UNREASONABLE HAPPINESS

One of my favorite Earth Fare stories involves (very peripherally) me (an Earth Fare cashier), sitting on the curb around the side of the building past the Green Sage restaurant – having my lunch. Two young Asian (best as I can tell) women come walking from the grocery store, across the parking lot, carrying one very full bag of groceries. (I never fill a bag that full – they would definitely have carried out two bags of groceries from me, unless they had demanded only one, in which case I would have given them my standard, only-partly-tongue-in-cheek disclaimer, “The Earth Fare company is no longer responsible for the safety of your groceries. If the bag breaks, it’s all on you. 🙂“

(Tom, like most of us, has a certain amount of ego.  But – ego notwithstanding – he is one of the most genuinely humble people I know.  I considered running this piece by him – maybe having one or more in-depth discussions about it with him – before publishing it.  I know those discussions would have been very satisfying – and maybe we still will have them.  But, I feel pretty sure, it would have been a non-stop battle to get his permission to publish this thing.  So I’m just going to go ahead and publish it – and ask Tom for his forgiveness instead of permission.)

My real good buddy Tom Kilby, who has worked in the Grocery Department for at least seven years at Earth Fare and three years at Greenlife, likes to say that Cashier “is the hardest job in the store”.

I think of Tom as primarily a dog person – oh, how he loved his Madeleine.  But he apparently a cat person, too.

I protested: “But we are not responsible for the smooth functioning of several aisles of groceries, like you are.  We don’t have to anticipate the need for product and order just the right amounts of just the right thing – somehow sandwiching this totally different administrative function in between the continual onslaught of actually stocking groceries.  We don’t have to unload trucks and wrestle with huge cases of heavy frozen foods. which, yes, builds your muscles but constantly threatens your backs.  We don’t have to work by ourselves – with little contact with co-workers or customers – all day long.”

Tom – for someone who is really great at the essentially solo work of the Grocery Department – actually excels at customer service and kind of lives for it.  Although he is constantly under the gun to keep his three aisles under control – not only correctly stocked but “looking good” – something that management cares a lot about, and actually many customers, too, he is always extremely glad to set aside these time-sensitive duties to help a customer.  Seasoned customers know this and seek him out for all manner of help in the store – often ranging far from his three aisles.

For Tom – and his dance parners Giovanna Allegretti Hopkins and Amanda Levesque – life is a dance.

When we both used to work at Greenlife/Whole Foods, he three times won the “Outstanding Customer Service Award” that was given three times a year to the employee who in that quarter most stood out for helping customers – an award that you pretty much expected to go to someone who had “customer service” more front-and-center in their job duties, like cashiers.  In, I think, the history of that store, Tom was the only employee to win that award three times.

When I was trying to be hired for my job at Earth Fare, it was to be expected that I would be interviewed by the Front End manager – the amazing Emmalee Butler, who I have missed a lot since she went to the corporate office for a job that better accommodated her life as the mother of a young child – and one of the assistant store managers.

It was, I think, less typical for a cashier applicant to also be interviewed by James Salducci – for 17 years the store manager at the Westgate Earth Fare store.  I’m a pretty good interviewee and the conversation had gone actually really well: early in the interview, I made sure to remind James that my candidacy was strongly supported by my friend and previous co-worker (three years together at the old Greenlife) Tom Kilby.  (I later realized just how truly unnecessary it was for me to make this point: Tom had actually taken more than one opportunity to talk me up with James.)

In the maybe-30-minute interview, James and I talked a lot about the nature of customer service – I think that was fun and satisfying for both of us.  He started to wrap up the interview by asking if I had any other questions.  Having taught interviewing skills back when I was a management consultant, I pulled out the tried-and-true response to this question – because it showcases you as someone who cares about the company’s success as much as your own: “What, to you and in this store, makes for an outstanding employee?”  James did not miss a beat. “Tom Kilby.”

I’ve never had an actual conversation with Tom about his philosophy of customer service, but – in the interest of the improvisation that Tom values maybe as much as any other quality in life – I’m going to go ahead and make up Tom’s three top principles of customer service.

1. “It’s a performance – it’s showtime!”So much of Tom’s mundane solo work would not seem like a performance – but actually, for Tom, all aspects of his job can be infused by the passionate performer in him.  Tom doesn’t just hustle-hustle-hustle all day long – he creates joy for himself by doing this in style.

   He doesn’t just move fast all day, he doesn’t just walk fast: Tom is also a passionate improv dancer and he dances through those three aisles. His turns can be sharply executed or smooth and flowing.

   When he meets a fellow dancer (like me) in the aisles, he will sometimes dive into a 1-minute verbal-relational “power-pump”, in which he exchanges more genuine interpersonal contact in one minute than most people can manage in ten minutes – and other times, especially if (like me) that fellow dancer is also experienced (even if, like me, they have never actually gotten very good) in “contact improv” (improvisational dancing that involves extensive physical contact with another dancer), he will exchange no words – but slink down the aisle shoulder-to-shoulder with them, give them a vigorous and almost violent chest-bump (Tom and I love to do this on the dance floor and often can’t resist it when we encounter each other in the cereal aisle), or (with more experienced contact improv dancers – unlike me – who he trusts not to get injured or to injure him) roll fluidly over their back.

   

   Tom and his long-time dance partner, the indomitable Amanda Levesque

2. “It’s all about love.”For Tom, you provide for your customer the kind of loving care that you long for when you yourself are a customer in a store – and which is more and more rare in these days when personnel are often barely trained at all and perhaps are constantly being asked to “do more with less” (like less person-hours to get the work of your department done).

   And, for Tom, love is not just at the heart of good customer service – it is the purpose of all life (maybe not just human life, but this conversation would veer into the mystical…a place where Tom will not hesitate to go).  “If you are not expressing and sharing love, then what are you doing with your precious eight hours – just stocking groceries?  I know that stocking groceries is necessary and even important – the store wouldn’t work well without that being done well.  But, excuse me, they are not paying me well enough to do only that.  If I’m not making great contact with people – if I’m not playing with people, dancing with people just as much as possible in my eight-hour shift – then I am just missing a precious opportunity to be fully alive.”

3. All of this beautiful and sometimes-philosophical customer service essence having been imparted, Tom continually strives to rise to the occasion of – as much as possible – not taking any of it very seriously.  Mostly with his fellow workers – but also with customers who he has known for many years and who may actively seek him out every time they come in the store – Tom is all about play, teasing and general foolishness.  He cares less for “looking good” than I guess anybody else I know.  He is the trickster.  He plays the fool.  He pulls your chain.

   He once, when my self-described motivation for doing something sounded just a little bit manipulative to him – just a little too much self-oriented – he lightly said, “That sounds a little like our president.”  Now it has become code between us for him – if he gets even a hint of insincerity in something I say, his wry smile peeking out, to ask “Is that your Trump-self speaking?”

If you haven’t already gleaned this from this paean to Tom Kilby, I not only think he is a hero of customer service and a huge inspiration to me as I try to always take grocery store work to the next level – where it really becomes an art.  More than all that, I just plain love the man.  And I am in good company there.  When I mention his name to others – as I frequently do, because I am proud to be his close friend – I have never experienced somebody I mention to so consistently elicit the response, from a huge diversity of people:

“Tom Kilby?  What a great guy.”

We are on this planet for healing.  The great meditation teacher Thich Nhat Hanh says, “We have come here to overcome the illusion of our separation.”

Thich Nhat Hanh

When people ask me what is my spirituality or what God means to me, I typically say some version of:

“I don’t know much about all this, but I do have two experiences that feel true, even though I don’t know how or why.

1. “All is one.  Everything is connected.  Whereas our limited rational mind – our ego – perceives chaos and separation, underneath that the truth is connection.  When my son was young, when something very synchronistic happened – like that just couldn’t be a coincidence that those things came together like that – I often would say “That was God winking at us.”  At those moments, my son – who often thought I was stupid, would think that was one of the stupidest things I had ever said.  Recently, when he was 40, he said, “Dad, remember when you used to say that a coincidence was really God winking at us?  I see it happening all the time now.”
2. “Life is benevolent – it is constantly looking out for our good.  It keeps sending us those experiences we most need for our healing and growth.  If we don’t get the message, Life finds another way to send us the same message.  It’s a lot like the movie Groundhog Day: it’s a new day and life is going to give us a chance to try again, to see if we can learn what we failed to learn the day before.

We are here for healing – to remember who we really are.  We have mostly all had lots of experiences that did not reflect who we really are: our parents maybe had a very limited vision of our inherent greatness.  Only an exceptional parent really knows that we are a divine being and consistently reflects that to us.  Our schools mostly don’t support our uniqueness, our individuality, our spiritual beauty.  Nor our churches.  And on and on.

One of the most powerful experiences any of us can have to help us to wake up – to remember our wonderfulness – is validation, someone accurately reflecting us…pointing us to our beauty and strength and goodness.  We all have the power to offer this kind of healing to the people around us – and we can grow this gift of validation, our skill at reflecting the other person, constantly over time.  And as cashiers, we have the chance to practice it with customer after customer, every shift we work.

I have been very influenced by a video called Validation – the Parking Attendant.  I saw it in a creative writing class a few years ago and it has never let me go.  When I developed and taught a customer service class for cashiers here at Earth Fare a couple of years ago, it was a central part of that class – a part that our store manager Brandon still remembers vividly, two years later.  The premise is that the parking lot attendant, as he is validating your parking ticket, also validates you.  It’s a little fable that does show the power of saying true, positive things to people.  The concept is fully covered in the first seven minutes of the video, but the remaining nine minutes are also very sweet and worth watching.  It could affect the way you think of cashiering.

My stretch goal for myself is to offer a fresh, meaningful, true validation to every customer who comes through my line.  I never achieve that – if I hit something like 80% (I never actually keep track) it is a good day.  If they have just a couple of items to buy and you get no chance to really get to know them, it’s harder.  Or if there is a line and you have to focus a lot of your energies making the transactions happen – but fortunately swiping groceries is mostly genuinely mindless work, and you really can do this at the same time.

Some of my validations are not too creative: their hair, smile, blouse, food choice, eyeglasses.  But I have a deal with myself that the validation needs to be accurate and that I genuinely do appreciate the element I am pointing to.  You would be surprised how many people, if you genuinely admire their eyeglasses, will have a story about them – and often one they are proud of.  As a man, complimenting another man’s hair or beard can be slightly tricky – but if I don’t make really deep eye contact, they will probably be reassured that I’m not hitting them.  And if they know I’m not hitting on them, but still think I’m gay, well that’s not such a horrible thing.

I  have appreciated:

• “your perfect nose” (she still remembers that one and laughs about it – “You just don’t forget stuff like that”)
• “Your intelligence” – sometimes that’s obvious
• “Your sense of humor”
• ‘Your fast, improv-style sense of humor.  When I fed you a funny or BS line, you just ran with it.”
• I love to appreciate couples: things like “You’re so comfortable with each other” or “You’re funny together.” couples
• Or families (especially extended family) or parents and children.  I had a mother and six-year old daughter wake me up and learn a new format for affirming little girls.  I still use it with them.  I’ll say, “Honey, a ways back, a little girl came through who was about as old as you and about as pretty as you.  I told her how pretty she was.  Her mom said, “You know what we say to people who tell you how pretty you are.”  And, in unison, they said, “I’m pretty and strong and I’m smart – huh!” families

I have taught a course on this topic and am writing a blog called Healing Validations.  This blog is a little short yet, but already has some useful and even inspiring posts.

My mother was good at this. In my son’s last visit with her, at age 25 – just a few days before she died – she asked him what he was up to.  He attempted to describe to her his current fascination with making music on an Emu – a synthesizer.  She obviously had no idea what he was talking about, but thought for a moment and then said – very confidently – “I know you can do it.”  These were almost the last words he ever heard from his grandmother.

“To think something positive about someone and not to tell them is one of the biggest wastes there is.” (Majo)

These days, when – at the cash register – I tell a little girl that she’s pretty, I always follow that by saying this:

“One day here, when i told a little girl she was pretty, her mama said, ‘You know what we say, honey, when some nice person says you are pretty.’  And then in unison, very powerfully, they said ‘I’m pretty, I’m smart, and I’m strong – huh!'”

The little girl I am speaking to at this point will almost always say, “I’m smart!” or “I’m strong.”  And I will say something like, “Boy, you really are, aren’t you!”  And the mother (or father) will usually beam with delight at their daughter.

After seven years of cashiering at two different grocery stores (Greenlife/Whole Foods and now Earth Fare), I really do believe that – at my best – I am a very good, sometimes inspired, cashier.  But I’m sure not always at my best.  At my worst, I suck.

I am learning again and again that it really doesn’t support me to show up for work tired or depressed – or, like today, tired and depressed.   Tired I have some control over: it usually really is possible to get to bed at a reasonable hour the night before I work.  Depressed I have less control over – especially as someone with bipolar disorder whose bipolar process is currently pretty out-of-control.

Cashiering in a grocery store (and probably other kinds of stores, but this is the kind of store I know best) is very demanding work.  My buddy Tom Kilby in the Grocery Department – who has been working in grocery stores for a lot longer than I – believes it is the hardest job in the store.

Tom Kilby and unnamed cat he was visiting. 

You do very repetitive work, which does not necessarily support your creative energies – but you need to be creative anyway.  To do it really well, you need to be “on” – you need to fully show up, as much as this is possible, for one person after another, standing mostly in the same spot, for however many hours your shift lasts.  You need to not just be friendly, but if you want to provide a world-class experience for your customer, you need to be really interested in them.  To the extent that your line allows, you want them to feel really greeted, really welcome, really valued.

When I am tired or depressed, I just don’t feel like doing all that – and sometimes I just don’t.  But, ironically, what I keep finding is that this kind of connection with my customer is the most powerful antidote to exhaustion and maybe especially to depression.  If I reach down deep and pull up the energy to make really good contact with my customer, I feel better – sometimes, surprisingly, really good.

This actually should not be surprising.  We are social beings.  We crave contact with others of our species.  Really connecting with our customers can be very satisfying.  We obviously can’t do it equally well with all of our customers – one after another after another.  Even when I am on a roll, I will observe myself maybe having great contact with one customer – then just kind of cruising with the next.  And sometimes the customer doesn’t want contact with us: they are preoccupied with something else or they have four more errands to run and they just want to get the hell out of here.

We also crave the experience of competence, of skill.  If we are aiming for really rich connection with customers, there is no limit to how much we can grow this skill.  I’m 73 years old, have 35 years of experience doing customer service in a professional setting and now 15 years in various  front-line customer service settings (Working Hard for the Money) – and it feels like only now am I really catching my stride and like there is no limit as to how much better I can get.

Cashiering can sometimes seem like a kind of menial job, but it really is nothing like that.  At it’s best – when we really throw ourselves into it – it is an art, a dance.  Otherwise we’re just swiping groceries, for relatively low pay.  That is just not a good deal.

Cashiering – especially good cashiering – is manic work.

Some times behind the register are slow, but most are not.  You need to change your focus immediately from one customer to the next.  You are wheeling and dealing.  If you value engagement with the customer – which is the factor that really makes cashiering shine – you need to really focus intently on the customer in front of you, listen well, pay attention to them, make them feel valued, have fun with them, while always paying attention the whole line.  Sometimes I will say to a new customer something like, “I know you have been waiting a long time.  I’m sorry for that.  With your permission, while you are here, I’m just going to put my head down and swipe groceries, so we can get you out of here.”

I’m more attuned to the manic quality of good cashiering because I have bipolar disorder.  In my first four years with our store, depression would sometimes infect my work with customers.  I would be sad – and not as responsive as some of my regular customers expect.  Occasionally a customer would say something to me like “Are you OK?…I don’t know – you’re just not your usual self.”

In the last five weeks, since I have been so happy to return to my job after a year away, cashiering pretty consistently makes me happy.  I am fun, playful, funny – and fast.  People leave my line happy, happy with our store – looking forward to coming back.  I consistently take register #5, the busiest register because it is right in the customer’s line of sight as they approach checkout.  I used to avoid this register, but now I like it because it keeps me busy.  Even in my currently happy state, I can quickly drop into depression if I am not busy, engaged.

I thrive on connection with the customer.  I love to make them smile, to make them laugh.  I strive to find just the right validation to make them feel good about themselves.  I compliment their shirt, their hair, their glasses, their choice of foods, their children.  I play with them.  When an obviously fun family recently asked me the origin of my Majo name (many people do), I said, “Would you like the real story or one of my many bullshit stories?”  They, enthusiastically and in unison, said “Bullshit!  Bullshit!”  And, because there was no one in line behind them, I gave them my bullshit story about being “born in Hungary, to gypsies.”  Because we had time, I said, “This is going farther into this story than I have ever gone – this is going to be interesting.”  They left really happy – with a grocery store story that they would remember.

Connecting with the customer in front of you – and keeping the line moving – is part of art of cashiering.  It is necessary.  Mania helps.  But if you don’t have access to mania, you need to reach down deep and pull up all your energy.  It is the difference between joy in your work and just swiping groceries.

I want to introduce – or reintroduce myself to you, my front end colleagues.

A great cashiering moment: I loved this customer’s shirt – and bought it from him for $10.

I appreciate and admire all of you.  We are doing very hard work. At it’s best, it’s heroic.  If we are not really engaging our customers, then we are just swiping groceries – and we’re not getting paid enough for this to be a good deal.  If we are not really in this for the money, then we ought to insist on doing really satisfying work.  Tom Kilby, who has worked here in Grocery for a long time, swears that cashier is the hardest job in the store. I think that, at our best, we are creating at our store a community of staff and customers that enriches life for all of us.

I worked for 20 years as a Ph.D. clinical psychologist.  Providing psychotherapy and personal growth workshops for people was very powerful customer service – and required me to continually improve at learning about and focusing on what would really help people.

Then I worked for 15 years as a Fortune 500 management consultant (organization development) focusing on teambuilding and participative management, management coaching, diversity, and other services.  My clients – even during the four years that I was an internal consultant (like as an employee) at AT&T, my internal clients were paying a lot of money to the Human Resources Department for my services.  I had to be exquisitely focused on customer service or not be invited back.

When I came to Asheville 15 years ago, “semi-retired” and trying to get a grip on the bipolar disorder that had wiped out my career, I knew that I did not want to (and could not afford the stress of) doing professional work.  I needed to re-invent myself.  My son’s advice – for my own mental health – was “move somewhere you have never lived before, where you know nobody, and do work you have never done before.”

I decided to become “the working class hero I was always meant to be.”  I grew up from solidly blue collar roots and was part of the first generation in my family to go to college.  When, right out of college, I got a Ph.D. and never after college did anything but white-collar work, it always felt a little strange and kind of like a betrayal of my heritage.  I recommend my blog post “Working Hard for the Money” (https://rlcol.com/2019/08/19/working-hard-for-the-money/) as a tour through my 13 front-line customer service jobs in Asheville.  Like the Donna Summer song, it takes a strong stand for the dignity and rights of people who do hard, under-appreciated work.  I strive, in my work with front line customer service workers, to not just help them to work better, but to be treated better and be more appreciated.

I have done a lot of retail (cashiering at Green Life for three years before I came to our store), but have also worked in a call center as a telephone customer service rep., been a taxi and Mountain Mobility driver, and a restaurant server. I have also been a vendor out in front of the store and other locations, selling “on-demand” poetry: you tell me the topic you want a poem about (your mother, your future career, I specialized in dog poems).  I have wanted to do more of that again, and if the store keeps cutting my hours I will have the free time and no economic choice.

I worked here as a cashier for four years before, a little over a year ago, I made a “deal with the devil”.  In order to move into Battery Park Apartments, the old 13-story hotel out the north end of the Grove Arcade that is now subsidized senior apartments, I had to reduce my income – and the only way I could do that (I couldn’t let go of my monthly social security check) was to let go of my job here at the store.  That was a very bad idea.

I had no idea the extent to which my work here – the structure to my days, my keeping busy, my sense of competence, but especially my relationships with staff and customers – kept me together.  A year of not being here basically wrecked my mental health.  I woke up one day and realized “I compromised my integrity by the choice to give up a job I love to move into an apartment building downtown (I hate apartment buildings and hate living downtown), mostly because so many of my loving friends say I have to do it.  I’m going to go get my job back and find another place to live.”  By the end of that day, I had my job back and had begun laying plans for a move.

Our store manager had been a participant in – and loved – the little 30-minute module on customer service I had developed for the store and delivered several times to groups ranging from one person to four.  He reminisced about it as we walked back to his office for my job interview.  He remembered that the key concept was “validation” – finding ways to affirm our customers – and the 7-minute video called “Validation -the Parking Attendant” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cbk980jV7Ao), which I very highly recommend to anyone doing customer service.

When I told him I wanted my job back, he got all excited and said “When can you start?”  No job applicant could ever ask for a better response.  I didn’t want to discourage him, but I did want all the cards on the table.  “I understand that the ‘items-per-minute” metric – how fast you swipe groceries – is being pushed by corporate, and I’m slow.”  Brandon said “You’re Mr. Customer Service, that’s just what we need right now.  We’ll work with you on your ipm’s.”

I have asked our store manager to bring back my little customer service course, but he said that with the way worker hours are being cut, there’s no way to be pulling people off the cash register.  He wants me and some of our other more senior cashiers to be informal resources to newer cashiers around customer service issues.

These days, especially since coming back from my year away, it seems like my three major missions on the job are:

1) to play and have fun as much as possible

2) to help my customers play and have fun as much as possible – to feel like grocery shopping is fun and our store is a warm, alive, fun place to be.  Another way to say that is that they would feel seen, acknowledged – valued as a person, not just a “customer”.

3) to, as much as possible, affirm every customer – to find a unique way to validate each one of them, even if it’s a little wacky or I may not even totally understand why I’m saying it.  A woman at Jason’s Deli the other day gave me a big smile and said, “I remember you – you’re the cashier that told me I have a perfect nose.  You just don’t forget stuff like that.”

I will be looking for ways to reach out to you all – to connect, to develop a relationship that can support me being helpful to you.  (Brandon is trying to help me get my override codes back – that would help.)  I hope and encourage that – from your end – you will be looking for opportunities to develop a relationship with me where I can support you in your work, especially around customer service.

A couple of hours ago, I walked home from my cashier job. I stand in a kiosk, a little booth in an extremely busy gas station, taking money for gas and cigarettes. (We have the lowest prices around for both of these.) I realized on my way home that I had not sat down once in the previous 8 hours.

Technically, my job does not offer any breaks in eight hours. But, on one of my first full shifts after my training, I had a little fit with my boss Mark about this. He had just gotten all snarky with me because I had hit the “Credit” button for a transaction that actually involved a check. He said, “You just can’t be doing this.” I kind of lost it. “Mark, I have been standing here for six hours, handling transaction after transaction after transaction with barely a chance to breathe. I have had no breaks – no lunch break, nothing. I don’t even think that’s legal. I can’t see straight any more. So before you give me a hard time because I hit a wrong damn key, you had better factor all that in.”

I came to realize shortly after starting this job, a few weeks ago, that I can get away with letting Mark have it when I need to. They have had a terribly hard time keeping people in this job, and Mark is down to me as the cashier. When he doesn’t have a cashier, he has to do that work and falls way behind on his manager tasks.

Even in job-challenged Asheville – which has lost many of its factory jobs, where so many people have moved without jobs for the lifestyle, and where its primary tourist business goes dead in the winter – not many people are willing to do this job. The pay ($6.50 an hour) sucks, even by Asheville standards. The hours are lousy – you either open at 7 a.m. or close at 11 p.m. You work way too hard for this kind of money: there is almost always at least one person at the window, frequently a little line – and they all want to get their change already, get back in their warm cars and go to work or wherever they are going. About the best you can do is to not piss them off, and frequently even this is impossible.

So Mark really needs me more than I need him. I could pretty easily find another retail job paying $6.50 or more, even in the winter. I’m not really sure why I have stayed these several weeks. I tell myself that it’s spiritual discipline, managing the details of the cash register (which genuinely are fairly challenging for this non-detail person) and finding some way to have genuine human interactions with the people in front of me, even if they are there for well less than a minute.

And I’m waiting to be called back on another, much better cashier job.

Mark has now gotten used to the idea that I insist on having at least one break during my 8-hour shift. I’ll say, “Mark, I’ve been standing here for four hours now – I need to get out of this booth. I’m going to do it sometime in the next half hour. I’ll hang up the ‘Bathroom break’ sign if I need to. If you want to take over the register while I’m gone, you need to let me know what time is best for you.”

Mark begrudges all this. His understanding of the job is that you don’t get a break during your shift. You nibble as you need to during your shift and smoke when you get off. But he lives with it because he has no choice, because he doesn’t want me to quit. So I get out of the booth for ten minutes and hang out in the parking lot next door, smoking a cigarette.

The other reason that so many people have quit this job after a day or so is that Mark is a lousy manager. He is in some ways a pretty nice guy, but he has two big failings as a manager:

1. He has really no systems in place for this job and doesn’t know how to teach.

   Very little is written down and most of your training comes from you asking Mark how to do something. He explains it once and thinks that you should then know it. He doesn’t quite get it that something he has explained to you once, with several impatient people in front of you, on a day when you have had to ask dozens of similar questions, is probably not going to stick. But he gets very impatient when you ask the same question a second time.

   My manager at my other part-time cashier job is an ex-college teacher. Even though he has very little turnover in this relatively cushy job in a hotel gift shop, and though you do dramatically less volume than at my gas station job and the cash-out process is much simpler, he has written a “Procedure Manual” for new employees, in which he outlines the steps for cashing out in a very clear way.

   At my gas station job, I handle about ten times as much money in a shift, can have upwards of 350 face-to-face transactions in 8 hours, and the cash-out process is fairly complicated. About my third day of attempting this, Mark said, “I’m going to leave you on your own to do that today – you should know it by now.” Well, I didn’t. I still had to ask him lots of questions and he was clearly irritated by each of them. He finally said, “The company is only supposed to pay you for 15 minutes to do your cash-out. It’s been taking you 30-40 minutes – you just can’t keep doing that.”

   Again, I allowed myself to lose it. “Mark, all of this should be written down. Because it’s not, I have to keep asking you questions – that takes a long time.” Mark was unapologetic. “I’ve got no time to be writing some manual, you’ve just got to pick it up.”

   The next day when it was time to cash out, I was ready. I said, “Mark, you seem to think there is no need to have this stuff written down. Apparently you are willing to watch each new person struggle with this process, asking you questions that just piss you off. Well, I don’t think I’m any stupider than the next person who will take this job, and this just isn’t working for me. So today I’m going to write the procedure manual that you aren’t willing to write. That means that I’m going to ask you questions about everything I don’t understand, write it all down and, obviously, argue with you. So this is going to take kind of a long time.” And that’s exactly what I did.

   (Clearly, one really good aspect of this job is that I can get away with blowing off steam like this, without being fired. Very few people in jobs like this actually have that luxury.)

2. Mark has no idea how to give a compliment for a job well done.

He’s all over any “coaching opportunities”. These range from a genuinely helpful “Let me show you an easier way to do that” to a whole variety of challenges and criticisms:

1. 1. “What’s that doing there?”

   2. “Haven’t you started to do that yet?”

   3. “When you hit that wrong button, it causes all kinds of problems.”

   4. Etc., etc., etc.

I do and have done lots of things right. I actually have mastered most of the details of the job pretty quickly, I’m totally reliable and I have a pretty strong work ethic. I can’t remember even one time in five weeks that Mark has given me a genuine compliment.

Thinking about these two glaring weaknesses in Mark’s managing style, I sometimes think, “No wonder they can’t keep people longer than a day.” But then I think, there are an awful lot of other managers out there who are this bad or worse. Mark is at least basically a nice guy – I know how many managers out there are genuine assholes.

My two current cashier jobs are jobs nine and ten for me in 15 months in Asheville. Some of these jobs I have liked. A couple I liked a whole lot.

My second Asheville job was as a restaurant server. This restaurant is part of a little Southeast chain that describe themselves as “the top end of casual dining”. It’s a genuinely pretty, bright environment with very good food. The managers do a relatively good job of training people and then mostly turn you loose to find your own style and hopefully have fun. And most of the servers do have fun – they work very much as a team and stay in the job, even though the restaurant is often slow and the tips not very good, because they are having a good time.

I had for years wanted to try restaurant serving and was excited about this opportunity. In this job, I was mostly able to genuinely charm my customers, had a lot of fun with my co-workers, and loved the challenge of learning to master the details of serving. But I never got very good at them. Never have I so clearly seen the difficulty of “multi-tasking” or realized how genuinely bad I am at it. I would do a tremendous job with one table and completely forget the other – or not even notice that another party had been seated. When I forgot to bring people their salads or bungled the details of their order, the whole charm thing would wear off in a hurry.

New servers are given just two tables to work with until they get the swing of things. You have to work with more tables than that to make any real tip money (added on to your whopping $2.13 hourly rate). But I never much got the swing of things. It was obvious to everybody that I was just barely holding it together with two tables and that, when I was given a third, I just began to unravel. Management let me stay on – the infamous “Mr. Two Tables” – because I did mostly learn how to take care of those two tables, because I was positive and cheerful and most everyone liked me and could see how hard I was trying, and because the company could afford to pay me the $2.13 an hour.

But finally I started to really wear out from the difficulty of the work, an old shoulder injury got inflamed from the physical challenges, and I just couldn’t afford to work for the $6 an hour or so that I was bringing in. So I quit.

My next favorite job, which I started part-time at the same time as my part-time restaurant job, was as a temporary holiday cashier at a really very neat “General Store”. It was one of several of these stores spread through the Carolinas, with great history, historic department store buildings and cool stock. Their distinguishing market niche involves very personal customer service and “an alternative to standard retail chains”.

This was in some ways a perfect job for me. I loved interacting with the customers, really helped them have a good time shopping – and this often led to them buying more. And there were, overall, lots fewer details to manage than at the restaurant. You did have to try to manage the “dance floor” – to simultaneously stay in touch with various shoppers – but you at least didn’t have to keep track of how they wanted their meat cooked.

I was great at this work. Though this company really does not expect its retail associates to follow a script, Ellen, the general manager of this store, is a fairly cautious, over-controlling person and her staff have tended to also adopt a fairly low-key, cautious approach to customer service. I did not. I had a ball with my customers and they with me. When I had a customer who just did not get my sense of humor and seemed taken aback by it all, I would just flash them a big shit-eating grin and they would decide that I was OK, not a problem, maybe just a little goofy.

My colleagues started to tell me that I was an inspiration to them, that I was showing them that they could be more real and have more fun in this work. One woman said, “I told my husband last night that you are teaching us to give better customer service.” She actually told me that a few minutes after I had been fired.

Ellen had grown progressively more nervous about my “spontaneous” style, about the risky humor I used with customers (and got away with – there was never a complaint from my customers). One day she told me, “Today I want you to only work the cash register – don’t talk with people.” “Don’t talk at all?” “No.” “Not even while we are waiting for their credit card to run?” “No.” I followed her instructions that day, when she was around.

The day before Ellen fired me, I had, in fact, taken a real risk in the way I sassed one of my customers. I would not have recommended this kind of interaction to another colleague with, honestly, less charm than I. But I knew that this customer liked me and would totally get the humor – which he did. But Ellen did not.

I was a temporary holiday associate and was only scheduled to work until right after New Year’s. But the next day, Christmas Eve morning, Ellen met me at the door at 9 a.m. and told me I was fired. Although some part of me was not surprised, other parts of me were shocked, especially by the timing and the abruptness. I chose to avoid any conflict there, on Christmas eve, and stumbled back out into the street a couple of minutes later.

(I did, a week later, ask Ellen for an “exit interview”, at which I gave her feedback about the dynamics I have described above. I felt a responsibility to at least try to help pry her loose from her need to over-control – and to kind of suffocate her workers. I don’t know that she was really able to hear any of this, but it felt good to at least try.)

A couple of my ten jobs I quit in just a couple of days, because I got a “better” job or because they were somehow intolerable. My very first job in Asheville was as a restaurant server at a Cracker Barrel store. The really very nice training manager told me that this chain honestly does have what he called a “Nazi style” of restaurant management. All of your interactions with customers are very tightly scripted and there is definitely the “Cracker Barrel way” to do everything. There is such a problem of staff shoplifting from the retail store that no staff member is allowed to bring in a backpack or even a purse – you are issued a transparent little plastic bag for carrying in any items that you want to put in your locker. I never went back after my first day of training.

One of the seven temporary agencies with which I have registered placed me in a “permanent part-time” job “helping out in the golf pro shop” at a big local resort. “Part-time” meant 7-10 a.m. Monday through Friday and “helping out” turned out to mean janitor work – sweeping, vacuuming, scrubbing and mopping in the men’s and women’s locker rooms. My boss (the golf pro) was pretty nice, but my shoulder injury acted up again – and I basically couldn’t handle the humiliation of it all. I quit after three days and I had the impression that neither my boss nor the temp. agency were surprised.

At the same time as this job, I walked into a local Sears store and immediately got hired as a sales associate in the electronics department. I mostly like all these kinds of gadgets and thought I would have fun learning about them and helping people find what is right for them. It took me about three days to learn that there is really no way to stay current with all the new items coming out on your shelves, that you need to bluff like you know a whole lot more than you do, and that the bottom line – duh! – is to sell. Not “serve customers”, but “sell”. And the experienced salespeople, my mentors, mostly started feeling a little slimy to me. Oh, and yeah, I hate shopping malls.

One thing these jobs all had in common was that they paid very little – none more than $8 an hour. Barely enough to make living expenses, even living as simply as I currently am. Definitely no money for discretionary purposes.

I haven’t always done this kind of work. I have a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from a wonderful university. After about twenty years of work as a psychologist, I shifted into organizational development consulting with large companies and government agencies. I never acknowledged being “burned out” by my work as a psychologist – and I still don’t really know if I was or not. My story was that I wanted to try to help systems and organizations change, not just individuals. And I got pretty good at this consulting work, also – in some ways I had a fairly illustrious fifteen-year career, before the combination of the Enron scandal and a national economic downturn made it very difficult to get consulting work. And this time there was no question that I was also burned out.

When I moved to Asheville 15 months ago, I was kind of desperately in need of a fresh start – I wanted to “re-invent myself”. I grew up working class. I decided to take my finely honed customer service skills into “front-line customer service jobs” – to “become the working-class hero I was always meant to be”.

I have received so many blessings from doing this work, even though my other jobs here have included:

• Working in a telephone call center – sitting in a cubicle all day, taking one call after another (the target is to complete them in three minutes or less) from angry customers calling to cancel their service. Very grim and stressful.

• Driving shuttle vans for the county “Mobility” service – taking handicapped, elderly and poor people to doctor appointments, etc. I loved serving our clients, but the pace was, again, tremendously pressured – often the computer spit out a schedule that required you to get to the other side of town in about two minutes. I was constantly negotiating with the dispatcher about who else could cover a pick-up that I was not going to make on time.

• Temping as a receptionist in a little accounting office. The work here was easy – they weren’t going to train a temp on how to use their company systems – but the commute was hellacious. It took about 90 minutes each way and you were always at risk of missing your connecting bus.

• My hotel gift shop job. The best thing about this job has been getting to know the behind-the-scenes life of working in a hotel. There is a genuine camaraderie among all the employees, in all the different departments – front desk, back office, bellhops, restaurant and room service, housekeeping, maintenance, etc. And I love kibitzing with my customers.

The primary blessing from all this work has been the opportunity to really identify with my working-class brothers and sisters. I will never look at any of these kinds of jobs – restaurant sever, retail, cashier, gas station, hotel, admin/receptionist, janitor, driver, call center – in the ways I did before.

I have for my whole life carried a deep identification with my blue-collar roots. I was in the first generation of my family to go to college. When I got my Ph.D., being called “Doctor” always felt weird. When a friend brought me to his upscale health club, I felt that, walking through the men’s locker room with only a towel, I had the words “blue-collar – doesn’t belong here” tattooed on my forehead.

When I got my first corporate job, I realized that one reason I was compelled to try this work was that I had been conditioned in my family to believe that the business world was someplace we didn’t belong. I expected people in this company to be on to me immediately and to somehow force me back out. It took me a while to get it that these were mostly just people like me. (And, fortunately for me, that first company was AT&T, which at least then had lots of managers who had started out very working class and had risen through the ranks.)

But my experiences of the last year and a half have really nailed down for me again my identity as a working-class guy. I feel so much kinship with all the other people around me doing blue-collar and/or subsistence wage work. Not that I ever much did this before, but I will never again hassle a cashier, a call center CSR (customer service rep.), a restaurant server, etc. My work in the gas station kiosk feels just one step up from taking tolls in one of those little booths on the toll road – I now feel identified with those folks, too.

Another key similarity in all of these jobs, besides the amazingly low wages, is that you work way too hard for the pitiful pay. In the back of my head, I frequently hear the Donna Summer disco song “She Works Hard for the Money”. When I sit on the bus on the way to work, most of my fellow riders are going to minimum wage (or slightly above), dead-end jobs like the one I am going to.

(In Chicago, people from all economic strata ride busses and el’s. Not here in Asheville – if you have any kind of money, you drive your car to work. The busses have limited routes, mostly run only every hour and not after 6:30 p.m. And, if you have any money, you just don’t take busses. Busses are for poor people.)

Even my hotel gift shop job, which truly is mostly pleasant and not very hard, is ripping you off by paying $6.50 an hour. My boss there, again mostly a nice guy, likes to say, “This job is very easy – it’s a $6.50 an hour job.” Well, maybe for a high school student – maybe. But he doesn’t want a high school student in this job – he wants an adult, and one who is comfortable conversing, sometimes at length, with all the varied guests who stay in the hotel. I often think, “If you need an adult in this job, pay a rate that is not so disrespectful to an adult.”

One evening, my friend Bob reached me at my gas station job. It was after nine p.m. and – having started at three p.m. – the steady stream of people at my kiosk window, paying for their gas and cigarettes, was finally starting to slow down. Not dead, by any means, but slower – I finally got some chances to breathe. I attached my earbud headset to my cell phone and Bob and I had a great, long conversation. Bob did not mind all the little brief interruptions to our call as I dealt with customers. He had grown up in a professional family and had never done anything but professional work – accounting and then management consulting. This was a window unlike he had ever had into the work of a cashier. He said it was “like a documentary”.

For many of my friends, staying in touch with me over the last many months has similarly been the closest they have come to real blue-collar work. My psychologist friend MaryEllen told me recently that talking to me has completely changed her perception of gas station cashiers. Even if, in Chicago, most of them speak limited English, she has an entirely new understanding of and compassion for what their days are like.

I think, sometimes, that if more of the decision makers in our society and government had spent a year like my last one, many of the conversations about various issues in our society might have a different tone – at least about things like the minimum wage and all the “illegal” immigrants working in our restaurants, factories, etc.

But so many of us do not have this perspective. Even growing up blue-collar and carrying a strong identity with this class, my working life has, until recently, been sheltered from any direct experience with this kind of “menial” work.

So what insights have I gleaned from all this recent work experience? Most clearly, just what I have named above: the pay sucks (it typically is not really enough to scrape out any kind of a life), the work is often very hard, if not humiliating – and most of the customers you deal with just don’t understand. I am continually amazed at how many people, apparently irritated and frustrated from the stresses of their day, seem to feel that the gas station attendant is expendable. They can vent their frustration at new policies like paying in advance for your gas, as if this person in front of you truly were a robot, not needing or deserving of any human respect.

If I ever did have any shred of this kind of attitude, I sure don’t now. But what can I do with these new insights, aside from treating my fellow humans who do this work with respect and even a little kindness? I’m not sure. I guess I can tell these new realizations to anyone who is open to hear. And write these words – maybe they will make some kind of difference.

This encounter was only a little bit playful: I gave this woman some serious, only slightly playful shit for maintaining that God is a “he”.

It started innocent enough – genuinely playful, only slightly disrespectful.  It was early on a Saturday and I asked this 40ish woman my stock question: “What are you looking forward to this weekend?”

“I’m looking forward to praising God!”

Now I was not yet trying to make fun of her – I was totally tongue-in-cheek, but I was really just getting with the excitement and exuberance of her energy: “Wow, that’s great!  Do you think you could stick around here this afternoon and we could do some of that here?  That sounds like fun!”

I think she knew better than to join in with that bullshit, and I don’t remember the next thing or two she said.  The next thing that came into focus for me was that she called God a “he”.  A little later, I said to my friend Jeffrey, when he asked me why I felt a need to get into all this with her, that I was just manic and it was just too juicy – I couldn’t resist a good tongue-in-cheek faux fight.  I was channeling my dear departed mother.

“So God is ‘he’ for you.”

“Yes, of course.”

“You sound pretty sure of that.”

“Totally sure.”

“Why?”

“I just am.”

“Who told you that?”

“It’s in the Book.”

“What book?”

“The Book – the Bible.”

(Probably my most provocative, most blasphemous statement…) “Oh, that book is so old!!”

Them is definitely fighting words, but I think she maybe just couldn’t believe what she had just heard – was kind of in shock – because there was a long pause.  In that pause, I had a chance to organize what I believe.  “No!  No he, no she, nothing like that.  God is something altogether different.”

Up until now, this woman had mostly acted off-balance, confused by me.  This was the first time she got really angry.  She leaned in close to me and with a lot of intensity said “God is everything!”

I think this maybe had an opposite reaction on me than she expected.  I leaned back, got thoughtful, and kind of gently said, “Wow, that’s cool – I like that.  I can genuinely get behind that”.

With that, she seemed to feel satisfied – it kind of made her whole, after feeling so misunderstood.  I also felt satisfied – after all this conflict, it was really kind of a relief to reach a point where we could genuinely be in synch with each other.

Also at this point, her large order of groceries – which had made it possible for us to have this extended interaction – were all bagged up.  I think we both knew better than to say one more word, that might open this can of worms back up.  She paid me her money and – as far as I could tell, contented – went on her way.

I can think of no other reason than this good ending why she didn’t go to a manager and complain about me – certainly women (usually middle-aged or older women) have done so for much less – except my one second hypothesis, which my friend Jeffrey thought was the real reason: she was just way too confused by the whole encounter to know what she wanted to say.

Anyway, I just at that point – almost as soon as she left – decided “If I’m not getting written up for this, I’m not getting written up for anything today.  I’m having a charmed day and I can do or say anything I want.”  And I pretty much did – and I didn’t.

I am using Twitter to announce my Earth Fare schedule on a daily basis – and last week I twice did add a shift with just one day notice.  ( I also do announce my schedule weekly on Facebook, some time on Sunday – when I remember to do so.)

So if you want:

1.  your Majo hug, even if it pisses off the people waiting in line.  I love to reassure the young woman waiting in line for her groceries turn next, “You don’t have to do this.”
2. a new validation, which it is my mission to deliver each time someone comes through my line. (I don’t literally manage this every time, but it is my goal.) Today a young woman at Jason’s Deli said, ” I remember you – you’re the Earth Fare cashier who told me ‘You have a perfect nose’.  You don’t forget something like that.”  I neglected to ask her if her life has been in some way better for that.
3. some little word of wisdom, like “the more foolish you can be every day, the better.”  I sense there are some coming that are even deeper than that :).

Come to my twitter feed: @johnmajo

If you do not yet have Twitter, getting it may open up whole new worlds for you.  Wouldn’t it be great (for some of you :)) to know, day to day, what Elizabeth Warren is saying – or Kamala Harris or Corey Booker? Even more fun than some other politicians who are even more closely identified with their Twitter feeds.  Marianne Williamson or #45?  Majo John Madden or I don’t know – Soupy Sales.