me. once my mom faxed it, she appologized and the next day when the managers appologized about the confusion i told them about this and they were shocked, because as an mit she doesn't even have the proper channels to fire someone. the only reason i stayed as long as i did was because jeff's friend kristen is the one that gave me the job and she was the only pleasant one to work with, yet i hardly ever worked with her. i really apperciated the opprotunity she gave me to get a job there as quickly as i did, and i just really wanted to make her proud of the work i did. she was one on the short list of why i liked working there. once i had poured all this out to my mom i realized that she was right...that retail was a great job to pay the bills but it was ruining my health, mentally and physically and i needed to get out fast. i wasn't interested in putting in two weeks, i wasn't interested in coming back. i hated the fact that i was going to make it hard for a few of my co-workers that i actually liked to pick up the slack for me once i left but i had to go. it was just one of those things. thinking about even trying to bring myself to get up in the morning to go there was just torture. i felt like one part of me was dragging the other half of me kicking and screaming and clawing the ground the entire way there before my shifts everyday. that's not how i wanted to live my life. my dad, who owns his own business, told me one time when i had lunch with him at his work, that your job will consist the most of your time. if you aren't happy there, you wont be happy in any other aspect of your life. my dad didn't get to go to college. his dad was an abusive alcoholic and his mom raised five kids alone...they didn't have money to send him to college. plus he did so bad in school that he could of never gotten a scholarship the same way his sisters' did...he was too busy being the man of the house to focus on school...and he worked a ton of shitty jobs just to help his mom with the mortgage. and sometimes it makes me really sad to see him struggle with reading, even though my dad is a complete mathematical genius and has come so far with the poor education he's had, owning his own business, and being so successful and well-known in the trade he is in. he understands that i'm going to have a lot of jobs as a young person but he has always encouraged me to go to school and do well in school, and he would completely fund it and all my other needs just as long as i got a higher education so i didn't have to hate my life and have the headaches that he had sometimes. and i was in college for a while there before my accident, and i didn't do so well in a lot of my classes and he was extremely disappointed in that...i had to take a year off school because of my injury. but without that injury and the lessons i've learned being out on my own, i would never be where i am today and be so motivated to change my life as i did when i almost lost my life 12-months ago. so last friday i walked into anthropologie, and told them that the night before was my last day. after i left anthropologie, i went to OCC and turned in my application so start in the spring semester.
my mom begged me to. i always get this sick feeling about quitting something, unless i really feel like it's ruining me...but it really was ruining me. and i still didn't want to quit. i could hardly get out of bed in the morning from my back pain and it seemed like no matter how hard i tried to not make work my life it was pretty much consuming every inch of it. on my days off i wouldn't even get out of bed. then i would get upset with myself for not being productive and wasting a day off. i'd come home from work and be in the worst mood ever from stress and pain...it wasn't until my mom came to visit me at work last thursday and take me to dinner on my break that i even thought of the idea of quitting. while she stood behind the register she witnessed one of the managers-in-training talk very demeaning and rude to me, the mit was not aware that this was my mother standing there. once we left the store she asked me if that's how it was all the time at work, and i said yes. that if it wasn't a manager beating you up, it was a customer. i began to vent like crazy all the cons to this job. she then asked me the positive aspects of anthropologie, and compared to the laundry list of bad things she didn't see why i would stay one more day for the few things i loved about working there. she wanted me to quit right then and there, telling me not to go back. i was shocked, because my mom has NEVER encouraged me to quit something. i didn't understand why she thought i had any right quitting my job with rent and bills and responsibilities. but she told me not to worry about it and that her and my dad would take care of me long enough for me to take it easy for a while and look for a more stationary job, where i wasn't hurting myself and having people treat me like dirt all the time. never before in my life had i witnessed so many senarios in which a customer was a complete jerk to a salesperson...and it wasn't until i moved to orange county that i was ever a victim to this kind of treatment in which i was a person's slave, that they could take out their daily frustrations on me over not having a sweater in stock in their size. a couple of instances i remember quite vividly was the morning i opened and one of our first customers was waiting at the other end of the register to do a return. she was on her cell phone, screaming at what a guessed was one of her employees or an assistant or something. she was an older woman...she stood at the other side of the counter and was vigorously writing something on a piece of paper while she ridiculously yelled over her cell phone like she was the only person in the store. i was occupied with my morning duties of cleaning up the cashwrap area and damaging out items and processing charge sends...i figured she was just using the register counter to write before she got in line to do a return. she hung up the phone and in a nasty tone of voice asked me when i was planning on helping her. i politely said that i did not know that she needed my help, and that i would assist her as soon as i finish processing the charge send i was doing. she told me that she had been standing there for five minutes waiting for me, and i replied that i had assumed she was using the counter as a place to write and that i usually respond quickly to people who stand on the other end of the register below the sign that says "line forms here" but that i could help her at my register (which was in the middle) when i finished the charge send. she (still rude) asked why i couldn't help her from another register, that it was "customer service" that i obviously didn't understand. i then replied (still polite) that associates are only assigned one register to use during the day, and that i could not log into another register while logged into this one. by then the charge send was completed and i told her i could help her, this whole time she's still rambling about customer service and how ridiculous i was being. i told her if she'd like she could come over to my register, but she refused saying that she wanted to stay where she was and that she didn't have to move and that it was "customer service." by this time my hands were shaking and my chest was about to explode. my heart was hurting so bad i almost wanted to rip it out. since my accident i've been on anxiety medication which causes you to feel other reactions than anxiety when an attack comes on. without the medication i would have probably fell onto the floor in a little ball, breathing hard, and shaking uncontrolably and in tears...however, if i did that i would have probably scared everyone in the store and would have been hauled off to the psyche ward. so xanax just turns me into the nutcase i would have been naturally, internally, so that no one can see the reaction and only i can feel it. i asked for her receipt and she huffed and puffed while pulling it out of her wallet. i tried to remain as calm as possible but it wasn't working. i picked up a pen and circled the items she wanted to return on her receipt, i looked at it once i was done and it looked as if a baby had attempted to circle these skus...my hands were shaking so hard i could barely write. i walked back over to my register and returned her items, and this whole time she's STILL complaining about how i don't understand customer service. STILL! i wasn't answering, i was too busy repeating to myself to remain calm and normal...and i think she was so upset that i wasn't arguing with her that she was just going to keep complaining until i cracked. A 40+ YEAR OLD WOMAN! picking on a fucking 19-year-old! i was so disgusted by this woman i almost wanted to vomit. if she even knew what her unattainable expectations were doing to me...causing me to almost lose control of myself. i interupted her rambling, still going, she mentioned something about a manager and i replied "may i see your visa card that you paid with?" to credit her account. she asked if she could get cash back. i said no, that we only refund the way the purchase was made. she dug in her purse for her card, and threw it on the table. she turned to her side and peered around the store for a manager, not making eye contact with me when i walked over to get her card. i returned to my register and asked if she wanted debit or credit. she replied debit looking straight into my eyes and then looking me up and down to turn around and get the attention of someone, who wasn't even a manager. i ran it as debit and then asked her to put in her pin at the pin pad near my register. she started again, why did she have to come all the way over there, this isn't customer service, can't i use this pin pad right infront of me? i said that she couldn't, that she had to use mine if she wanted debit. she then told me to run it as credit. now i could understand if she had a broken leg or something and couldn't walk over. i've been injured for that past year too and a lot of things about every day life are hard to do - but i never expected anyone to do things for me. and i knew she didn't have a problem walking, because before she even came to the cashwrap she was dashing around the store on her cell phone yelling. who wouldn't have noticed her...you couldn't even hear the music. she was just being an obnoxious bitch and that's the bottom line. i asked for her id. her address read newport beach. i gave her a receipt to sign and she pushed it away. she grabbed her copy from my trembling hand and i softly said "have a nice day." my voice was just as shakey. i saw her run over to brian, my manager, and complained to him. i ran off into the storage room where we kept the boxes and bags and calmed down for a minute. i came back and brian was just going on and on about it, i didn't even defend myself. i just wrote 'cunt' in my tightest cursive on the dotted line of her receipt and went on with the rest of the day being a punching bag to the rest of our customers when we didn't have what they wanted. later that day, a woman approached me with a fashion magazine, asking me where she could locate the russian teaset pictured in the magazine in our store. i politely told her that we didn't have the teaset in our stores yet while giving her various options in how she could purchase it online or through our catalog. she immediately got upset and began to YELL at me saying "i don't understand why you would advertise a product in a magazine but not have it available in your stores..." i tried to reason with her, but she just kept asking me that same question over and over. i finally got so fed up i told her "i can understand if we were advertising LIVERS or KIDNEYS and you needed one really bad and we didn't have one in our stores but this is a TEASET." i then wrote down the owner of urban outfitter's name on a piece of paper and handed it her and told her to take it up with him. i'm not the one who makes all those big decisions but if she wanted someone to ring her up and wrap all her shit in tissue paper and give her twenty boxes to wrap all her christmas gifts even though she only bought one thing than to let me know. well maybe i didn't say all of that. but i was about to crack. it seemed like everyone that came through that door had some need that was impossible to fill. it got to the point where i started to hate humanity, just because 90% of who i saw everyday was a complete jerk and would get so huffed and puffed over a simple thing like a sweater, like not having their size, like something not being on sale, on how long they had to wait in line, just everything. simple things. things that just shocked and appualed me in comparison to how i was raised. wow, they don't have that dress anymore...it's not the end of the world. to be patient, and kind to everyone. rich people, poor people, corporate people, homeless people, disabled people and young people and elderly people. everyone deserved the same respect. please and thank yous. i was raised this way, and yeah some sales people are annoying. i worked at nordstrom, i hated bothering people because i hated it too...but i was always kind. said no thank you. the people at del taco mess up my order all the time...but i don't treat them like lesser people to me because they work there, because they put red sauce in my burrito. i just check before i leave. but i don't pester them about doing it right the way customers used to coily ask me "did you take all the sensors off?" yes. i'm here everyday, eight hours a day. yes, i took the sensors off. i loved it when they told me how to do my job, and yeah, sometimes i'd get a little smart and as them if they'd like to come behind the counter and show me how to do it. i got so fed up with people that part of the reason i spent my days off in bed was because i couldn't deal with people anymore. it was unbearable to even think of coming into contact with strangers because strangers all the time were mean to me. i was becoming this person that couldn't be around people, just because some pretentious bitches in newport beach thought i was their slave when i was on the clock at anthropologie...and i love people. i've lived my life to help people less fortunate than i, when i vollunteered at food not bombs in high school, and when i signed up to enroll in the peace corp. in 2010. and even after my accident, i immediately became a part of MADD, and even though my mom and dad were so upset with the drunk driver that hurt their two daughters and our friends, they even planned on offering him support to take control of his alcohol abuse once the trial was over. and go to aa meetings with him. and this is how my family taught me to be my entire life. especially during christmas time, after both my sister and i were educated on santa claus, we stopped recieving truck loads of presents and got maybe one or two things we really needed and then donated the money we would of spent on gifts to a family in our area that was less fortunate. every year my mom would take brittany and i to target and we'd pick out toys for a couple little girls and little boys that were in foster care and i remember having so much fun doing it, even at a young age. and to watch all these people at my store freak out about not having this or that to get for themselves or for someone just made me sick. that they spent so much energy on stupid, materialistic things that werent going to make a difference about anything when there are more important things in life to flip out about. on top of that was the fact that i only liked about three people that i worked with. never had i had a job where i was so untrusted with my judgement, with responsibility. sometimes i offered wondered why i was even there when i was completely useless to do anything on my own. the managers-in-training were just having a field day on having some power in the store and would boss us around just to hear themselves boss us around. one manager would tell me to do something, and then another manager would come right behind them and tell me to stop doing that and do something else. i think it was really the breaking point when i went to the emergency room one night after work because of back pain and my doctor gave me an off-work order for a week. i faxed them this paperwork that apparently wasn't spread around and everyday i'd get a call with some manager screaming about how i wasn't there. then i'd clear it up, fax it again. and it would happen the next day. i got so frustrated that i had my mom call them to fax the paperwork again (she has a fax machine) and one of the managers in training TOLD MY MOM that if i wasn't honest about this off-work notice that she would complete the termination papers she was filing out for me. once my mom faxed it, she appologized and the next day when the managers appologized about the confusion i told them about this and they were shocked, because as an mit she doesn't even have the proper channels to fire someone. the only reason i stayed as long as i did was because jeff's friend kristen is the one that gave me the job and she was the only pleasant one to work with, yet i hardly ever worked with her. i really apperciated the opprotunity she gave me to get a job there as quickly as i did, and i just really wanted to make her proud of the work i did. she was one on the short list of why i liked working there. once i had poured all this out to my mom i realized that she was right...that retail was a great job to pay the bills but it was ruining my health, mentally and physically and i needed to get out fast. i wasn't interested in putting in two weeks, i wasn't interested in coming back. i hated the fact that i was going to make it hard for a few of my co-workers that i actually liked to pick up the slack for me once i left but i had to go. it was just one of those things. thinking about even trying to bring myself to get up in the morning to go there was just torture. i felt like one part of me was dragging the other half of me kicking and screaming and clawing the ground the entire way there before my shifts everyday. that's not how i wanted to live my life. my dad, who owns his own business, told me one time when i had lunch with him at his work, that your job will consist the most of your time. if you aren't happy there, you wont be happy in any other aspect of your life. my dad didn't get to go to college. his dad was an abusive alcoholic and his mom raised five kids alone...they didn't have money to send him to college. plus he did so bad in school that he could of never gotten a scholarship the same way his sisters' did...he was too busy being the man of the house to focus on school...and he worked a ton of shitty jobs just to help his mom with the mortgage. and sometimes it makes me really sad to see him struggle with reading, even though my dad is a complete mathematical genius and has come so far with the poor education he's had, owning his own business, and being so successful and well-known in the trade he is in. he understands that i'm going to have a lot of jobs as a young person but he has always encouraged me to go to school and do well in school, and he would completely fund it and all my other needs just as long as i got a higher education so i didn't have to hate my life and have the headaches that he had sometimes. and i was in college for a while there before my accident, and i didn't do so well in a lot of my classes and he was extremely disappointed in that...i had to take a year off school because of my injury. but without that injury and the lessons i've learned being out on my own, i would never be where i am today and be so motivated to change my life as i did when i almost lost my life 12-months ago. so last friday i walked into anthropologie, and told them that the night before was my last day. after i left anthropologie, i went to OCC and turned in my application so start in the spring semester.