Kaye's Days

Warning: This post is an angry, nonsensical rant written while I am exhausted and have sore feet. If you have no desire to read angry nighttime rambling, please skip this post. You have been warned.

To my future self, perhaps at 30 or whatever:

You better have gotten the hell out of retail!

This is absolute bull! Customers are the very worst! You were only in this job because you had to be. You needed money and you had no prior work experience. You never worked at another store because what was the point? It’s all retail! Dealing with freaking people who think it’s great to do their $500+ purchases and layaways at nearly closing time! People who freaking want to argue with the manager over the real price! People who think they’re entitled to have everything they want because “the customer is always right”. You’re lucky your managers had spines, but you still had to deal with those people!

Six to ten hours on your feet, sometimes day after day and back to back! Remember when you worked two weeks without a day off? Are you still picking up the slack of the callouts? If you are, you better be getting paid a whole lot better for it!

Speaking of your feet, have you gotten foot surgery? You probably needed it by the time you were 25. At the rate you were going, you’re bound to have something that requires to take medicine daily or get some kind of operation. Or just take a knife and cut off all the blisters. The pain’s nothing in comparison to what caused it in the first place.

I’m telling you now you better have kept your behind in school! And graduated! And paid off those student loans! And never looked back at retail! I’m not kidding! I will smack you silly if you step foot in a retail job ever again! Unless you’ve become a masochist, don’t even think about it! I’ve only been working at it for a year and a half and I’m ready to go! I don’t know how many years it took you to quit, but I will annihilate you if you ever do it again! You’re not too good to do retail, but it is hell! Actually, hell is probably less hellish! How much more of a misanthrope do you want to become? It’s already crushed most of your empathy for people! Go into retail again and you’ll come out a sociopath!

Seriously? What part of retail is worth it? It’s not even the darn money! You “work” to help people’s ridiculous sense of entitlement! You couldn’t even become management! You would’ve strangled yourself if you had! Only perk of it is you’d be automatically believed and sided with over a lower employee should any issue arise between you and them. Which is a sure sign you’d lost any and all empathy for those of your species around you if you aimed for management for that reason.

Wherever you and whatever you’re doing, you’d better not be here and that job had better be something that doesn’t make you wish a plague on humanity! Yeah, you were exhausted with school too, but at least, that was getting you out of retail! Did you get those certifications? Yes, plural! More than one! Which ones? And stay up-to-date with them! Which would you prefer? Having to retake your certs every few years or having to give up your soul to the devil that is retail again? Fine, there’s no guarantee it will get you out of retail, but you have a better chance than if you don’t graduate. So, graduate and get the certs, darn it!

Look, the summary is stay in school, get certified, graduate, find a related job, pay off your student loans, and run from retail like you’re on fire! In that order! Do it! Do it or I will come to the future and knock you into the past!

Oh, and so you don’t have to hear an old man watching X-rated media at 1:30 in the morning! Use that as motivation too.

I don’t care what your motivation is! You just better be out of this house and out of retail! Or else!

Sincerely, your past overworked, aching, 24-year-old self who yearns to smash every cash register to smithereens with a metal bat.

(To those who have read: Yes, I’ve had a very bad night.)