Overthunk

"How many do you have?" the my-age, appropriately "thick" Avenue salesclerk inquired as I strode toward the precious dressing room, bundle of possible vestments held close to my bosom. Sure, it was late and the store was quiet and they were doing their closing activities, but they didn't actually close for an hour. "Six," I replied. "The limit is four," she said. ("Hmph. Industry standard is six. Y'all can't count higher than that?" I thought to myself.) I tried to just put 2 on the back of the door so I could swap them and not go looking for her again. She seized them away and put them on an unrelated rack an inconvenient distance away. I finished the trying ons, the selectings and rejectings, and had to go hunt her down again to find where the other two garments were. She was none too eager or swift to assist me. In the passing between however, a bait and switch occurred. She gave me the two shirts I still needed to try on...

During my tenure of nearly a decade spent in the Crimson Limbo above Walmart and K-Mart and below, say, Macy's, I worked most of my time at the customer service desk. Working every single holiday of my life was de rigeur during that time, as was donning the horrid color combo of red shirt and khaki pants -- there's nothing like a pair of khaki pants to make me run (slowly) screaming, even now -- only black pants can camouflage flab effectively, which is why it is now de mon rigeur to wear black pants 99.4% of the time. To this day, you will never catch me, even if all my other clothes have been burned up in a fire, wearing red and khaki together. Ugh. At Tar-zhay in the 90's, there was a "no-hassle" return policy -- we accepted virtually any item we had ever sold at any time in the past as a return, as long as we could string a few numbers together to make that identifying number and some semblance of a selling price. I have personally refunded money on leaking ...

Back in 1988, "Ask me. I like to help." was printed on a white plastic card in large Arial script on a ground of thin red-lined grid. This card was fused in some fashion to the large, uncomfortably identifying name tag which is the universal badge of shame of the retail store employee. I would have preferred, as at the telemarketing job that I held for one day when I tried in desperation to quit the red-walled retailer, to have been able to use an alias emblazoned above the lofty plastic claim of undaunted helpfulness, but it was not to be. From the first time I pinned on that promise of unqualified assistance with ANYthing the customer might need, it galled me daily. I started my training far earlier than that first week of employment. As a kid, we took weekly trips to Target, complete with the obligatory two-foot tall bag of popcorn. Once, when I wouldn't obey my mom, I got my ass flat-out busted in front of the shopping carts, to the amusement of the whole store, it se...