Cashier Meltdown

Despite my happy chanting here about loving my job, I pretty much had a meltdown at work last week. I was hired as a pet training instructor, but at least until our training class schedule picks up, I am stuck on the cash register at times. Generally this situation is tolerable, as I can visit with customers and their dogs as I ring up their merchandise. The occasional request to assemble a dog crate or to carry it to someone's car is no problem (although I confess to carefully suppressed annoyance when the requestor is a non-elderly male.) Even cleaning up dog urine on the floor is not frustrating as long as the disinfectant squirt bottle doesn't come apart in my hands (roughly a 50-50 proposition.)

However, lately I've been fighting a cold, and on the day in question I was sniffling through a long siege at the register: folks buying their weight in tiny, unsorted cat food cans that have to be rung up one at a time, people trying to buy merchandise with absent or not-on-file price tags, people with weird manufacturer's coupons that require strange calculations on my part... occasionally someone with an utterly inappropriate request ("Can you stop your register line so I can call my vet on my cell phone and get him to give you a prescription number for some prescription dog food?" this one inexplicably okayed by the manager on duty, even though it was lunchtime and the vet could not possibly be reachable via phone!)

Mostly it was just the relentless traffic of the customers lining up and lining up. Relentless, like the beating of the surf against the shore. Constant waves inexorably approaching. As I loaded purchases into bags--double bagging the despicable canned foods--I'd page via the PA system for customer assistance, and I'd answer the phone as it rang at the register, and no one would come to help me, and I'd be in violation of store policy by having more than three customers waiting in my line.

Weeks ago when I was still in training, I could almost laugh as my inevitable errors piled up. Once in a while the computerized cash register would seem to fall into a processing loop and refuse to display the screen I would need to handle a given transaction. Having to summon the manager on duty was no real burden, as many of those calls were determined entirely by store policy regarding large refunds or other factors beyond my control. However, on Friday the steady demands of the register line threw me off-kilter, and several times I caught myself looking at the screen with no clue of where I was going or how to get there.

Friday afternoon, sniffling and congested, I felt like each customer, however gentle and polite, was taking a piece of me. Each one was actively sucking at my soul. I could barely find a moment to page for help because my lined-up customers were getting restless, and the telephone would not stop ringing. At one point, I heard my own name paged over the PA system, instructing me to take line one to answer a question regarding training classes. Already juggling live customers, I was forced to ignore it, so the page was repeated. So, six hours into my shift, as I ran out of plastic bags and the empty register next to me also started to run out of bags, and as the register tape started turning red to tell me I was out of paper (both issues with which I have not been trained to cope) I found myself fighting back tears. I was polite and my voice was breaking ("Thanks for shopping at PetWorld") and I didn't dissolve into wailing till I made it back to the break room.

I suppose the boss attributes it to menopause. He gently told me never to let the customers upset me. Now when I am not teaching, he has me checking the prices on the shelves, using a pricing gun. I do one four-foot block of shelving at a time, starting at eye level and then doing each shelf below it. Given where I am standing, people don't understand why it is that I cannot sell them a gerbil or help them choose a fish tank bubble wand, but at least if I lose my place as I track down another associate for them, I can simply re-scan the entire shelf. It makes me truly grateful for the time that I am allowed to spend in class--teaching, laughing, joking, and being licked by dogs.

My Busy Life as a Corporate Drone

Work continues to be fun. The hours are long, and often I feel as if I have little or no life outside of work. This is the reason that I have added nothing to this blog for so many weeks. Still, like most of my colleagues, I find that I often show up at the store briefly even on my days off. If I am out of the house with any of my dogs, I cannot resist taking them to work in order to meet my coworkers, enjoy the smells, and be doted upon for a few minutes.

I am a reasonably happy corporate drone, getting paid to talk to people about their dogs, to cuddle puppies, and to teach people pet parenting behaviors that will strongly reduce the likelihood that their dogs will ever be abandoned or relinquished to shelters. It does indeed feel like preventive pet rescue. I've empowered folks depressed by Katrina, referred people to pet bereavement, pet epilepsy and canine cancer resources on-line, and translated a Chihuahua's oral-Spanish veterinary history into English so he could get shots and get his anal glands expressed. (Now I know how to say “anal gland” in Spanish, which will certainly be an important part of my future employment arsenal.)

Just as clinical psychology was applicable in the world of dog rescue, I find that it has its place in modern retail sales. I am delighted to be spared the managerial angst that haunted me as president of a dog rescue. If I wanted to go into management, I suppose that I could apply my psych knowledge there, but I am happier to be free of that need.

Likewise, I may have studied compliance-inducing behavior at the knee of Robert Cialdini while in graduate school, but I far prefer to speak simply from the heart when I discuss dog obedience classes with a pet owner. (Cialdini, a brilliant social psychologist at Arizona State, wrote Amazon.com's best-selling book on persuasion. No, I don't get a cut; I just think it's fun and fascinating reading.) I couldn't sell long-distance phone service to my own mother when she was alive, but I can sincerely make the case that after all the tumolt of Katrina, it only makes sense that putting one's dog in an obedience class and working with that dog daily helps to restore order to that dog's life. When we returned to town following Katrina, the media experts were all clamoring for us evacuees to put our children back into school as soon as possible. Why should it be different for a dog? When the sight of a suitcase or even a cardboard box brings up memories of long car rides and strange motel rooms and apartments, the regular practice of obedience activities restores structure and a sense of normalcy. We and our dogs both regain a little taste of agency and predictability.

I may be making 30% of what I made at my peak as a psychologist, but now I have excellent group health insurance and I can go to work in flat shoes, covered with dog hair, and thumb my nose at managed care companies. At first, just being on my feet all day was painful. However, practice and gel insoles have helped. When I know I’ll have to do much shelf stocking, I load up on ibuprofen. One day when the boss had me scraping leaked fatty-acid coat/skin supplements off the bottom shelf of the canine health and beauty aids aisle, I lamented to myself that our housekeeper makes 50% more per hour than I do. However, I reminded myself that I have better retirement and health benefits than she does, so it is not as if my years of training were without recompense.

At 50 I'm older than 95% of my coworkers, but they like and respect me. They are typically amazed and impressed that I can legally commit someone to a hospital for 72 hours by virtue of my psych license. I prefer to joke about that sort of thing rather than have them speak in hushed reverence about me as an aged healer. I have a standing joke with the store manager, because he keeps calling me Miss Gloria, which I detest. (It makes me feel as old as Miss Daisy.) Whenever he calls me Miss Gloria, I call him “son.” He is forty.

One thing that was very weird was to learn that several of the cute young college boys who work as stockers and cashiers are only 17 years old and still in high school; they certainly don’t come across like the boys I went to school with in the early seventies. I never thought I’d relate at all to those pathetic men who claim, “But Judge, she seemed so much older!” I am glad to be off the market and not tempted by such delicacies.