Friday, August 27, 2010

Camp

I have had a lot of jobs over the last ten years, with quite a bit of variation. Assistant Gymnastics Instructor. Sales clerk. Babysitter. Software Tester. English Language Assistant. Coldstone...person. French teacher. Volunteer Coordinator. Caller at a calling center. English Language Assistant and Volunteer Coordinator top the list as my two favorite positions (with the lowest salaries), babysitter and and software tester are down at the bottom at least favorite (with the two highest salaries). The job at the calling center is the only one I have ever quit, after lasting only three days. I would have quit after the first fifteen minutes, but my supervisor was so damn attractive I tried to stick it out. I don't regret having any of these jobs. I can look back on each one and point to ways in which they helped me further my career, develop my interests, or at least help financially.
Except for one.
One job I look back on and think, Why, why, WHY did I ever do that to myself? It made me cry nearly ever day. It paid next to nothing during the time in my life I least needed money. It made me physically sick. I didn't like the people I worked for and few of the people I worked with.
Summer camp counselor.
Every day for eight weeks during the summer after my freshman year of college I got on a school bus at 7:45 in the morning and went on an hour long journey, gathering children who routinely vomited each and every morning before arriving at our destination. I have a phobia of
vomit. Even just knowing someone in the same building as I am is throwing up is enough to make me sick enough to do it myself. Obviously I did not fare well on these bus rides.
And this was before camp even BEGAN.
Once camp began I often had MORE children vomit throughout the day. Sometimes in the pool. I do not know WHAT parents were feeding their children during the summer of 2004.
It was either burning hot or raining. I had kids running off into the forest. I had girls shrieking over centipedes. I had boys sticking their butts on one another. I had food fights and naked children running about trying to pee on things and at least one girl per day who cried unintelligibly over something incomprehensible and three hypochondriacs and a lot of snot and blood and tears and parental notes and YOU try getting sunscreen on hyperactive 6 year olds with ADHD and a bizarre obsession with running around NAKED.
AND I had to get in the pool.
In a bathing suit.
It was the most horrific of all nightmares.
In the middle of it all, I had to sing this song repeatedly:

Beaver one beaver all let's all do the beaver call
Beaver two beaver three let's all climb the beaver tree
Beaver four beaver five let's all do the beaver jive
Beaver six beaver seven let's all go to beaver heaven
Beaver eight beaver nine CLAP CLAP it's BEAVER TIME!


But you know what the worst part is? The most ridiculous, awful,
insane part of the whole thing?
I went back the next summer.

Monday, August 9, 2010

Retail. Oh GOD, Retail.

Yet again, I begin an entry in this here blog with an apology. I am very aware that this entry is a couple of weeks late, but I am also aware that it is far more prompt than the last entry was. I take this as a positive sign. A few more months of haphazard shit, and we will have turned me into a regular blogging dynamo.

Apologies aside, this week's entry is about the magical world of retail.

Let me make something clear here. I don't have any particular problem with shopping. I approve of shopping, in a general sense, even if I myself am not as an avid a shopper as many of my friends. Working retail is another story altogether.

I work in a local independent lingerie store, neither Victoria's Secret, nor Fredrick's of Hollywood. It's a cute little place with an excellent selection of bras, panties, and cute little things, and in many ways it's not a bad job. I'm selling things I like in a store I approve of, for a boss I generally think is pretty awesome.

That said, retail is like high school. No matter how good your particular high school is, it is still high school, and therefore it is terrible. No matter how good your retail job is, it is still retail, and therefore it is terrible. It is also, for the most part, unavoidable. Yes, you could go into the service industry, or become a nanny, or just go straight for the gold and become a hooker, but for the most part, retail is simply what you do when you aren't qualified to do anything, and when you're poor. I am both of those things, so retail it is.

Retail is a poor decision for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, retail is a poor decision because it forces you to interact with other people. Now you may be thinking, “I don't get it, Rachael, I like people!” You are wrong. You may think you like people, but that is because you don't work retail. If you worked retail, you would realize that people are terrible. They are smelly, inconsiderate bastards who talk on the phone while you ring them up, thrusting their credit card in your face, and babbling away at whatever halfwit was stupid enough to have answered the phone when these inbred underwear buying hippos called.

People are also gross. Incredibly gross. A truly surprising amount of the time, they're not actually looking for underwear. They have wandered in off the street, taking a break from their evidently constant masturbation, hoping to find sex toys to shove in their every orifice to distract themselves from the emptiness of their broken, greasy lives. For the record, all of these disgusting, mutated examples of pseudo-humanity are male. They are also apparently incapable of distinguishing between Adult Mart and a high end, reputable, classy lingerie store. The presence of women not bearing the telltale signs of herpes should really be a dead giveaway.

People are also cheap. Really cheap. Women come into the store with bras that are literally falling apart on them. They complain about spending forty dollars on something that will actually separate their nipples from their belly buttons. They hang around for two hours, showing me far more of their pustule-encrusted wrinkled rolls of fat than I would EVER under ANY CIRCUMSTANCES like to see, and then only buy ONE FUCKING BRA. If I were on commission, I swear to you, you would have seen me on the news by now, wielding a bloody knife and growling.

IN SUMMATION: I didn't hate people until I started working to retail. I walked in there my first day, bright eyed and bushy tailed, innocent and sweet, and retail has killed all that love. Beaten it out of me. What a shitty decision. Ugh.