Part Essential Worker, Part Salesman, All Fatigue and Frustration
Throughout the pandemic, I have been at the intersection of high-level tech and ground-level social interactions.
I can’t name the location of the store, the carrier it services, nor the owner of the franchise it operates under. Whatever reasons (that aren’t based on legal concerns) can be explained by what I’m about to tell you. Because though I haven’t had to deal with any lousy bosses, the customers have made being an essential worker so much harder.
These are the stories about those people, especially with how they hardly considered the people who serviced them to be human. They are the deniers, the conspiracy theorists, the Luddites, the selfish, and the overall idiots. The people who instilled into my coworkers, managers, and myself thoughts and feelings antithetical to our work. This eventually produced a feeling that the customers made me feel dumber every time I interacted with them.
These are the stories about those people, especially with how they hardly considered the people who serviced them to be human. They are the deniers, the conspiracy theorists, the Luddites, the selfish, and the overall idiots.
Admittedly, I have had a particularly hard time working at the store. Though in my defense, I had been hired in late January 2020, six weeks before the pandemic hit the United States. Three of those weeks were spent in training. Even back then, we have to admit that COVID-19 was treated as “stuff going on in China and Italy”. When it did hit, it was unnerving enough that our store was closed for a couple of weeks. But at first, it felt terrible but controllable.
Once we were considered frontline essential workers and allowed to reopen, things started to take a turn. We weren’t actively selling anything because of the pandemic, just handling software fixes and people paying their bills. But then there was a false sense of security once the number of active cases began to subside. That’s when the other customers started coming through the doors, in a boiling-the-frog sort of way.
The first problem would be the supply chain, which affected the delivery of new phones to our store. Though some people were annoyed by it, they mostly understood that these were difficult times. Management was tracking the door swings and expecting us to sell, yes, but it wasn’t the end of the world. Problems began to arise when the moronic customers (to put it in the nicest way possible) began coming in.
They weren’t interested in buying anything, they didn’t act like civilized people, and they wanted us to fix their problems for free. These were problems that they usually caused in the first place. While some district managers understood and empathized with these situations, the company line was that we were to stay out on the floor if we weren’t on lunch break. In Shakespearean terms, this was “the most unkindest cut of them all”.
So let’s do the emotional math, folks:
Introvert with anxiety issues
+ Sales job with clearly defined goals and commission structure
+ Supply chain issues affecting store deliveries
+ Customer Support punting their responsibilities onto salespeople like said introvert)
× (Customers + Low intelligence + Lack of empathy + Shouting a lot)
÷ Not enough people to run the store.
What does that equal? Me, who wants to curl up in bed as soon as I get home from work! Though admittedly, I did forget to add two key elements to the formula: wiping down all points of contact and enforcing social distancing standards. Most people complied, though often not before guilt-tripping or giving us a hard time for mentioning it.