The trauma that is working in retail

For our May fantasy book club at The Latest Edition Bookstore in Creston, we are reading “For Whom the Belle Tolls” by Jaysea Lynn. This funny romantasy is about a girl who finds herself in the afterlife after losing the battle to cancer.

When she finds her paradise complete with an amazing library, her childhood cat and anything she could ever wish for at the tip of her fingers, she’s bored. As she wanders around, she finds the entrance gate to Hell.

I picture the lines at the airport where frazzled employees yell “I can help whoever is next down here,” but instead of pencil skirts and ascots, it’s demons with horns, wings and fun-colored skin.

The main character Lily watches as angry people, customers almost, yell at the demons, demanding to speak to a supervisor because there’s no way they should be going to hell.

This reminds Lily of a life in customer service, except there’s one major change — the demons don’t have to be nice to their “customers.” They don’t have to fake apologize when someone is mad about something ridiculous. If they are getting treated poorly, they get to return that attitude in kind.

Now this is something Lily would enjoy — getting rid of years of pent up frustration from the customer service industry.

Reading this book has naturally made me reminisce on my days in customer service. Like Lily, I think I would greatly enjoy working in a customer service help desk where I could use my full sass and attitude.

But I also think there’s something so much more rewarding in deescalating a situation, something Lily is able to do with many of the people she sees.

I started in retail when I was in college, working at Tradehome Shoes in the mall in Eau Claire. This was also a sales job, and it’s where I first learned that side of retail. Fortunately, you don’t see a lot of angry customers at a mall shoe store.

After I graduated college, I moved back home and started working at U.S. Cellular in Dubuque as a retail wireless consultant — basically a sales associate. Believe it or not, you see quite a lot of angry customers at a cell phone store.

From prices to phone problems to billing issues to plain old entitlement, I saw it all. And honestly, I kind of liked it. One of my favorite things to handle were billing complaints/questions. Though the U.S. Cellular bills can be confusing to read, I was fluent in the language of billing.

I could use the bill and the computer to sort out exactly what caused a jump in bill, find out if it was on our end or theirs and go from there. When it was on the customer’s end, say a missed payment a month or two ago that’s just been carrying over, they weren’t always satisfied with the answer.

There were also people who would come in yelling about their Facebook password or their Gmail being hacked. While U.S. Cellular has no control over what tech companies do or what password you chose seven years ago, we were always the easy one to blame.

One thing I loved about working in retail is that you never know what crazy thing a customer is going to say. I still think my favorite of all time is when a customer came in because his phone was running slow. I took one look at the phone to see that he had approximately 87 weather apps and widgets.

It took me almost a minute to remove one app, it was running that slow. I asked if he wanted to run some errands while I got it cleaned up. He said, “Oh good, and can I leave my glasses here with you too?” I thought he was joking so I gave him the customer service chuckle (if you know you know). He wasn’t joking.

“Don’t you guys fix glasses here?” he said. I’m not sure which of us was more baffled. He asked me where he was supposed to get his glasses fixed and I had no answers for him. I did get his phone cleaned up though.

Having worked in customer service, I always go out of my way to smile at the cashier. I try to remember that the person on the phone didn’t create the policy that’s annoying me. I’m also, unfortunately, an easy sell.

The next time you’re taking your anger out on a customer service person, maybe think again. You don’t want to end up as one of the angry customers in Lily’s line to hell.

Wow, that sounds really dramatic. Don’t take it too seriously.