[Dean's World] G. Willow Wilson: Life As A Clerk

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Posted by G. Willow Wilson:
Life As A Clerk
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1181404418.shtml


   Reading Ron's [1]latest post and Dean's comment in response to it made
   me think about the summer I spent as a convenience store clerk. I was
   seventeen and had just finished my sophomore year at Boston
   University, an exorbitantly expensive, professionally-oriented private
   school in which students lived and died by their internships. During
   the previous summer I had supported myself by headhunting--in
   French--for an international web design firm; the next summer would
   see me interning at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. I was,
   in other words, precocious to the point of obnoxiousness, as every
   young second-tier college student aspires to be.

   That summer, however, I was recovering from a long and exhausting
   illness. It had left me humbler and more introspective; less eager to
   impress, more focused on my relationships than on my ambitions. I
   didn't want a summer job that would require me to wear heels every day
   just to collate paper in a cubicle. I wanted something that would keep
   me busy and earn me some pocket money, something that didn't feel like
   a race toward a goal that was never clearly defined. So I took the
   opening shift--6AM to 2PM--at a local convenience store. It was the
   last of a dying breed of mom-and-pop operations, selling coffee,
   cigarettes and dry goods to people who worked at the upscale shops and
   restaurants and city hall nearby.

   Within a week, I realized how little I really knew about my town. Up
   until that point I had always been on the receiving end of
   service--the waited-upon, not the waiter. At the store, I served the
   people who served me. I got to know the construction workers (the only
   people who had to get up earlier than me to go to work), the
   line-cooks and busboys and retail clerks. They found it hugely funny
   to see someone like me behind the counter: I spoke Colorado slang with
   an upper-crust East Coast accent; I was always reading, sometimes in
   multiple languages, during lulls in business. No matter how hot it
   got, I refused to wear shorts. The customers at the store were acutely
   aware of the class differences I was lucky enough to be able to ignore
   or think irrelevant.

   But they never held those differences against me. On their coffee
   breaks, the construction workers told me stories about Vietnam (and
   the boot-camp birth of the term 'home slice') and prison and how to
   tornado-proof shingling on a roof. I learned to speak a kind of
   sign-language with the illegal workers who knew no English of any
   kind--and who always paid cash. The busboys and hostesses, who used
   their wages to put themselves through school, would hang out over
   Cokes and complain about diners who wanted bizarre menu substitutions
   and sent food back to the kitchen without explanation. I was briefly
   pursued by a young Japanese sushi chef who had come to Colorado in a
   year-abroad program, and who also spoke no English, but through a
   series of amazingly artistic sushi lunches he delivered right to the
   store, spoke the language of attraction perfectly well. I met a
   homeless girl who thought she could stop cars just by thinking about
   it. I've done a lot of things, but that was probably the most
   interesting summer of my life.

   ([2]show)

   It seems cheap and condescending to say I learned something important.
   There are so many stories about privileged intellectuals vacationing
   in some more relevant strata of society, and coming out feeling very
   smug and worldly and tough, that it's become cliche. I won't say it
   changed me; I won't say I changed anybody else. But I will say this:
   it is an honor to be relied upon for real things. I think I got more
   out of having a fresh pot of coffee ready for the construction guys at
   7AM than I did out of meeting Kennedys or Grand Muftis. To be of
   immediate use, to help someone in an immediate way, makes all our
   wordy abstract ideals seem prudish and silly. It's a little alarming
   that in our postmodern world one has to learn to be human and to be
   made happy by human things--by service, in other words, by real
   physical service that requires you to get up early and lift heavy
   things to make someone else's load a little lighter. But once you do,
   you never wonder which things are the important things again.

   This in itself doesn't have a ton of relevance to Ron's post; I'm sure
   Ron himself believes something similar to what I've just said. But
   reading his post and thinking about the ecosystem of a convenience
   store, I felt compelled to point out that counterproductive and
   self-destructive habits like buying lottery tickets and smoking are
   rarely the product of simple stupidity. Education, which even in a
   relatively (relatively) egalitarian society like the US is tied to
   resource accesibility, which is tied to class, is less about giving a
   person information than it is about training him to use it. Without
   that training, simple information does very little good. The disease
   is poverty; what Ron describes are merely its symptoms.

   You can all throw bananas at the leftist now. I'm wearing my special
   rubber suit just for the occasion.

   ([3]hide)

References

   1. http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1181320439.shtml
   2. file://localhost/var/www/powerblogs/deanesmay/posts/1181404418.html
   3. file://localhost/var/www/powerblogs/deanesmay/posts/1181404418.html