Lately, Tired has been winning at work. We are short-staffed as we enter our busiest time of year, and my friend/supervisor and I are starting to fail at some basic things, like using words.
Ruth and I have worked together for five years. What we have survived at the store has basically made us battle buddies. So, even she has since been promoted to management, we still interact much more as friends than supervisor/employee. This week, in preparation for our seasonal craziness at work, the district manager came for a visit. Usually, whenever my boss’s boss shows up, I turn into an awkward, inept, bumbling idiot. And since I have been pulling extra hours, I really expected to fail with aplomb. Apparently, though it was Ruth’s turn to showcase her tiredness. In my usual capacity as friend/assistant, I brought the coffee order for the staff. But after I handed Ruth her coffee, I realized that I hadn’t made her drink water first (Okay, fine: I have a bad habit of momming my friends). Since she was already touring the store with the district manager, I didn’t want to interrupt. Trying to be a stealthy ninja, I slipped up beside her and put a bottle of water in her free hand. Then, realizing she didn’t have a free hand to open the water bottle, I tried to take the coffee out of her other hand. Tried . . . She stopped mid-sentence and turned to me, “No, ma’am, you do not get to take the coffee away! I need that!” We all, Ruth included, enjoyed the humor of her over-reaction as she explained the strain it would put on our friendship if I tried to take coffee from her, and I defended my friend status because friends don’t let friends dehydrate. But then she continued the joke with a line that our audience (the district manager, a twenty-year-old part-timer, and two sixteen year-old temps) didn’t understand. “I want my friendship needle back!” she exclaimed, oblivious to the sudden stillness and nervous glances from our audience as they contemplated whether she had just announced that we were drug buddies. We aren’t. Neither of us knits, but knitting needles are wonderful for poking corners out on bags. So, we split a set of knitting needles, and what do we call them? “Friendship needles.” Later that same day, when another co-worker came in, Ruth greeted him with the exclamation: “I got the bad news that we’re expecting!” She kept right on talking while I enjoyed the show: the confused uncertain look on his face as he tried to figure out just who was pregnant and why Ruth was so upset about it and what the socially appropriate response would be. Finally, I took pity on them both since they were clearly having two different conversations. “No one is pregnant,” I interrupted. “And we are not anti-baby here.” I wish these were isolated incidents, but with our increasing levels of tired and pollen, Ruth and I continue needing to unsay things (expect we are enjoying the humor of those fumbles just a little too much to stop).
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My first job, Donut World, was my best. And although I have worked at many other places since then, I still expect business to follow the principles that my first boss demonstrated. And every time I am reminded that the business world is not like Donut World, I am startled anew by the difference.
Rule 1: We are Family. As long as we worked well and hard, the store owner Avi treated us like family. When we returned after a semester at college or even vacation, he would greet us with open arms, saying, “Ah, my family is back.” On my first day at Donut World, one of my father’s friends came in for his usual donut and coffee on his way to work. As a brand new member of the Donut World family, I sensed Avi’s fatherly concern as this burly man greeted me warmly. He didn’t relax until I explained that I knew this man from church. Our customers were also part of the family. We knew about each other’s lives and truly cared about each other’s lives. When a co-worker died, Avi wasn’t able to tell me before Shabbat started, so he asked one of our regular customers to stop by the store to tell me the news in person. Similarly, when I graduated from high school, customers and employees alike celebrated that milestone with me with gifts, cards, well-wishes. Avi even blessed me before I left for college. Rule 2: Hard work is rewarded. My sister warned me that at some point during my first day at work, she, Avi, and Georgia (the store manager) would disappear into the backroom on the pretense that they needed to check things in the stock room. What they were really doing was watching me on the camera to see what I did without supervision. I wiped down already clean counters. I checked what needed to be restocked. I started to memorize the menu board. At the end of the day, I already had a pay raise. Avi didn’t give annual pay raises; he rewarded hard work with surprise pay raises and just-because bonuses. (Corporate America with its ten-cent annual raises would learn well from Avi’s method. Why work hard when you are only ever rewarded for surviving another year?) The other rules build on those two rules. Rule 3: How you behave determines how you are treated. If customers didn’t behaved nicely and threatened to take their business elsewhere, Avi sniffed and waved them away, telling us that “we don’t want that kind here.” And even if they became regular customers, they were never part of the family. They didn’t get special treatment by complaining and being rude; in fact, Avi regularly called the police to have those customers removed from the premises. It’s amazing how quickly bullies back down when authority arrives. Rule 4: Serving others is serving yourself. This last rule is really the summary of all of Avi’s business principles and an idea that has been playing in my mind for a while now as I wrestle with Corporate America’s dehumanizing way of structuring business. Working at my current company, a corporate cookie-cutter business whose heads couldn’t care less about the employees on the front lines, has made me realize this rule. My previous manager at this store ran the store into the ground by mishandling funds and helping only high-dollar customers. He paid us just above minimum wage and would steal any commissionable sale from us. By serving himself (and no one else), he lost valuable employees, regular, loyal customers, the community’s good opinions, and ultimately the store. The new manager follows Avi’s rules (as much as corporate bigwigs let him) and serves others, and in doing so, has salvaged the store, gained a positive name in the community, built a loyal customer base, and turned the customers and employees into a family. Hmm, serving others really is the best policy. As a language teacher, I spend so much time emphasizing the importance of using words so that the audience clearly knows the ideas in the author’s mind. And then I go to work at my part-time jobs and realize I just might be wasting my breath.
“Hello, this is Eleanor at Music World,” I say, using the official company script for answering the phone. A mumbling voice on the other end of the line says, “A cup holder on a music stand.” Uncertain what that code means, I ask, “I’m sorry. How can I help you?” “Do you have a cup holder that latches onto a music stand in stock?” Wouldn’t it have been more efficient to have asked that to begin with? Usually these phone calls end just as uncertainly as they start. “No, I’m sorry. We don’t have that in stock. We can get it in for you, though,” I say. “Okay.” I’ve learned that in modern business phone etiquette “okay” means “thank you. Good-bye.” Things get more confusing when I answer the phone, and the customer says, “You just called me.” That’s it. No name. No reference to the voicemail left for them. And I wasn’t the one who called them. When asked what my associate had called them about, the customer admits that she didn’t even bother to listen to the voicemail left for her. So I get stuck playing twenty questions: “Do you have a rental account with us?” “No.” “Do you take lessons with us?” “No.” A huge part of me wants to say, “Listen to the voicemail if you want to know why someone called you!” In high school when I worked at Donut World, it was even worse. Fully literate adults would stand in front of a donut case holding forty different kinds of donuts and request “that one.” Then they made me play a guessing game. “Which donut?” “The one on the second rack.” The second from the top or bottom? From the left from the right? That still only narrows it down to eight flavors. “The one with the white powder on the outside and the white cream on the inside.” “Oh, you want a vanilla cream donut,” I would say to model using words to communicate. “Yeah, with the white powder,” they would say, ignoring my cue. Those are usually the people who make picking a dozen donuts seem like an entire shift. And they teach their children to do the same thing. “Johnny, what kind of donut do you want?” After their child stares at the overwhelming choices for a few seconds, they start pointing at “that one” or “that one.” It takes more work to describe the donut than it does to read the label. Even stranger are the ones who will read every part of the label to me, except for the name. “Could I try this ice cream?” “Which kind?” “The ‘creamy vanilla ice cream with a ribbon of caramel syrup and pecan pralines.’” “Oh, the Pralines and Cream?” “I guess so.” Why do we work so hard for high literacy rates when the general population refuses to read even once they’ve learned? Last week, when I turned down the candy aisle, I was elated to see the candy cane Hershey kisses, one of my seasonal favorites. Immediately, my excitement turned to indignation at premature holiday stocking. And just as quickly, I switched back to relieved excitement when I remembered that it is November and holiday treats are acceptable.
Last week also marked the opening exercises for the apocalypse of holiday shopping. I watched my first holiday commercial of the season—a heart-warming Wal-mart commercial celebrating the competitive greed of the gift-giving season. Hours later I sat in a meeting at work learning this year’s strategy for a successful Black Friday event. They never out-right say it, but I usually leave these meetings thinking that the measure of success on Black Friday is whether or not the final score is Corporate America: gobs of money; Humanity: zero. I used to enjoy the magic of planning how to make someone else’s day special, hours hand-crafting gifts in the closet (because in a house full of people, it was the safest place to hide), and secret pow-wows about how to sneak gifts into the house or how to deceptively wrap the gifts. I would savor the treats of November and December—the edible treats of almond bark pretzels and chocolate-covered Danish cookies and the inedible treats of eating pumpkin pie for breakfast with Dad’s defense of “It’s a breakfast pastry!” when Mom would look at us aghast (to clarify, the inedible treats were Mom’s look when she said, “Honey!” and Dad’s grin when he defended his/our breakfast choice). But since I started working retail, each year, I approach Thanksgiving and Christmas with the same level of delight as I would approach the apocalypse. And after January’s inventory, I breathe a sigh of relief and say, “I survived.” I survived? After realizing that was becoming my response to my formerly favorite season, I have been trying to reclaim the humanity and magic of the season. It isn’t easy. But I have picked retail employees as my targets because they are the season’s biggest victims. I enjoy leaving them surprise anonymous treats (the edible and inedible kind). Even in the summer, my friends will remind me when I’m in the middle of folding a stack of shirts in a clothing store, “You know you don’t work here, right?” But especially in November and December, I find it especially hard to leave product on the wrong shelf or a dress half-hanging off a hanger. The harried employee (“team member”) will never notice half of the things that I reshelf for them, but it makes me feel that Humanity’s score at the end of the season won’t be zero. Iced Coffee—It Tastes Like . . . Coffee
I don’t know why, but Fourth of July weekend makes me nostalgic for my days as a barista. In high school and college, I worked for a coffee/pastry/ice cream shop that I have lovingly pseudonymed as Donut World. It was my first job; my best job, my worst job. Donut World was my training ground for work, leadership, and adulthood. My experiences there formed my expectations for the business world. To this day, I still expect “the real world” to follow the same principles that Donut World ran on, even though I’ve never again gotten a fifteen dollar tip just for being an American girl who had to work on the Fourth of July (true story). Every year as it began to heat up outside, our iced coffee and iced latte sales rose with the thermometer. And every year, as unbelievable as it may seem to our coffee-fluent culture, we had people who didn’t understand what they were ordering. (Yes, this was before there were as many Starbucks as there are tourists visiting New York City this weekend.) Late one night after I had been working at Donut World for a year, a group of teen girls came in and two of them ordered iced latte. After paying for their drinks, they tasted them. “Uh, excuse me, ma’am. These drinks are messed up,” one of the girls began. “What’s wrong with them?” I asked. “This tastes like coffee.” “Iced latte is coffee,” I said. “Yeah, but it shouldn’t taste like this.” “What should it taste like?” “Not like coffee. I don’t like coffee.” She is not alone in her ignorance. “Is iced coffee sweet?” Many customers wanted to know. Iced coffee is just as sweet as hot coffee. It’s just cold coffee. Chilling it doesn’t make it sweeter. Yet, so many customers ask “Is the iced coffee sweet?” and then get offended by my answer: “If you want it sweet, it can be. It’s just double-brewed coffee over ice.” And then there are the customers who order iced coffee and wonder where the whipped cream is when they get it. “Doesn’t it come with whipped cream?” “No, ma’am. It doesn’t.” “Well, the picture right there shows whipped cream and chocolate drizzle on top.” The picture, of course, had the conveniently ignored caption denoting the drink as an iced latte, but many customers didn’t see, or taste, any difference between iced coffee and iced latte. To celebrate the Fourth, I think I’ll visit Donut World tomorrow and leave a ridiculously large tip for my iced latte, which I certainly hope tastes like coffee. |
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