Category: Life

An Ode to Those in Service Jobs

Tonight, after a dealing with the rain and a long bus ride home, I decided to order a pizza for my boyfriend and I so I wouldn’t have to cook. I went to pick up said pizza and encountered the rudest person I’ve seen in a long time. I won’t go into deep detail about what this person did, but lets just say he was not at all sympathetic to the fact that the pizza place was extremely busy and proceeded to give the people working there a hard time. For whatever reason, he was aggravated that he was not immediately helped by the staff because they were assisting other customers and answering the phones.

As I stood there watching this man be rude and nasty to the poor guy working behind the counter, memories of all my time working in customer service came back to me. Over the course of nearly 7 years of working in retail, I’ve encountered the craziest, meanest, and most selfish people ever. Many times I had said to my co-workers that I could write a book about all the people I have helped and all the awful things that people did thinking it would help them get there way. Many echoed the same sentiment. Since I never really got around to writing a full book, I figured I’d post it here. So here it is, my guide to how to treat people in the service industry, how to actually get what you need and want, and what you should never do.

1) Be nice. Simple concept, right? I guess not everyone understands it. Seriously, be nice and you will very likely get what you want. I can’t tell you how many times I went out my way to help someone just because they were nice to me. I’ve had many co-workers who have done the same. If you treat the person assisting you like a human being, be nice and not demanding, they will very likely go the extra mile for you. Think that screaming and making a huge scene will help you get your way? Hell no. Not many people in retail/customer service will tell you this, but if you make a scene or yell at them, they will do the bare minimum to help you. Likely, you won’t get what you wanted. This is also true when you call corporate customer service. I witnessed a women who got angry with the corporate representative I directed her to call because her return couldn’t be approved. After about a minute of her screaming obscenities at the person on the phone, he hung up on her, causing her to storm out of the store. I have also seen customers escorted out of a store by security for making a huge scene.

2) Do not assume you are better than the person serving you. We are human beings, just like you. We are people trying to make money, just like you are. Walking in to a place of business with a sense of entitlement means nothing. You may think you deserve everything in the world, but the world doesn’t feel that way about you. Oh, and flaunting stories about  how much money you spend at a store/restaurant doesn’t do anything. You are likely embleshing and don’t realize that you are a drop in the bucket compared to how many customers that business gets on a daily basis. Unless several employees know who you are and know your name, you don’t make a significant impact on their business.

3) Don’t screw with people who serve and prepare your food. Now, my food service experience is extremely limited, but I still know this is true. While we like to think that no one would stoop low enough to mess with people’s food, stuff happens. Don’t be rude to these people, unless you want to risk something happening.

4) While you may have the attitude that a sales associate’s job is to clean up after your messes, it doesn’t make it right for you to completely destroy a display of items. You want to look at a shirt in a pile? Sure, by all means go ahead. But do not ravage through the entire pile, throwing shirts on the ground that you don’t want. Yes, I have seen this. Try to be courteous, its not that hard. Also, throwing trash on the ground outside is considered littering, so why would it be any different inside? Don’t make a huge mess of a store or restaurant, its just down right rude.

5) Don’t yell at the lone stressed out cashier who has a line of 7 people deep. It is not their fault that their manager didn’t schedule enough people to help out. Rarely will you see people just standing around doing nothing when a store is busy. You may think you see people who are purposely not helping out, but more often than not they are doing something important, whether you want to believe it or not.

There you have it, my top five rules for interacting with people in customer service positions. I promise that you will have a more pleasant and helpful experience if you follow them.
Will you sometimes come across rude, unhelpful customer service people? Of course. But most people who work in customer service are friendly and helpful and will be nice to those who treat them with respect. So be kind and you will get kindness in return.

Did I Just Do That?!

Allow me to take you back to my childhood. I was an active child and I always played outside. Biking, swimming, and hiking were my favorite activities. Stories of my childhood include me trying to coax my couch potato friends away from the TV so that we could go outside and play. Sadly, that didn’t last long. Once I moved to Arizona from California, summer was filled with sitting inside my air conditioned home, trying to avoid the 100°+ heat. Thus began my sedentary lifestyle.

Next came middle school, where my sadistic physical education teachers gave me a newfound hatred of running. I’m not kidding; they were sadists and I truly despised running. Every month students were required to run a mile. If I wasn’t huffing and puffing while attempting to run a quarter mile, I was being yelled at to “stop walking” through a megaphone by a PE teacher who, instead of running the mile with the other teachers, sat on her ass on the bleachers. Two years of that torture yielded a girl who not only hated running, but could barely run at all. My best mile time was 10:35 completed by mostly walking and barely jogging and I didn’t even actually finish the full mile.

High school was no better; I hate running all the same and only participated in the one year mandated PE class. After that year, I walked away from any type of sports activity in high school and never looked back.

Through my childhood, middle school, and high school it didn’t really matter if I exercised or not. I was super skinny with a fast metabolism and ate anything I wanted. Before you start hating me, know that the gravy train didn’t last long. By my early twenties my metabolism wasn’t the same and weight gain became my battle.

Thus began my desire to get active, improve my health and loose weight. My first attempt to reach these goals came last year with the help of my boyfriend, an ex track and cross-country runner. He helped whip me into shape, but I gave up after a few months. We moved away from the track that we’d run on and the exercise ceased.

Fast forward one year, I am at my highest weight (which I will not disclose) and fed up with how out of shape I am. I spent most of my final semester in college being sedentary and working at an internship that had me sitting at a desk all day. So I’ve decided to take up running, for real this time. I want to get into shape for once and for all, and be healthy for the rest of my life.

Yesterday I went running for the second time at the beach close to my house. For the first time in my life I ran an entire mile without stopping. I was shocked and so happy. I pushed myself to go farther than I normally would and I felt great. I could hardly believe it and kept asking myself “did I just do that?”. I went from being a girl who literally walked 90% of each mile I was supposed to run in school, to being a girl who pushed herself to go out and run on her own and actually complete a goal.

Of course I had some soreness afterwards but not enough to deter me from continuing. My plan is to work up to running almost everyday; right now I am doing it every other day. My hope is to really love running and maybe, just maybe, finish a race.

You Can Never Run Away…

…From the problems you face. Trust me.

I have never really ran away from my problems before, despite my past urges to do so. However, this past week I was given the opportunity to escape my life for a few days, to run away from facing what I didn’t want to face. So I took the opportunity.

I choose to extend my vacation instead of going back to San Francisco and facing an apartment to clean, laundry to do and a job search. At first it felt like a weight lifted off my shoulders.

Soon, I learned my lesson though; the problems you run away from never go away. How could I be so naive to think they would? I still have an apartment to go home to, I still have laundry to do, and I still need to look for a job. And, I have a boyfriend who was looking forward to me coming home and tried to tidy up our apartment in anticipation for my return. So by running away from problems, I didn’t escape anything and perhaps hurt my boyfriend.

I knew that running away never solves anything, now I understand why. I get that my body can be removed from my problems, but that my mind never can.

When this posts, I will be on a train back to San Francisco. Back to my real life, problems and all.

Now I Feel It

My grades just posted for my final college semester and I passed everything (with a 3.5 gpa). I was completely confident that I would get great grades and pass my classes, but there is something so amazing about seeing everything with my own eyes.

It finally feels more real than it did on my commencement day. Next step is to get my diploma. Then it’s really real.

I feel so blessed to have accomplished a dream I have had for so long. But i feel like accomplishing this dream has left me unsure of what comes next. I have new dreams but not much clue of how to achieve them. Maybe this is the right kick in the butt I need to start evaluating how to get my new dreams.

The End of the Era

This time has come. I am no longer a college student! Its been 20 years that I have been in school and its finally over!

What a relief. Sitting at my college graduation felt strange. Not very final to me at all. I had a huge sense of finality at my high school graduation. It was the end of my public education and it felt like it. Graduating from college doesn’t feel real. Maybe because its an indication that I return to grad school. Maybe because as corny as it sounds, I will never stop learning.

What’s more strange to me, is that I started to feel disconnected from college around February of this year, and yet on the day of my commencement, I felt very connected to my school. I had pride for San Francisco State University; the same level of pride I had when I first started at SFSU.  Somehow I feel like my connection with SF State is not over, or will probably never end.

The whole time I was at SFSU I was reminded that my father had attended the school about 40 years prior. That connection stuck with me all the way through graduation.

It doesn’t feel like the end. It does feel like a beginning though. The beginning of my career. Which I am finding to be a challenge. I know what I want, so I just have to go after it. Or do I know what I want? I think that I really need to evaluate what exactly I want. I can’t settle, not just yet. I want to make the dreams I set for myself come true. In the same way that it was my goal to graduate from SFSU. And I did it; I didn’t settle. I pushed for what I wanted and got it. I can’t forget that the real world isn’t different. I need to choose a new goal and push for it. All the effort and moxie I put into getting to SFSU needs to be put into looking for a job.

20 years and its all over. Hope the next steps in my life are awesome.