Last night, I found myself feeling royally pissed off by the most inconsequential remark. Someone asked me to "tone down" my "bubbly personality".
First of all, I never, ever think of myself as "bubbly". To me, that's a term that ranks right down there with "perky". I don't do "bubbly", thank you very much. So telling me to "tone down" something that I don't even do in the first place is nothing short of ridiculous.
The circumstances were thus: for the past 2.5 years I have had a part-time job working in a family-owned drugstore/gift shop in the town where I used to live up until November of last year. I initially took the job - cashier in the pharmacy area of the store - because my freelance income had hit an all-time low and I needed some sort of steady income stream that would cover groceries and the electric bill but wouldn't get in the way of my "real" work. The store was within walking distance of my former home; it was a nice store and I shopped there regularly; and it so happened they were hiring and paying the right wage at the exact time I needed a job. It was a match made in heaven.
After a few months, they decided to train me, if I was willing, to do some pharmacy technician work. Pharm techs are the people who aren't licensed pharmacists but they assist the pharmacists by counting out pills into bottles and slapping the labels on them, so the pharmacist is free to do the more difficult work of deciphering the doctor's chicken scratch on the RX slips, looking for drug interactions and dealing with the customers who have issues with their meds. It was more interesting than simply ringing up sales on the register so I agreed. I also didn't get paid any extra money, but since I was only very part-time (less than 16 hrs a week by choice) I didn't quibble.
So, over time that's what I've been doing there, a combination of pharm tech work and cashier stuff. As part-time jobs go, not bad at all and the people are very nice there. Having said that, for a number of months I have been more and more aware that I need to move on. My writing business is taking off, and now that I no longer live in that town and have to drive 30 minutes each way (with the gas prices being what they are) and I have cut my hours back to 12 per week, it no longer seems worth the bit of money I end up with after taxes. It just seems like, if I still feel I need some sort of regular part-time income to balance the unpredictability of my self-employment lifestyle, I could probably find something that fits in better with where I am now.
But, like a lot of people who are in jobs just to pay the bills, I found myself not quite ready to make that move. For one thing, they are short-handed in the pharmacy right now (turns out there is actually a shortage of licensed pharmacists right now, industry-wide), and I cover two of the shifts where no one else is usually available to help the already-overworked pharmacists out. And the holidays (and cold and flu season) are coming, which means they will need experienced help. And I wouldn't mind the extra cash with Christmas shopping to do over the next few months. So I've been rationalizing a choice to stay at least through the holidays, then to "see what happens", mainly because it's just easier and more comfortable to do that than to figure out some alternative.
In truth, one of the things that has been turning me off about working there is a growing sense that it is just a very petty environment to be in. Being a family business, where all the family members work there and many of the other full-time employees have also been there forever and are like extended family -- well, like in any family you get to hear a lot of griping, sniping and back-biting, not to mention gossip about coworkers.
And the gossip extends to the customers, particularly those that frequent the pharmacy: in a small town business, you get to know the neighbors almost TOO well; who's had her face lifted for the umpteenth time; who's overdoing the Percocet; who's divorcing; a guy I'll call "crazy fax guy" because he comes in weekly to fax out documents and sometimes sports a British accent even though he is not British at all; the sad case of a sweet woman with growing Alzheimer's who was observed by one of the store staff trying to unlocked her car door only to discover it wasn't even her car (her car is white and this car was red and a totally different make and model car); and even a recent discovery that one of our patrons, a particularly aggressive and scary kind of guy, has been living under an assumed identity since 1974 (until he was recently picked up by the cops for possession of stolen gun, among other things). He's out on bail and still comes into the store to pick up his son's medication. In a small town, you've got all types.
The gossip makes the work marginally more interesting, but one thing I have come to learn about myself is that I weary quickly of repetitive work. Some people thrive on it, but doing the same thing over and over again, every week, holds no attraction for me. And of course I've always known this was a "temp" thing I was doing for a little extra cash flow, so my heart hasn't been into the work. Gossip, however, is something I have taken great pains to eliminate from other areas of my life, because it's just so darned negative. People never gossip about the GOOD things that are happening to someone else, it's always the bad stuff. Gossip is like a toxin, poisoning everything around it. So, despite my best efforts to disassociate myself from the gossip and occasional in-fighting among the other employees or the owners, that negativity has started to pervade my attitude in a way I really don't like at all.
Working in this small, narrow little world in this small, narrow little affluent town seems to make people equally small and narrow in their thinking and outlook. For instance, there's a woman working there who has no life outside of working in that store. She's unmarried with no kids (big deal, so am I) and does nothing outside of her job there and caring for her ill recluse of a mother, so as a consequence she is very emotionally attached to her job, and very territorial about it, to the point that she can be very unpleasant to work around when she's in a mood. I've worked with people like that in the past, people with too much time on their hands and not enough to fulfill them in life, so they make a huge deal out of the most minor things in their lives and everything is a damn melodrama.
The more I work in that store, the more that sort of behavior and attitude seems to rub me the wrong way, leaving a sour taste in my mouth and a growing reluctance to go in to work at all. The small-minded, gossipy nature of some of the people has become one of the negatives of the job, but wasn't providing me with enough incentive to quit. But you know how when you are facing a decision, you sometimes ask the universe to send you "a sign"? Well, last night I got my sign.
The thing that was said to me by the boss that has pissed me off and has helped me FINALLY make the decision to quit, was nothing more than the store owner taking me aside at the end of the evening and asking me to "tone down" my "bubbly personality". To his credit, he actually said it in a very nice way, because he is a rather nice guy with a gentle way of expressing himself even if he's correcting something you've done wrong. For a second I was taken aback because I didn't know what the hell he was referring to. When I asked him for details, he couldn't seem to provide specifics other than mentioning that I had been having a social conversation with one of the other pharm techs and that it had, in his words, "been a distraction" for the other tech. Then I knew what it was REALLY about. As it happened, earlier that afternoon the owner's wife - easily the most petty, busy-bodyish woman on the planet - had pointed out to me that there was 1 person waiting "in line" at the register (since when is ONE person a "line"?) while I was having what was actually a very brief conversation with this other pharm tech. Ten seconds before that, there had been no customers waiting at all. The owner's wife - who is not responsible for the pharmacy area at all - saw something and apparently made a decision that I was "goofing off" or "distracting" the other worker, told her husband about it, and that's why I was suddenly being reprimanded for nothing whatsoever.
Now, let me just state for the record that I have no problem if someone points out that I have made a mistake while doing my job. We are all human and I am far from perfect, and people make mistakes. But this was not about a mistake and this incident was not the first of its kind, because in this workplace they seem to have a habit of trying to enforce rules of behavior for some people but not for others. In truth, the people working in the pharmacy take time out for personal chit-chat all the time. No one seems to have a problem with them doing that, from what I've observed. Once, at the beginning of the summer, the boss told me I wasn't supposed to wear open-toed "flip-flops" to work, and I refrained from doing so for a few days until I observed at least 5 other women wearing them anyway. And in the past there have been one or two other incidents where I was asked to conform to a rule or standard but others around me were not - stuff that to me was really petty and silly, but which at the time I tried to take in stride because after all it IS their store and they have a right to run it any way they like, whether I agree or not.
I took the owner's alleged "constructive criticism" professionally and left the owner's office with steam coming out of my ears, feeling the sting of "injustice" and thoroughly pissed off at the whole thing. But as my shift ended and I began my drive home, I realized that this guy had just done me a huge favor - he gave me exactly the final push I needed to make the decision to quit. Despite the fact that I don't have another part-time job lined up yet. Despite the fact that I will feel badly about leaving them with one less helper in the pharmacy when I know they are already short on staff. And despite the fact that for the most part, I really do like these people and they've treated me well.
Because it's not about who is right or wrong, or about whether or not the owner's remarks to me were justified or simply him just cow-towing to his neurotic, micromanaging wife. It's not about me being too "bubbly" (which I can only interpret to mean "too talkative") and whether it was "fair" for the boss to call me out for something but not the others doing the same exact thing. It's not about any of that at all.
It's about the fact that I have allowed myself to stay at the party too long, and I've known this for a while now but wasn't willing to do anything about it, and now I know it's really time to leave. The "party" I'm referring to is called "The Comfortable Party" - that space we all get in from time to time where things are comfortable and familiar, so we stick around long after we want to or need to even when it's not a GOOD place to be. And if I allow myself to get caught up in the comfort zone as well as in worrying about little things like whether or not I am being treated fairly at a job I don't even like, then I am at risk of completely missing the point -- and the opportunity for something better.
As I was driving home, I realized that I have been doing this a in a variety of other ways lately. That I am still talking about moving to France but not really doing a whole lot about it. That I sometimes get overwhelmed by the changes I have made in my life and when I get overwhelmed I retreat into myself, eat too much chocolate and feel guilty about it, and waste time doing a variety of useless things instead of doing what is really healthy and in my own best interest.
I realized that if I left this job, and left now even without another part-time safety net, it would really be a way to catalyze myself into a new direction. And by the time I reached home, I had made a commitment to myself:
Never again will I do any sort of work, for any amount of money, if it does not in some way directly relate to or support my long-range vision plan of writing and traveling and living abroad.
Period.
[Author's Note: Just now, while I was writing that last one-word sentence and putting the "." after the word "period", the phone rang and it was a potential new client calling to talk about doing some writing work. Which reinforces the commitment that I just this moment put in writing for the first time - the intention to stick only to work that fits my vision for my life, and that's WRITING-related work. The universe sometimes acts VERY quickly when we set our intentions firmly and clearly, so be careful what you ask for!]
Back to the topic... what I am now going to look into is becoming certified to teach English to non-English speakers. It's something that was recently suggested to me by the woman who runs the language school where I take French lessons, and the idea was reinforced when I read in Living and Working in France 2005 (by David Hampshire) that TEFL/TESOL-certified English teachers are in demand in France, at least on a part-time basis. And I thought, that might be the perfect fit: learning to each English here at home and using it as a part-time income source while I'm here; then perhaps parlaying that into a job opportunity while in France (not to mention its portability as a profession, one that, like writing, I could do anywhere I'm at in the world.)
So, I'm already researching how to become certified to teach English, including a program that teachs you how to teach business English, because with my business background I'd be perfect at that. Whether or not I end up doing that remains to be seen. The bottom line is, it feels great to have made this decision, not only because I just know it's finally time to leave the party, but because I know the party I'm going to next will be even better, whatever and wherever it is.
"Miss Ruth was a lady. And a lady always knows when to leave."
-- from Fried Green Tomatoes by Fannie Flagg
When you're done, you're done - no sense prolonging things. I will turn in my notice at the store tomorrow. And let the chips fall where they may.
