To those who shop for the holidays…

Here’s an open letter I found to everyone that goes to an actual physical store to do their shopping for the holiday season. Amen.

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You don’t know me, and you probably don’t care. I’m the person that is standing in the store, trying to help you with your purchases for your friends and family. I’m the one that smiles at you when you walk in, points out the item that you were looking for, and checks you out. I am usually standing on my feet for eight or more hours each day, picking up the messes that get left behind when you rummage through that rack of clothes or pile of towels and then decide they aren’t worth your time. You ask me to double check the prices on twenty different items, which I happily do, only to have you tell me that even with the coupons and sales prices, we’re charging too much for our goods. I smile politely instead of cringing when you return twenty pairs of shoes that you bought three hours previously in our Black Friday sale, because you didn’t check the sizes and are now wanting all of them in different sizes and why don’t we have more of them?

I’ve been here all day, trying to smile, to be helpful, and do the best job that I can, while you belittle me, destroy our store, and treat myself and the other customers with contempt and rudeness. While you got to spend your Thanksgiving with your friends and family, i got to spend twelve hours with mine, only to go to bed in the middle of the afternoon so that I can be there to open the store at midnight for our sale so you could save $5 on a portable DVD player. Lucky me, I get to do it on Christmas as well.

Honestly, I do like helping people. I try my hardest, and I realize the holidays are rough for everyone. The stress, the pressure, the money; I totally understand why you might be a little tense right now. But I am here to help you with your purchases, not to be your verbal punching bag or therapist. Honestly, right now, I would settle for a bit of civility and polite behavior from everyone. If I acted a little grumpy for a moment, I’m sorry, but that was after your children went through the store and knocked over two mannequins and three tables of sweaters only to have you tell me you wanted an extra discount off an item because your children broke it. I work hard, and being treated as someone’s servant is not actually in my job description. I checked.

So please, the next time that you walk into a store to buy gifts for this holiday season, please remember something: the person checking you out or helping you with your purchase is a person just like yourself: tired, frazzled, and trying to do the best job they can in a trying time of the year. A little kindness and patience will go a long way and trust me, you’ll have us happily bending over backwards to help you, because you were The Nice Person. Sadly, that makes you a rarity in shopping these days.

To everyone working retail, hang in there. Just a few more weeks, and we can all breathe a little easier. Here’s hoping that you all have more Nice People in your lines than mean ones, all your returns have receipts, and that your managers spring for hot cocoa or coffee as needed to keep us all going that extra hour or so.

Is 2011 over yet?

Yeah, another fall off the planet moment. I blame work. No, really, I do. It’s still insane, as is most retail this time of year, and has been insane since the end of October. A few weeks ago, I managed to end up at the local urgent care from doing something messed up to my knee. a week of crutches later, plus pain killers, anti-inflammatories, and a trip to the orthopedic doc later, and I had a diagnosis of Pes Anserinus Bursitis – aka “your inner knee hurts a damned lot, so quit doing all that stuff for a while.” Well, there’s more to it, but that’s about what it ended up as. One week with the crutches, one week of being banned from stairs and ladders, and two weeks of physical therapy (I start my second week of therapy tomorrow). The therapy is helping, but I have a feeling that it’s not going to completely go away until I stop what I’m doing at work, which means getting a different job. Yeahhhh, fun times. :/

With everything that’s going on (Jared still looking for a new job, Mom having her own issues), it’s going to be a slim Christmas for us here. We’ve set a monetary limit on gifts for each of us this year for the first time in a really long time. If you’d asked me at the beginning of the year, with full knowledge of everything that would be coming out in the next 12 months, here’s what my list would have looked like:

1. Apple iPad 2, black, 16g, wi-fi only
2. Apple iPhone 4S, 16g for AT&T
3. Knit1 Oxford Gift Certificate (the local yarn shop in town that is awesome)
4. New cat tree for the kitties
5. Clothes, clothes, clothes!
6. Diablo 3 Collector’s Edition

I finally got around to making my list today, and for about 20 minutes only had one thing on the list: the gift certificate to Knit1 Oxford. It took me another 30 minutes to add on 4 books and a DVD set, and I still feel meh about adding them. Like I told my Mom when she was sighing at me, I -want- a lot of things, but they’re so improbable at this point, there’s no point in adding them to the list. What do I -want-? Everything on the first list, plus ethernet cables run through the old section of the house to get better wi-fi reception (old house walls made with chicken wire to hold the plaster = leaky Faraday cages). I also want a phone call from some place that I talked to back in October to say “let’s go on Round 2, you know, nm, let’s just have you start tomorrow, k?” I want no more stress from friends and family over money, cos they all have jobs that they love (or at least like) that they’re being appropriately recompensed for. I want time. Dammit, I want to be happy for more than 15 minutes out of a week, cos I’m tired of everyone around me having a crap existence right now.

Like I’ve said, it’s not the frostbite that gets you, it’s the frost-nibble, and dammit, I’ve been just about nibbled to death. :/

Bweh. Okay, off that. Something happy… Oh! So a good thing recently? I got to beta SWTOR, fell in love with the Sith Inquisitor like I thought I would, and before everything went to hell in a hand basket, paid for Jared and I’d Collector’s Editions in full. They asked me at the store “Why now?” My response: “We have the money now, and I’m terrified that if we waited til release day, it wouldn’t be there.” In hindsight, I was right and I rule. So come December 20th, Jared and I will have our CE keys and have been playing early access for 5 days and having a blast. Yey us. ^^; Hey, at least it’s something.