I was 19 and I needed a job. I had transferred from a state school in Florida to a private school in East Tennessee and I very much needed a job.
This was before I learned the lucrative beauty of waiting tables. My work experience until then had been packaging bulk food in a heathfood store, being a servers' assistant at a too-fancy restaurant, selling Kirby vacuum cleaners, and being a concierge at a hotel. Not a bad resume for a 19 year-old.
With my years of work experience under my belt, I hit the Johnson City Mall. I filled out applications and handed them to cashiers who could only tell me that they were "always accepting applications." I hate that. It basically means "waste your time, if you want to."
I came upon one store that I had never heard of before. The entrance looked like the outside of a tropical bungalow. I entered. The music was loud and the inside was dim, crowded with racks of surfer-chic clothes, and strongly scented.
I didn't look around much, but headed to the register.
"Are you hiring?"
"Yes. Here's an application. If you fill it out right now, I can interview you in 30 minutes."
What luck.
I completed the application, returned it to the cool-looking woman, and wandered around until it was time for my interview.
I remember nothing about the interview, but when it was over and I was walking through the mall to my car, my cellphone rang. It was the manager.
"Can you come to orientation on Monday?"
"Yes."
"See you then."
Interesting. Within a matter of minutes of learning that a company existed, I had become an employee.
I don't remember orientation either, really, except that I had become a "brand representative" and I would have to wear clothes in the style of the store (fortunately they didn't have to actually be from the store, but more on that later) and generally look "beachy." This look was achieved by, in addition to the attire, wearing little make-up and flip flops or "cool sneakers."
Whatever. I had a job.
It was okay, at first. I learned a lot of new music that I still listen to today. I found a perfume that I really liked a lot, though it has since been discontinued.
Yep. That's the whole list of the things that made it not so bad. The other list, the bad list, was longer and grew.
My shift was about six hours and I would spend that time relegated to a "zone." Often times it was the dressing room, which had the benefit of allowing me to, when it was slow, stand by myself and sing along to the music, which was so loud that casual conversation wasn't generally attempted. I was okay with this. The patrons of this particular store were cool-kid teenagers who made me self-conscious.
To make matters worse, the clothing was all designed for humans who had the body shape of an avatar from the movie Avatar - very long and very thin. I could not wear the clothes. Everything was too long and too tight. In fact, I never bought one piece of clothing the whole time I worked there. I just stood in the dressing room as the 12 year-old girls tried on miniskirts and giggled and the 12 year-old boys tried on t-shirts that said "God bless the bikini," and other, more vulgar things, while looking tough at themselves in the mirror.
Then came the news that all of the employees would have their photos taken and sent to Corporate to determine whether or not we were adequate "brand representatives." I'm sure now that they use that job title to justify hiring and firing based on appearance. Weird.
The woman who had hired me, I learned, had a graduate degree in psychology. No wonder her eyes looked a little bit dim in that place.
She go out, though, and was replaced by a man who insisted that we tuck every price tag in before we could leave the store for the night. He was later fired for "fraternizing" with the underage female employees.
Even though all of this was enough to make me dread those six-hour shifts, the most demoralizing part of the job was the folding of clothes. When my "zone" was an area of the store, I was responsible for keeping everything folded. I would perfect the jean wall, only to have it torn apart by three 14 year-old girls, looking, carelessly, for their size. Then, I would put it back together and watch someone else tear it apart. This happened with everything in the room - every neat stack of t-shirts and intentional pile of sweatshirts. Everything. It was demoralizing.
When I finally got another job, I approached my manager - the fraternizer.
"Have you made the schedule for next week yet?"
"No."
"Okay. Could you not put me on it, or ever?"
"Okay."
"Do you understand?"
"Yeah."
I had quit my first job.
I like to tell people now that I worked there. They find it funny and uncharacteristic. I do too. I don't even know why they hired me. The kids who shopped in those stores when I was a teenager were the kids who I wanted to impress but couldn't. I never looked right. So it was funny that, as an adult, I was selling those clothes, those clothes I couldn't even wear, to another generation.
In another life, retail might be a fun job for me, but until then, I will cringe a bit every time I see a jean wall.
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