I’ve been on the new job for nearly a month and it’s about what I expected. Long stretches of dullness, aching legs and feet, flurries of activity, credit card machines not working, thirty boxes of inventory coming in one day.
A day in the life of a shopgirl.
When I went on an interview this summer for an office job I knew that I could not do that. I knew I’m the kind of girl that needs to keep moving during the day and putting me in a chair behind a desk would be like eight hours of time-out.
When you never know who will walk through the door, the potential to meet somebody interesting is present on every shift. Today we had a lovely woman in from Joplin, Missouri.
That Joplin.
We asked her how the town is doing. How rebuilding was coming along. She told us of a friend who got picked up three different times by that tornado and landed upside down inside a car. Not only did she live……she remembers the entire thing. That you can see clear down blocks where businesses used to be and there is absolutely nothing. That the hospital will not be rebuilt in the same place because it was too close to the other one in town and they cannot risk another tornado taking out both. That while one hospital was destroyed the other one had dozens of severely injured patients coming in with no electricity and a week before they had running water again. That in her lifetime she will never see her town resemble anything close to what it was.
That on any day she is a combination of sad, lucky and grateful.
On this day, I was happy to be a shopgirl once again. To hear customers stories, to be reminded that it’s all fleeting, to know that despite what one wears attitude always makes the girl.
