Breaking Point

I was watching an episode of Quantum Leap on Hulu the other day, in which Sam leaps into the life of an adult with some sort of mental disability and the IQ of a twelve year old. I'm sure that's not the PC way to say that, but I mean no harm. Anyway, he finds himself making mistakes and acting klutzy all the time as people treat him like he's less than human. It made me think about my time at Fred Meyer. Towards the end, I could hardly handle a day of work. Especially in the home department. I would go home and cry almost every night. I would even cry before work because I didn't want to go. This is an excessive amount of crying, even for me.

But I just couldn't take people treating me like I was less than human anymore. As I mentioned, I've been reading notalwaysright.com lately, and it's made me realize just how many truly horrible people I encountered. Almost every day I would experience somebody ignoring my polite small talk, rolling their eyes at me, questioning my answers, talking down to me, or doing something to make me feel like my life was worthless to them. Of course, the majority of the people I met were just shopping, neither evil nor good. But I think I took the evil ones worse than most people did. I think the work that I perform as well as my emotional reactions are very strongly related to what people expect from me and the way they treat me.

Towards the end I even started being nasty back to customers. I asked (in not a nice tone) that woman who wanted to speak to a boy why she needed to speak to a boy instead of me. And once, a customer came in while I was at the register in the home department and asked me if we had any tomato cages. I told him I wasn't sure, that they could be found either right around the corner on aisle 79 or in the small garden area at the front of the store. He became angry and asked me why I didn't know, insisted he didn't have time to look, indicated that it was my job to know the name and location of all (285,000 items) in our inventory. I asked him if he would like me to call my manager and ask if we had any. He yelled at me, "do you even KNOW what a tomato cage IS?!" I told him, yes, I do know what a tomato cage is, but I do not know if we have any.

He stormed away, yelling sarcastically, "Thanks, you've been SO HELPFUL."
I yelled something after him. I don't remember what I yelled, but it wasn't nice. I have to imagine he didn't hear me or I would have gotten hell from my manager, or the guy would have come back.

Normally you're supposed to just grin and bear it when customers yell at you, but I don't think that's fair. Everyone has a breaking point, and I think it would be better if retail employees were encouraged to say something like, "You are being rude and abusive, and do not have to serve you if you continue to act that way toward me." Just a statement of fact. That way it doesn't devolve into a shouting match, and rude customers don't get to just keep being rude to their fellow human beings.