That Time Everything Sucked

   In August 1980-something, Jim and I packed up everything we owned and headed for Houston, Texas. We packed  his motorcycle and everything  we owned in a UHaul, including the cat, and latched my  newly purchased Toyota Celica, with new tires and also packed, and headed south. Newly graduated from college, Jim was heading to work for his cousin. I was along for the ride, having stalled out a bit on my English degree at CU Denver, and thought a change of scenery might be nice.
   We stopped in Arlington, between Dallas and Ft. Worth, at a Ramada Inn. We took the cat and the guns and a suitcase of clothes into the room with us, and I slept poorly. When we woke up, the UHaul was gone. Vanished. Whoosh. Disappeared.With my car latched behind it.
   The UHaul with all of our sad, earthly possessions was now gone.
   My clothes.
   His newly purchased work clothes.
   The bed.
   The Dresser.
   A satchel with everything I had ever written.
   My high school letter jacket.
   His motorcycle.
   Towels, underwear,
   Leather jacket.
 
  You get it.
  Gone.
  Left with nothing but a cat, a suitcase and each other, we stood in the hotel lobby with the police and were told this was a "ring", they'd been hot wiring UHauls. Yet nobody was watching ours, so....cool. Thanks. Welcome to Texas, kryssi.
 
   Okay, I'm not going to bore you with police reports, or that Jim's motorcycle was used in a liquor store robbery in Dallas, or that renter's insurance doesn't cover you on the road, or that Prudential will consider you uninsurable for a year after getting all of your shit stolen, or the graciousness of family  or  or or....only that it sucked. Hard Core.  I was in an unfamiliar state with my boyfriend's family. Jim had a job, I did not. I had to find a job, we had to get an apartment, I had to buy clothes to go on job interviews, we had to figure out functioning with one car since he had his dealership car and mine was stolen, I had to figure out how to register and pay for college at UH as a non resident.
   Then, one day, I received a phone call from someone I did not know. The satchel with all my writing was found by a jogger (oh ya, the UHaul had been stripped, the car was stripped and our sad possessions strewn about a wooded area in search of some kind of gold the fuckwad thieves seemed to think we had.) My address in Lakewood was in the satchel, they tracked me down. They then mailed me the satchel, in Texas, out of nothing but kindness. These people did not have to do that.

   And so, in conclusion, all in all, to sum up: Thieves are fuckwads. Life sucks a lot. Adulting is more difficult than you imagine when you're 18. And as angry and bitter as you'd like to spin and blame and trouble deaf heaven with your bootless cries, some rando with a heart will find your satchel with your poetry and journals and "novel", and mail it to you.

  I submitted those pieces from my "novel" to Edward Albee a year later, and was accepted to his playwriting class.

  That's all.

B. Dalton Bookseller, this is kryssi, how can I help you?

   When I was 21 years old, I made the following statement: "The entrance exam to the human race is too easy." 
    I  repeated this statement for years, and then those trapped behind a counter or at a bar with me, without any means of escape, would be regaled with the full thesis. "You should have to work retail at Christmas, and wait tables to pay your rent. No spouse or parental help. You don't get tipped, you don't eat. 'The Customer Is Always Right' and you argue, you get fired, you don't pay rent. That'd fix 95% of what is wrong with this world. If everyone had to do this, nobody'd be a jerk."  
   This was  a long time ago. I'm going to drop hints along the way and make you do your own math, but trust me, Nothing Has Changed over the years.   
   I thought it had. I thought Amazon and its Prime and Target online ordering had killed the Holiday Rush, as video killed the radio star, then I saw cell phone footage of a melee in Walmart on Black Friday and my fears of a collective human maturity were assuaged. Nope. People Still Suck.   
    Yes, it's time to bitch about retail. 'Tis the season. 
    For a bit over ten years, I worked at B. Dalton (Co and Tx), Book Star (Tx) and Barnes and Noble (Co). Most of my retail experiences were in bookstores, with a brief high school stint at Fashion Gal and a trendy stop at Wax Trax. So I fulfilled the first part of my human race entrance exam by the time was 19, and the second by the time I was 22, as I switched between gigs and sometimes worked two jobs, one retail and one restaurant. Just sayin'.
    For years after leaving B. Dalton I wouldn't go near a mall, let alone during a holiday. Once I had kids, however, it became obvious that when it was cold or snowing, the mall contained a warm glow- in -the -dark mini golf, Cinnabon and Target was attached. So I returned. However, I still get anxiety about parking and will not travel unless absolutely bullied. Which is ridiculous, why would anyone bully a grown woman into a mall in December? I'm just sayin'. So, at Baybrook Mall (TX) and Southwest Plaza (CO), the mall employees were not allowed to park in the mall lot in December. I always managed to bum rides from my boyfriend or a friend who had a different shift, because I refused to be treated like a servant and park a mile away and take a bus in to work. This was policy in two different states, so clearly it has a long reach. I also remember being trapped at Baybrook mall during a tropical storm, sitting in the back room of B. Dalton with my colleagues, with no windows or way to know how bad it was out there. Sigh. That's not relevant at all, just a weird memory. Hi David and Wesley!
    Once, at Christmastime, a woman called me stupid. I'm not saying she was wrong. Clearly it was my fault that we had sold out of whatever The Book was that she needed to continue to live her life. We were sold out. Sold. Out. I checked the overstocks, I checked our back stock. She was so angry I finally called to the back room and asked the shipping coordinator if any had been unpacked, perhaps, in the last ten minutes. Alas and alack, it had! With great flourish and  pride, she emerged from the back room with a copy of The Book aloft. The woman thanked the shipping person deeply and sloppily. Once I had the book in hand and was ringing it up, she flatly said, looking at her wallet as she dug out her cash "Clearly you're stupid, she had the book all along." 
   Bitch, I still have the book and it's a hardcover, I could kill you with it. You're kidding me right now. Merry Christmas. I have lived too much life ---well, OK, not "too much" I was in my early twenties---to be treated like this by you. But I will return tomorrow, and someone else who looks nothing like you or exactly like you will treat me precisely and exactly the same crappy way because they've never had to do this for a living.  (There's your theme, my readers.) I wish I could say this happened once, only once, this One Time That I Remember A Very Rude Person. However, varying degrees of being treated like a poorly performing servant, or an idiot who works here because she isn't smart enough for a real job were demonstrated everywhere, every day. They were just worse at Christmas, where malls truly bring out the worst in people
   Oh man, Black Friday. I remember the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, cleaning the store to the nines and pulling newly delivered boxes out to get everything displayed before the end of the day, so we could walk into a ready store on Friday morning at stupid early a.m. There was always a hardcover release for Christmas, and if it was Stephen King you truly hated your life, as his books are particularly thick, and heavy, and don't fit on the little plastic book holder displays provided by the company. So you'd have to get all arty and use your engineering skills to build an interesting Tetris display that won't collapse when some Nim Rod takes a book from the center or near the bottom, because they think they're a magician and this is their version of pulling the tablecloth out from under all the china, except they're not and it isn't, so...sigh, it's fine, somebody call security, I saw a small child near the display before The Stand came tumbling down...
    I recently saw a short video on social media, a young actress portraying all the different customer types. Considering her young age, this calendar year and my advanced years, I expected to watch something I didn't understand. You know, these kids today and their memes that aren't funny, that's what I was expecting. To watch something mocking older people, or making inside jokes for younger people, as these seem to be the choices with these kids today (get off my lawn). I watched it and sat, shocked, as I recognized every stereotype. They have been somewhat updated and altered, but they are exactly the same as they were 150 years ago.
    We've come so far.
     How are these people exactly the same decades after I've left retail? In the immortal words of my beloved Edward Albee "Evolution has ceased to take place." 
    Clearly I already knew this because I'm a teacher. I get treated poorly by the same people for different reasons now. Not directly, my parents are great, but as a society, I am blamed for everything. Funny how that works.
    We have arrived at the personal connection portion of my essay, thank you for reading this far.

B.  Dalton Bookseller/Barnes and Noble, this is kryssi, how can I help you? *

    As I was ascending the fabulous rolling ladder that is the staple of all great libraries and book stores, my right arm loaded with  hard copies of The Frugal Gourmet Cooks With Wine, a woman approached. She stopped at the bottom of the ladder and turned her face up to me. She regarded my name tag, my place on the ladder and the stack of books on my arm and said "Do you work here?" 
     "Nope. I'm under a physician's care, I can't stop climbing these things with 20 pounds of books. Wanna try?"
____________________
       "How are you sold out of the new Stephen King? Didn't you print enough? It's Christmas Eve, why aren't you more prepared?" I wanted to reply "It's Christmas Eve, why didn't you shop sooner?" But it was Christmas Eve, and he was clearly distraught, so I talked him into the recent Bachman book collection, as that was still something of a "secret" and it made him feel like he was in on something. Also it was Christmas Eve, and I've now broken the rule of comedy threes so this wasn't funny.
_____________________
       As I am standing behind the counter, directly behind me, to my right and my left, and behind the customer on an island display-he was literally surrounded- are a million copies of The Hunt For Red October by Tom Clancy. The front of the store is awash in this book, it is impossible to miss.
     Customer (looking directly behind me at the book display after walking past the front island display) "I need that book, do you have that book, the one the president read while he was in the hospital? It's about a submarine...what's it called?" He looks down at his right hand at the book on display, the same book he's been staring at behind me. There is a submarine on the cover with a hammer and sickle. He looks back up at me. "It's about a submarine and the Russians?" I smile, it's Christmas and he's probably buying it for a family member. He has no idea what kind of a book it is, or what it looks like, he just heard that the president read it, and therefore he wants it. Clearly I sold him the book, and I was actually truly nice about it, because he was honestly not rude, just clueless. And maybe a little blind. 
_____________________________
      This other time, the center island was a tantalizing exhibit of the new Jackie Collins book. All of her books were solid colors, except the one with the palm tree. It was likely a marketing thing, it made her books easy to find and less complicated to suss out the themes of titles like Lucky, which was fuchsia with a high heeled shoe under the title for a tease as to what the reader might encounter. I can't remember which Collins book was flashing up front, just that there were a lot of them in hardcover, and they were colorful, and to this day I have proudly never read a single one of them. A customer walked straight in the entry and past the display, hyper eyeball focused on me, laser zooming directly to poor kryssi who's really just trying to get through the updated markdowns before the rush. In case you are not a careful reader, or that I am a poor writer,  I repeat: he walked directly past the Vegas display of the new Jackie Collins book. In my mind's eye, there was a cardboard cutout of Collins standing next to the books. In the most accusatory tone I expect he was able to muster, as clearly he was Very Busy And Important and I was nothing but in his way as he set about his day, "Do you have the new Jackie Collins?" I looked behind him at the splashy, trashy display. He turned his head and looked at the display with me. Then he turned back and blinked at me. "Well? Do you?" He demanded. His tone indicated that maybe I had not understood his words. Perhaps I am from a foreign land, and this job is the only one I could get with my limited skills.
    I wish I could say I said "No", which is what I did on many occasions, but I really did not like this lizard man and I wanted to make him feel stupid. I just stared at the display until he saw it. He was looking, he just didn't see. Once he picked up on my subtle, non verbal cues, his true colors spiked along his scales. He snatched a copy, slammed it on the counter and wouldn't look at me as I rang it up. It's OK, Buddy, I think you're a dick, too. We're even. I have no patience for ignorance coupled with poor manners. There is no excuse. Clearly he was an educated person, he just wanted everything handed to him, easily. He was playing dumb so he didn't have to think and when that didn't work, he treated me like I was dumb. 
  That's everybody's problem Christmas shopping. We are there to serve, locate, hand over, predict, punt, inspire and fix all of your life's failures by easily locating the one book you need, because you don't have the time or patience to figure out the alphabet. Alphabetical by author, Fiction is on the far wall. Go look. I prefer perusing book stores, I don't want the employee to walk me straight to the book and hand it to me. What  if there are other titles by the same author I haven't read? What if there's another book I think of whilst I'm standing here reading the dust cover of this book? When it was Not Christmas, I loved waiting on those people. The ones who lived too far from The Tattered Cover and didn't want to mess with parking down there, but loved books. Those people were my beloveds, my regulars for whom I would special order hard to find books, or put them on the scent of an out of print tome, or discuss Cider House Rules because when someone just shopping for any book to read asked me what it was about I was stumped....boil it down? Really? How long do you have? Man, that's what was great about working in bookstores. Except at Christmas, where nobody wished to peruse. It's like grocery shopping, they want the ingredients to make their gift, that's it. There is no interest in smelling all the spices they've never tried before, just grab the cinnamon and go. Gimme the bestselling novel.
    Gimme what I want.
_____________________________________________________________________
   
Here are two personal faves of mine, not Christmas related but true:
  "Do you have The Catcher in the Rye by John Updike?"
  "Nope. But I have The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger."
  "Who's he?"
___________________________________________________________________

    "Who Wrote Beowulf?"
_____________________________________________________

   With that, in conclusion, all in all, to sum up, I realize that not everyone is capable of working retail at Christmas. There is a reason not everyone does it: it's rough. You have to be helpful but keep your snark and mohawk close at hand. You cannot take any abuse personally. The work toughens you up, and I am one of the most patient retail shoppers you will encounter, unless I can truly see incompetence. Then I have no patience, and the girls will call me on it with "Mom, she's just a teenager, she doesn't know." It's fine if the register blows up or the computer crashes, I'm fine with that. I'm fine with your youth not really knowing how to function under pressure while you wait for a manager. But I am not fine with your lack of eye contact, your inability to smile at me and let me know what went wrong. If you can't handle it, get out. It's a battle zone, and the only way to calm an irate customer with an armload of clothes when your register has jammed, the computer system crashed and the credit card machine melted is to smile and make eye contact and acknowledge their humanity. Yep, this sucks, I'm sorry it sucks, we will figure this out together or I can hold your purchases for you while to shop elsewhere. Or you can be a screaming Ass Gnome, and I will continue to smile and make eye contact because I am a Human Being and we're in this together, get it? I am not your servant. You are not superior just because you are on that side of the register. And do you know how you would know this?
   If you had ever worked in retail at Christmas. Or waited tables for a living.
   Just sayin'.
                                     
*I did not work registers at Book Star, I shelved books from midnight to eight a.m., so no costumer contact.