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.