It was January 2020 when I started my first job working in retail. My mother was quite familiar with the small business owner, Jen, whom I started working for. Jen owned a gift and party store that my mother would often visit in search of gifts for people's birthdays. The shop sold what looked like an infinite amount of toys for each age group and gender, and in the back was the balloon and decoration shop where you could order any type of balloon art or party-favor that your heart desired. Upstairs the storage room lay alongside my boss' office. Unfortunately, the entire building was old and cramped. To navigate through the shop, you were constantly squeezing past something, whether it was a group of whiny brats or a pile of merchandise that had collapsed on the floor.
The shop owner, Jen, was known to be incredibly hard to please, unforgiving, and quite literally insane. It wasn't long before I figured that out on my own. As soon as I arrived, she put me to work organizing and rearranging each shelf of merchandise with hardly any instruction, growing angry with me when I didn't organize it to her liking.
As each shift carried on, work became more and more exhausting, and each day I knew I had to go to work, my stomach churned. Jen gave her employees no breaks, including lunch at times. A shift at that place would consist of running back and forth between the storage building and the shop, up and down stairs until your legs felt like they would give out. Her passive-aggressiveness and ability to gaslight her employees were two obstacles I had much trouble overcoming. She had a different excuse for why she was in a "mood" each day; her butt injections would kill her one day, and the next, her head would be pounding from the eight concussions she'd suffered.
A couple of months into the job, I was “lucky enough” to gain a spot in the very back of her long, narrow office. I was put in charge of custom airbrush and paint pen commissions, and I wasn’t paid a cent for any of my work. After climbing over mountains of inventory, a puppy pen, and half-full storage bins, I squeezed myself in between a desk against the wall and a wooden chair that wouldn’t budge due to the clutter surrounding it. Every shift, I would spend hours up there struggling to teach myself how to airbrush while occasionally making friends with the stink bugs. I would hear the shouting of my boss from downstairs, asking how much longer it would be until I was done. Sometimes, though, she would sit in her office with me, her desk 15 feet behind mine, and I could feel her stare burning the back of my neck as I tried to work.
But because this was my first job and because this was all I knew, our relationship became normal and my tolerance grew high for Jen and the bullshit job I was hired at. I learned that it was better to comply with her rather than fight back and suffer the consequences.
There were a couple of slip-ups that I experienced working there, such as inventory falling off a shelf or wind blowing a box of packing peanuts off the porch. When those packing peanuts blew off the deck, Jen's glare burned through the space between my eyes and left me braindead. She shouted at me from her car as if I had purposefully knocked it over with an invisible arm.
Eventually, five months passed me by. It was a sunny, warm morning in late May, and I had just woken up from a sleepover. The air was fresh and faint traces of an upcoming summer lingered. I was dreading my five-and-a-half-hour shift. I rolled over in bed to see one of my friends, and I immediately complained to her as soon as she woke up. My friends knew all about my psychotic boss and pleaded for me to stay and hang out with them. I honestly considered skipping work that day. It was the perfect summer day, and when my friends offered a trip to the local beach that morning, I could barely control myself. But I couldn't just skip work; I couldn’t even imagine what sort of passive-aggressive master plan Jen would think of to get her revenge on me.
I ruefully drove away from my friend's house and showed up fashionably late for my shift. I walked into Jen's office to greet her as I usually did before starting my shifts there, and I was met with a dead, angry stare. Despite the amount of respect I had lost for her at this point in my career, I couldn't help but feel intimidated. It was even worse knowing a couple days prior, I tried to quit after work one day, and she didn't let me. Instead, she voiced, "Not right now, Grace; I'm way too stressed for this. Go home."
I brushed off the chilling feeling her nasty gaze left me with and got straight to work. She sent me to wrap party favors, so I did. It wasn't until I nearly completed the order that I heard frantic footsteps grow louder and louder down the creaky wooden steps above me, and before me stood Jen, who looked like she had just witnessed a murder.
"I need you to reorganize all of the cellophane bags in these drawers," She stated as she walked over to the storage cabinet on my right, which sat against the wall. She gave little instruction on organizing them, only that she wanted them arranged by size; easy enough.
I began arranging the cellophane, separating each bag by size and shape, and placing them in neat piles. I put them into the drawers from smallest to largest, and once I finished, I went a step further by organizing the entire room afterward. I swept the floor, picked up each grain of glitter, sorted out the stray streamers and balloons by color and size, and found homes for them. Next, I wiped down the counters and reorganized the desks and utensils scattered on top of them. An overwhelming sense of productivity consumed me as I stood before the balloon room admiring my work.
Familiar footsteps creaked above me, growing louder with each step. Jen marched down from her office to find me finishing up the last few party favors from the primary task. Jen brushed past me and stood before the drawers, which I had spent an hour organizing. She opened the top drawer and stared. She breathed heavily out of her nose, and I felt a sinking feeling in my gut. Next, the second drawer was opened with more force, more frantically. Then, the third drawer and the fourth, and I was met with a glare that could burn holes through whatever met its gaze.
"This isn't how I wanted it organized."
"What? I'm sorry, how did – "
"I clearly explained it to you, and you didn't listen. Look at this shit. You barely even did anything."
I felt my heart rise to my throat, and my body felt weightless at this moment. Then, Jen started throwing out every swear word imaginable while talking to me at a volume like I was hard of hearing.
"You need to put the bigs with the bigs and the smalls with the smalls, Grace."
She was clearly mocking me, and I couldn't stand it.
"You got that?"
She grabbed the cellophane that I had spent so much time sorting out. I should have guessed this would happen.
Cellophane bags of all sizes hit the ceilings and walls and weightlessly drifted towards the floor, sinking back and forth. Jen started tossing the newly organized plastic in every direction imaginable, continuing to run her mouth and belittle me. Finally, she left me alone, giving me the exact instructions she had left me with earlier; Organize the cellophane by size and shape. I was pissed, and I wanted out immediately.
Watching her storm out of the balloon room, I heard her aggressively order around her other employees. I crouched down towards the floor and sat down in front of the mountain of plastic that I had to reorganize. I felt so drained, tired, and underappreciated, and my eyes unfocused as I thought about the next step. All of this for a below minimum wage pay?
I started texting my friends and parents, desperate for advice on what to do next.
"Quit"
"That's inappropriate."
"You can't let her talk to you like that."
"You can't let her walk all over you."
I stared off into the distance, avoiding eye contact with the cellophane avalanche that towered before me. I pondered the advice my parents had given me, as it was much more in-depth than my friends, who were jokingly begging me to beat up my boss before I quit. Too much had just happened, and I was in disbelief; I slowly stood up and mindlessly strode to the stairs to grab my purse hanging on the wall. I didn't say anything to anyone, and I avoided eye contact with my employees. Luckily, Jen was perched in her office.
I walked out the back door, picking up speed. I clutched my purse next to me and listened to the door shut behind me, and I quickly made my way down the deck's staircase into the parking lot. As I got into my car, my adrenaline levels rose; I felt like I had just made a prison break. I sat behind my steering wheel, and all I could do was breathe. My shift was nowhere near over, and I was on my way home with no intention of ever going back to that forbidden gift store.
I texted her once I arrived home. I sent a long, respectful paragraph thanking her for the experience and letting her know she'd never see me working there again. I know it wasn't the right way to quit, but she couldn't figure out how to correctly manage employees, so I guess it cancelled out. She called my mother soon after I sent the text and blew up my phone in a fury. She sent me numerous photos of the mess she had made and scolded me in paragraphs.
"It's inappropriate to leave the workspace in this state." She said, "I'm telling you this as a boss as a mother," so clearly, it must have been valid information.
It's been nearly a year since I quit now, and to this day, I still fear the day I run into her in my local grocery store or CVS.