The Customer is Always High Right
a role reprised
I walk into the job like a character actor walks onto a familiar stage: with my role in my mouth, my lines in my head like crackling lights I catch between breaths, and I bring with me my spontaneous passion for unfurling my anti-nature beneath the heat of the unforgiving Klieg lights that follow each expression with conscious shadows. Work is a show. Work is a place for which I must turn on my character who is affable, quirky, rarely dark (only in thin unexpected shafts of needle truth sent out to surprise the unwary- never enough to lose my grasp on the play) and so cheerful. Always full of light. Full of genuine desire to bring everyone else into the play.
No hint that I often look at large groups of people and see them as collections of penises and vaginas. A collection of animals with gender and hormones dancing around each other like so many cats strutting underneath a full moon. No hint that I strip all people into their elemental parts as an instinct. It isn't something that comes to me in a thought bubble or in a philosophical moment. It's instantaneous and flashes across my mind like a hot bolt of electricity before I can stop it. I always assess people first as an animal does, with my nose and eyes and vibrations in the air.
Going to my work orientation felt like sliding back through all the years to when I had so much less skin. So much less of everything. I am back in my Radio Shack costume working the evening shift with the older Filipino palm reader, wondering how her life brought her into the orbit of the cheap and cheesy electronic retail circuit. How did our lives manage to bisect for one evening just so I could always wonder if palms really do tell our futures, because looking back, I have to say that she told the truth even though she only knew me for six hours:
She told me I would marry an American man, even though I hoped to marry someone from another country. (How did she see in my secret dreams?) She assured me that we would travel together. (We have.) She said that in the middle of my life I would experience a big break in health, but I would come through it and live longer. (My thirties have been marked by so much physical trauma- childbirth, constant colds, new allergies, broken hip...)
I still think of her. Her papery skin over a typically thin frame with a shock of dark hair. Her retail costume as ill suited to her as mine was to me. We were such a great pair of misfits. I adored her. She was all brisk intelligence.
I thought that I had hung up my retail badge when I had a child. I believed that my life had taken a finite turn. That all those days of being trashed on by pinched frugal righteous consumers were over. That in life we move up, ever up, and at some point we take flight from these humble first steps. I believed with all my heart that these hours I put into soothing the frayed infantile nerves of the PEOPLE WITH MONEY was like paying my dues: once paid you keep moving forward and away.
I saw today what I often see from a different angle: that for the majority of my countrymen and women, this is it, you never stop paying. This is the great epiphany. There isn't a place beyond this. Money is the true god of my country and customer service is its greatest disciple.
On the one hand there's a part of me that enjoys this strange exchange between people- like all great actors I relish a meaty role- and for me there's nothing meatier than trying to satisfy the needs of shoppers, to be the person that brings some light to their empty search for product satisfaction, to be the one that gives that extra dose of genuine thoughtful human interaction...
But the dark side is exhausting. Those people trying to squeeze every last cent from their purchases and who will sell their soul to the devil just to get one extra penny from you whether or not you will get fired for losing that penny into their capacious appetite for "good deals", those people are exhausting.
I become uncomfortably aware of social chasms between myself and others. It is evident in how we expect our lives to unfold. It is evident in the things we aim for. I saw myself in all these roles as the starlet who was putting in time until the big break comes.
This may explain my amazing affinity for those popular movies in the thirties like "Stage Door" in which our heroine is always going to make it on a much larger stage than the one on which she gets her start as the understudy.
I always had such big plans for myself. Like all good dreamers, I saw my life open into an endless field of poppies like an inevitability. I never questioned whether or not I would end up doing something extraordinary, even if it meant I died young in an incredible combustion of life-meets-fire. Even if I died young I knew it was going to be spectacular. Isn't that the epitome of youthful hope and ambition? You burn bright.
What I have been coming to realize is that that isn't the epitome of all of youth. There are so many young people in our country who never see beyond the customer service career. They don't have stars in their eyes, they don't have a fool heart aiming for love or bust. They consider themselves lucky to land a position as Radio Shack's newest salesperson. They might, if they are very ambitious, set their sights on management. This work I have always considered the stepping stone that will sink into the ocean of my opportunity as I move forward, is the pearl in a lot of people's professional life. It is the actual prize.
Now that I am here again I can't help but feel the sting of my previous arrogance that I had hoped I would be remembered for my poetry. That I might find my place on the book shelf next to Bukowski, who I've slammed so many times in spite of the fact that I would consider it an incredible honor to have anyone compare my work favorably to his*. Who says that it is less noble or memorable to be an excellent employee in a customer service related job than to write something well?
A life well lived has as many meanings as there are people.
I first look at people as animals with gender and appetites. I first look at life as an epithet on a grave. What will be written on your stone when you're dead? What is the essence for which you will be remembered?
I have to believe that it doesn't matter what you do with your life as much as it matters how much you shine just because you have the gift to shine. I have to believe that in the end it matters less if you achieve honor in a public forum; that at the end of the day what matters most is that you let every ounce of light you have shine on the person who came to you from nowhere, with no name, and needed your light to keep on living.
*I will have to write about naked drunk people a whole lot more for this to happen. I will have to really own sexual filth like a second skin. Want me to try?
No hint that I often look at large groups of people and see them as collections of penises and vaginas. A collection of animals with gender and hormones dancing around each other like so many cats strutting underneath a full moon. No hint that I strip all people into their elemental parts as an instinct. It isn't something that comes to me in a thought bubble or in a philosophical moment. It's instantaneous and flashes across my mind like a hot bolt of electricity before I can stop it. I always assess people first as an animal does, with my nose and eyes and vibrations in the air.
Going to my work orientation felt like sliding back through all the years to when I had so much less skin. So much less of everything. I am back in my Radio Shack costume working the evening shift with the older Filipino palm reader, wondering how her life brought her into the orbit of the cheap and cheesy electronic retail circuit. How did our lives manage to bisect for one evening just so I could always wonder if palms really do tell our futures, because looking back, I have to say that she told the truth even though she only knew me for six hours:
She told me I would marry an American man, even though I hoped to marry someone from another country. (How did she see in my secret dreams?) She assured me that we would travel together. (We have.) She said that in the middle of my life I would experience a big break in health, but I would come through it and live longer. (My thirties have been marked by so much physical trauma- childbirth, constant colds, new allergies, broken hip...)
I still think of her. Her papery skin over a typically thin frame with a shock of dark hair. Her retail costume as ill suited to her as mine was to me. We were such a great pair of misfits. I adored her. She was all brisk intelligence.
I thought that I had hung up my retail badge when I had a child. I believed that my life had taken a finite turn. That all those days of being trashed on by pinched frugal righteous consumers were over. That in life we move up, ever up, and at some point we take flight from these humble first steps. I believed with all my heart that these hours I put into soothing the frayed infantile nerves of the PEOPLE WITH MONEY was like paying my dues: once paid you keep moving forward and away.
I saw today what I often see from a different angle: that for the majority of my countrymen and women, this is it, you never stop paying. This is the great epiphany. There isn't a place beyond this. Money is the true god of my country and customer service is its greatest disciple.
On the one hand there's a part of me that enjoys this strange exchange between people- like all great actors I relish a meaty role- and for me there's nothing meatier than trying to satisfy the needs of shoppers, to be the person that brings some light to their empty search for product satisfaction, to be the one that gives that extra dose of genuine thoughtful human interaction...
But the dark side is exhausting. Those people trying to squeeze every last cent from their purchases and who will sell their soul to the devil just to get one extra penny from you whether or not you will get fired for losing that penny into their capacious appetite for "good deals", those people are exhausting.
I become uncomfortably aware of social chasms between myself and others. It is evident in how we expect our lives to unfold. It is evident in the things we aim for. I saw myself in all these roles as the starlet who was putting in time until the big break comes.
This may explain my amazing affinity for those popular movies in the thirties like "Stage Door" in which our heroine is always going to make it on a much larger stage than the one on which she gets her start as the understudy.
I always had such big plans for myself. Like all good dreamers, I saw my life open into an endless field of poppies like an inevitability. I never questioned whether or not I would end up doing something extraordinary, even if it meant I died young in an incredible combustion of life-meets-fire. Even if I died young I knew it was going to be spectacular. Isn't that the epitome of youthful hope and ambition? You burn bright.
What I have been coming to realize is that that isn't the epitome of all of youth. There are so many young people in our country who never see beyond the customer service career. They don't have stars in their eyes, they don't have a fool heart aiming for love or bust. They consider themselves lucky to land a position as Radio Shack's newest salesperson. They might, if they are very ambitious, set their sights on management. This work I have always considered the stepping stone that will sink into the ocean of my opportunity as I move forward, is the pearl in a lot of people's professional life. It is the actual prize.
Now that I am here again I can't help but feel the sting of my previous arrogance that I had hoped I would be remembered for my poetry. That I might find my place on the book shelf next to Bukowski, who I've slammed so many times in spite of the fact that I would consider it an incredible honor to have anyone compare my work favorably to his*. Who says that it is less noble or memorable to be an excellent employee in a customer service related job than to write something well?
A life well lived has as many meanings as there are people.
I first look at people as animals with gender and appetites. I first look at life as an epithet on a grave. What will be written on your stone when you're dead? What is the essence for which you will be remembered?
I have to believe that it doesn't matter what you do with your life as much as it matters how much you shine just because you have the gift to shine. I have to believe that in the end it matters less if you achieve honor in a public forum; that at the end of the day what matters most is that you let every ounce of light you have shine on the person who came to you from nowhere, with no name, and needed your light to keep on living.
*I will have to write about naked drunk people a whole lot more for this to happen. I will have to really own sexual filth like a second skin. Want me to try?
Labels: jobs, penises, philosophical crap, vaginas, writing life