About 2 years ago, I ventured into something that I’m sure most people experience more than once in their life, (so I guess I should be grateful I only had endure a singular short period), a minimum wage job. The good ol’ days of my unemployment had to end sometime, and that sometime was the holiday season of 2011. It happened while I was out doing one of my typical shopping trips during the day, a very well planned loop through the outdoor ‘mall’ that we have that ended with a stop at TJ Maxx. Because it was getting close to the holidays there was a table at the front door with employment applications. As I’d already failed at finding any other job; I took one, applied, interviewed, did more clothes shopping, and ta-da I was at my first minimum wage job.

I had originally applied to work in the warehouse because those hours were from 7 to 10, and I was hoping to be on a similar schedule to J, but I guess showing up to the interview in a dress and heels made them think I was overly ambitious, and I got a job at the jewelry counter. Working in jewelry wasn’t all that bad. My favorite part was when a new box of inventory would come in and I’d get to go through all the new items. Or maybe my favorite part was marking things down for clearance and getting to be the first to see how cheap everything was going to be. Either way there were a lot of bad parts that I didn’t like. For example the late hours and standing on my feet all day (I nearly passed out on my first day. Seriously, green in the face. The woman that was training me bought me one of our overpriced water bottles to keep me from dying.)

What else sucked was that the jewelry department wasn’t actually just the jewelry counter. It also encompassed purses, hair supplies, lotions, shoes, and women’s intimates. Every day that I had to walk up and down the shoe aisles trying to match up random shoes, or trying to make them fit onto the little shelves, I hated my life a little more. As I was crawling around on my knees trying to find if the other blue flat that had disappeared under a shelf all I could think was “$25,000 in student loans… college degree…. and I’m matching shoes.”

I learned a lot about retail during that time (since I knew zip before), like how to set up displays. The first display I did had some jewelry stands and hats in it. They loved it. Went crazy for it. Told me how amazing it was. Me, being overly filled with self confidence, was beaming at how I was owning this retail thing. The next display I did involved some sets of pajamas. I basically just needed to stack them up against the wall. Done, easy, I mean I’m the master of jewelry stands. That’s when I learned about this totally ridiculous rule of retail; color organizing. Now I like organization above most things, but the system of retail color organization was so completely arbitrary to me I struggled with it. There was a specific rainbow order, that was not ROYGBIV, that had to be followed. But did it go down the rack or across the rows? How did patterns factor in? If you went around a table did you follow the same rules? The questions were endless and their answers were unsatisfactory.

I quit 2 months later. Normally when I think back to this time I assume it was closer to 3 or 4 months, but really, I quit in the beginning on January when I started my (current) “real-life” job. The torture of shoes, retail rainbows, and having to work for 3 weeks to even afford the cheap jewelry we were selling, seems to have stretched out those 2 months into an extensive period of torturous time.

I then got the ‘real’ job, worked 2 weeks and made more money than I did the whole 2 months in retail. I’m not saying money is happiness. But when you’re making twice as much and you’re not possibly passing out from standing all day, then yes, that money is happiness.