Odd Jobs and Odd Characters
This was young me… pretty similar, eh?
I was one of those lucky kids who never had to have a job through high school. My parents were perfectly fine as long as I got straight A’s. I would pad my extracurriculars for college applications and they hoped that one day I would be off to Harvard. I’m not smart enough to go to Harvard as I only got a 1400 on my SATs (you young kids might not recognized that score because they’ve gone and fluffed up the test since my day). I graduated second in my class (they call it Salutatorian which is latin for not Valedictorian) and was immediately told to get a job. My free summers were over.
The first job I managed to land was at American Eagle. This job consisted of me folding clothes up front or putting clothes away in the dressing room. It’s amazing how little I was trained for this job. I literally know nothing about American Eagle clothing or their policies.
Around the exact same time, I got a job at Victoria’s Secret. I have no clue how I landed that. Immediately, I rushed to the mall to acquire something known as “makeup.” I went to Nordstrom’s and forced some lady to show me how to put it on. I had been told that I had to look presentable and that also translated into me needing new clothing. If it wasn’t jeans, a t-shirt or a sweatshirt, I didn’t own it.
Weirdly enough, I was pretty good at my Victoria Secret job. They put me in the “beauty” section after a couple of days. No, that didn’t mean I was prettier than the other girls (although I am), it meant I was selling their makeup and lotions and stuff I’d never used in my entire life. Luckily, I’m good at bullshitting or else I wouldn’t have lasted a day.
Their main goal was to get me to get people to sign up for their credit card. They gave me all the selling points and I’d make sure people signed up. This is the sole reason they kept me around. I can be very convincing.
Around this exact same time, maybe two weeks after I was working my two jobs, I got a third job offer from CompUSA. I accepted the third offer and worked three jobs for about a week until I dropped American Eagle for its worthlessness.
I worked here
I was finally able to quit at Victoria’s Secret when the managers at CompUSA realized that I am awesome. They started me out as a “software” saleswoman because they figured since I was a girl, I’d know very little about electronics. Clearly, my glasses had not given me away as a huge fuckin nerd. I quickly ignored my “zone” and started to sell laptops. This probably would have made them nervous except that every laptop that I sold was going out with their extended warranty plans. This was the main way CompUSA made money. The margin on laptop sales is very low so they pitch you two or three year extended warranties in order to make an extra buck.
They quickly upped my hours and I said goodbye to the “beauty” section of Victoria’s Secret for life.
No, but for real, I’ve never gone back in there and don’t plan to. It smells disgusting.
At CompUSA I eventually became the top salesperson in the northwest region of Oregon, Idaho, Washington and Alaska. The boys that I worked with quickly learned to respect me and we would have long arguments about the benefits of HD DVD vs Blu-Ray. I had never felt more nerdy in my life.
And yet, there was always someone there to remind me how normal I was. There was the nerdy guy who never saw daylight except for work. He had sharpened his fingernails to a point and explained to me how he could place the point on someone’s neck and puncture their throat. He smelled and I tried to avoid him at all costs unless it was to ask him a question I did not know the answer to.
Then there was Tim. He used to be the best salesmen of the store and you could see why. He resembled a young used car salesmen. I got several sales from women Tim had been talking to who felt he was sleazy. I then used that as an opportunity to up-sell these women because they felt safe buying from me.
Tim’s best friend was Flavious. Flav was a sketchy Italian dude. He was shorter than me, always wore a gold necklace and tied his hair back into an extremely tight pony tail, which he then slicked down with layers of hair gel.
My second summer working there, a new girl was hired. She was a cute brunette who was placed in software because she actually didn’t know anything about computers. Her name was Sara and she inexplicably started to hang out with Flav and Tim. By the next summer, she was pregnant with Flav’s child and they were supposedly getting married.
I have absolutely no idea if they actually got married because I decided to stop coming back during the summers and I stayed in Walla Walla. CompUSA went bankrupt soon after. I’m sure it’s because they didn’t have my superior selling skills keeping them afloat; especially if you’ve only got the cast of characters described above as your “best” employees. Rough stuff CompUSA, rough stuff.