Why is it always the little things?
Today was another day at work that just left me feeling beaten up and sad.
For starters, when I got there, I pretty much immediately discovered that Debbie had taken down all of the stuff that I'd put up on the pillar at Register 4. Probably only people who know me really well will even know what I'm talking about, but over the course of the past year and a half, I'd pretty thoroughly decorated the area around Register 4, the register that I usually work at. I had little "vegan" things cut out from those ABC cookies, lots of random stickers (I found half of my firefly sticker lying under the scale later on today), and even a picture of Debbie and Nick, dressed up for Halloween two years ago. At least the happy monks got saved -- Allisyn rescued them and hung them up in the Cash Office.
But it really hurt, and it made me cry pretty much instantly. And Debbie felt awful about it (which, in turn, made me feel awful too). And she actually totally understood what was going on inside my head -- she remembered how hurt I'd felt two months ago when my parents got a new refrigerator and didn't move the pictures of me that had been hanging up on the old fridge onto the new one. And she came over and said "it's not like the refrigerator -- you're not going to be forgotten," and she hugged me, and she apologized, but it still made me feel really sad all day long.
It's funny -- I hadn't realized how much I'd looked to those little things for comfort until I was forced to look around me and see them all gone. I was doing magazines today and found a picture of Kermit the Frog in some car ad, so I cut it out and laminated it. Now it's the sole decoration at Register 4. It didn't take away what I was feeling, but at least I had his smiling face to look at for the rest of my day.
Anyway, not long after that, I had yet another close encounter with a balloon. Only this one was much worse than the other two -- this time, a little boy wasn't holding a balloon on a string but was rather just holding a balloon in his hands. Apparently, he wanted to play catch, because he fucking threw the balloon at me. I screamed, and I jumped back -- luckily avoiding actually touching it -- but it landed right where I would stand if I were at the register, and the boy's mother had to come around and retrieve it before I could go back to ringing up her groceries.
And I talked to Shannon after all of this and I asked: just when was it that I became the craziest fucking person at The Co-op? Because I gotta tell ya, the competition is pretty stiff, and I don't enjoy the fact that I seem to be pulling into the lead.
For starters, when I got there, I pretty much immediately discovered that Debbie had taken down all of the stuff that I'd put up on the pillar at Register 4. Probably only people who know me really well will even know what I'm talking about, but over the course of the past year and a half, I'd pretty thoroughly decorated the area around Register 4, the register that I usually work at. I had little "vegan" things cut out from those ABC cookies, lots of random stickers (I found half of my firefly sticker lying under the scale later on today), and even a picture of Debbie and Nick, dressed up for Halloween two years ago. At least the happy monks got saved -- Allisyn rescued them and hung them up in the Cash Office.
But it really hurt, and it made me cry pretty much instantly. And Debbie felt awful about it (which, in turn, made me feel awful too). And she actually totally understood what was going on inside my head -- she remembered how hurt I'd felt two months ago when my parents got a new refrigerator and didn't move the pictures of me that had been hanging up on the old fridge onto the new one. And she came over and said "it's not like the refrigerator -- you're not going to be forgotten," and she hugged me, and she apologized, but it still made me feel really sad all day long.
It's funny -- I hadn't realized how much I'd looked to those little things for comfort until I was forced to look around me and see them all gone. I was doing magazines today and found a picture of Kermit the Frog in some car ad, so I cut it out and laminated it. Now it's the sole decoration at Register 4. It didn't take away what I was feeling, but at least I had his smiling face to look at for the rest of my day.
Anyway, not long after that, I had yet another close encounter with a balloon. Only this one was much worse than the other two -- this time, a little boy wasn't holding a balloon on a string but was rather just holding a balloon in his hands. Apparently, he wanted to play catch, because he fucking threw the balloon at me. I screamed, and I jumped back -- luckily avoiding actually touching it -- but it landed right where I would stand if I were at the register, and the boy's mother had to come around and retrieve it before I could go back to ringing up her groceries.
And I talked to Shannon after all of this and I asked: just when was it that I became the craziest fucking person at The Co-op? Because I gotta tell ya, the competition is pretty stiff, and I don't enjoy the fact that I seem to be pulling into the lead.