NJM #13 - Holiday Job Day 1 Learnings in These Foolish Things

I don’t know if this has anything to do with anything, but before I go into the details of the first day of my Holiday Retail Fashion Stylist job, I have to tell you about my dream last night (I’ll be brief, I promise):

The gist of the whole dream was that I was finally almost ready to be intimate with a new guy, but the only problem was that my downstairs area had not been neatly maintained in a couple of years, so things were wild down there. And when I say wild, I mean, thicker than the Amazon. I kept trying to break away from whatever action was happening to go do some emergency “womanscaping” and a million things kept getting in the way! So I kept somehow putting this guy off. And the longer I put him off, the bushier things got. And don’t forget, I’m a ginger, so…

I woke up before the crack of dawn to prepare myself for Day 1 of my new gig, and I was pretty excited about it. I won’t bore you with all of the tiny details like I normally do, but I will say that there were a few things I took note of that I found interesting. I’ll bullet them below.

• While waiting briefly at the store’s locked door before 8am for the morning manager to show up, another new employee walked up to the door with me. He’s tall (roughly 6‘4”), salt and pepper hair neatly coiffed and a super sharp dresser (all in black, which is a store requirement, but he just looked so well put together). His name is Jorge. Hellooooo, Jorge. Too bad I eventually found out that his wife also works at the store.

• There’s a woman I’ll be working with who is completely deaf. She communicates through hand gestures and notes on her phone. I will likely not interact with her that much since she works the back of the house and I’ll be on the floor as a “stylist”, but she’s actually pretty talkative for a deaf person. I love that! She’s super outgoing and does her absolute best to get you to understand.

• I also started with this adorable young guy named John. He turned 21 three days ago. He is so cute and enthusiastic. He’s tiny and I want to put him in my pocket. I love him.

• It’s clearly been so long since I’ve worked retail…

• It took nearly three hours for us newbies to get all of our information input into the company’s database system.

• Even though every little administrative thing about this job is all done online, we still got a physical employee handbook AND a good old fashioned manilla file filled with codes of conduct and dress codes and maps of the parking garage, etc. Don’t you think that’s kind of a waste? I prefer everything easily accessed on my phone.

• All of the cash registers are ipads. That’s really nothing new, but I just remembered that the last time I worked a till, it was a giant machine that kind of looked like a massively oversized calculator with a big drawer full of cash. Now we can also ring people out with a swipe of a card on an iphone!

• We had to have a mini-class on how to deal with customers who are either (a) Karens, recording bullshit on their phones, or (B) people who think we are discriminating in any way - being racist or anything of the sort - and recording bullshit on their phones, or (C) people who think we are accusing them of stealing and recording bullshit on their phones. Good news is, the best way to take care of stuff like that is to call over a manager and let them deal with it. Still, there will be times that are not manager-worthy that are going to have to be handled with decorum, obviously. I dread my first dick customer.

• We had to have another mini-class on something called a Code Adam, a protocol used when a child becomes lost or separated from their parent. The goal is to keep kids from being abducted in public shopping areas. I’d never heard of it before, but I guess it’s been around for quite some time. It’s so sad that we have to think about these things. AND…

• We will be doing monthly active shooter training. This one is the freakiest to think about. Monthly! I kind of forget that shopping areas - especially LARGE shopping centers like the huge one where I’m now working are the perfect target for terrorists and crazy people. Neat, huh?

Anyway, Day 1 of my Holiday Retail Fashion Stylist is over and I feel like I still don’t know anything. I suppose that’s what Day 2 will be for? Well, realistically, I’m sure it will take the entire week for me to figure this out.

But I’m still very, very excited…even though I found out today that fast food restaurants pay more than what I’ll be making. I don’t even care. I get to touch silk and cashmere all day. Yum.

On to Day 2!
GS