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Entry tags:
barely-contained rage and grocery checkouts
This might be a tricky segue, but I'm not afraid of the challenge:
I'll be the first to admit I'm hardly the most happy-go-lucky person you are likely to meet. I have a lot of anger inside, I won't deny it. But by and large I am decent enough to keep it simmering beneath the surface, and if the need to express it overwhelms me, it normally will be only in the form of a subtly aggressive posture, or a carefully-placed look. Unless I know you well enough to truly go off on you, it usually takes only the most extreme circumstances of outrage to make me overtly and obviously demonstrate any real anger.
So it may be kind of hard to believe that, being such an angry camper myself, raw exhibitions of rage from others are not very pleasant for me. I am cursed with a hypersensitivity to others' emotions, and seeing someone else's anger puts my senses on high alert, sets my pulse racing (and not in a good way) and inspires all sorts of intense, fight-or-flight primal reactions in my physiology that I just as soon could do without. Fortunately this doesn't happen often. In fact the last time I remember such an incident was while inventorying a Best Buy 6 months ago. They require us to work one-on-one with their people (in theory ensuring a near-perfect inventory) which isn't bad, but we get shuffled off whenever we change departments and have to build a whole new rapport with someone just as the old was getting comfortable; for someone as socially introverted as myself, you can imagine how exhausting this can get. But there was no chance of rapport with one guy in this inventory. He was upset about something, it was obvious in every aspect of his demeanor. Maybe he was missing a hot date...maybe he couldn't remember if he left the oven on. Whatever his excuse, he absolutely DID NOT want to be in that inventory, and made no secret about it. As he tried to hold a stack of CDs for me to scan, he was actually shaking with so much rage that he repeatedly dropped them, which made him even angrier. The only word out of his mouth was "fuck".....I'm no prude to obscenities, but there are only so many repetitions in a 15-minute time period that I can take, and this guy was waaaaaaaaaaaaaay over. I mean, he felt ripe to turn into The Incredible Hulk at any second. I knew his seething anger had nothing to do with me, still, at the earliest opportunity I actually went to the store manager and demanded I be assigned to someone else, because I don't function well in a prolonged fight-or-flight mode, much less deliver an accurate inventory. I sincerely hoped he was immediately enrolled in anger management classes, or at the very least reprimanded, but I guess I'll never know.
Here's where we shift gears trickily. These new self-service grocery checkout machines are fabulous. I love the independence, the freedom, the hands-on proactiveness of them. I love most of all not waiting, helplessly fuming, while some idiotic customer stands motionless until the whole order is rung up, THEN whips out their checkbook and starts writing (after sneaking 20 items into the "10 items or less" lane). But these mechanical wonders are not for everyone, particularly not the especially nonurgent or slow-witted among us. At the risk of sounding unkind (oh, who am I fooling?) some people are simply better suited to standing motionless while a clerk does all the work for them. And I suspect one of them was the woman who is the real star of this whole post. I didn't pay very close attention to the details, but judging from her very vocal, very angry reactions, the machine was thwarting her every step of the way. Lady, it's scan-place in the bag-scan-place in the bag....it's not rocket science or even skilled labor. Yet every minute or so I and my fellow customers were treated to her loud, almost theatrical sighs of disgust and frustrated snorts, punctuated by her standing back and glaring at the machine, hands on her hips, as if trying to intimidate it into working properly. When I started ringing up my own order, she was trying to pay. The machine wouldn't recognize her card and that was the last straw. "This is a brand new card!" she yelled, "I don't have problems anywhere else but at this store!!" Out of the corner of my eye I could see her swiping it top to bottom, when any seasoned customer of the store knew damn well it worked best swiping bottom to top. Some stores even had signs posted on the reader advising this. I felt so bad for the hapless employee who had to help her. I myself might have chosen that moment to take a cigarette break, and I don't smoke. But just being within range of her voice was raising my blood pressure several points.
I'm being terribly unfair. Maybe this woman's husband is dying of cancer and she has stresses going on that I can't even imagine. But guess what.....everyone has problems, lady, and none of us want to hear about yours. Chill out, get yourself a LiveJournal. Let off some steam, just do it anywhere else but right next to me.
I'll be the first to admit I'm hardly the most happy-go-lucky person you are likely to meet. I have a lot of anger inside, I won't deny it. But by and large I am decent enough to keep it simmering beneath the surface, and if the need to express it overwhelms me, it normally will be only in the form of a subtly aggressive posture, or a carefully-placed look. Unless I know you well enough to truly go off on you, it usually takes only the most extreme circumstances of outrage to make me overtly and obviously demonstrate any real anger.
So it may be kind of hard to believe that, being such an angry camper myself, raw exhibitions of rage from others are not very pleasant for me. I am cursed with a hypersensitivity to others' emotions, and seeing someone else's anger puts my senses on high alert, sets my pulse racing (and not in a good way) and inspires all sorts of intense, fight-or-flight primal reactions in my physiology that I just as soon could do without. Fortunately this doesn't happen often. In fact the last time I remember such an incident was while inventorying a Best Buy 6 months ago. They require us to work one-on-one with their people (in theory ensuring a near-perfect inventory) which isn't bad, but we get shuffled off whenever we change departments and have to build a whole new rapport with someone just as the old was getting comfortable; for someone as socially introverted as myself, you can imagine how exhausting this can get. But there was no chance of rapport with one guy in this inventory. He was upset about something, it was obvious in every aspect of his demeanor. Maybe he was missing a hot date...maybe he couldn't remember if he left the oven on. Whatever his excuse, he absolutely DID NOT want to be in that inventory, and made no secret about it. As he tried to hold a stack of CDs for me to scan, he was actually shaking with so much rage that he repeatedly dropped them, which made him even angrier. The only word out of his mouth was "fuck".....I'm no prude to obscenities, but there are only so many repetitions in a 15-minute time period that I can take, and this guy was waaaaaaaaaaaaaay over. I mean, he felt ripe to turn into The Incredible Hulk at any second. I knew his seething anger had nothing to do with me, still, at the earliest opportunity I actually went to the store manager and demanded I be assigned to someone else, because I don't function well in a prolonged fight-or-flight mode, much less deliver an accurate inventory. I sincerely hoped he was immediately enrolled in anger management classes, or at the very least reprimanded, but I guess I'll never know.
Here's where we shift gears trickily. These new self-service grocery checkout machines are fabulous. I love the independence, the freedom, the hands-on proactiveness of them. I love most of all not waiting, helplessly fuming, while some idiotic customer stands motionless until the whole order is rung up, THEN whips out their checkbook and starts writing (after sneaking 20 items into the "10 items or less" lane). But these mechanical wonders are not for everyone, particularly not the especially nonurgent or slow-witted among us. At the risk of sounding unkind (oh, who am I fooling?) some people are simply better suited to standing motionless while a clerk does all the work for them. And I suspect one of them was the woman who is the real star of this whole post. I didn't pay very close attention to the details, but judging from her very vocal, very angry reactions, the machine was thwarting her every step of the way. Lady, it's scan-place in the bag-scan-place in the bag....it's not rocket science or even skilled labor. Yet every minute or so I and my fellow customers were treated to her loud, almost theatrical sighs of disgust and frustrated snorts, punctuated by her standing back and glaring at the machine, hands on her hips, as if trying to intimidate it into working properly. When I started ringing up my own order, she was trying to pay. The machine wouldn't recognize her card and that was the last straw. "This is a brand new card!" she yelled, "I don't have problems anywhere else but at this store!!" Out of the corner of my eye I could see her swiping it top to bottom, when any seasoned customer of the store knew damn well it worked best swiping bottom to top. Some stores even had signs posted on the reader advising this. I felt so bad for the hapless employee who had to help her. I myself might have chosen that moment to take a cigarette break, and I don't smoke. But just being within range of her voice was raising my blood pressure several points.
I'm being terribly unfair. Maybe this woman's husband is dying of cancer and she has stresses going on that I can't even imagine. But guess what.....everyone has problems, lady, and none of us want to hear about yours. Chill out, get yourself a LiveJournal. Let off some steam, just do it anywhere else but right next to me.