I quit work yesterday. Finally free of incompetent managers, even more incompetent coworkers and the truly stupid customers. OK, maybe it wasn't as bad as I just made it sound but you all know how work is. Anyway, now that my first job is finally over with a year and a half later I've had my view of the world altered (corrected you might say). For example:
-If people can read, they sure don't show it. A sign that says "CLOSED" in six inch neon orange letters might deter some people from entering the restroom, but many are not so easily swayed. Even barricading the door with wet floor signs won't stop the truly stupid from entering.
-One in a thousand plastic bags is defective and yet some people think that this means that EVERY bag is incapable of holding so much as a head of lettuce. I've triple bagged a single package of marshmallows for someone once. People always tell me " Oh I'm going up stairs so double bag everything" Folks, I've carried a gallon of milk in one of the plastic Sunflower bags across two blocks and up four flights of stairs many a time, I assure you they will hold your strawberries.
-Sunflower Market is geared towards the health-conscious, all natural liberal crowd and yet they attract a fairly large number of right wing fundamentalists as well. Probably because of kosher foods or other such dietary restrictions. It's amazing to me that such diametrically opposed people can be in the same building without killing each other.
-After observing customer food selections, noting the purchases of different ethnic groups I have arrived at some odd conclusions. Eastern Europeans buy several weeks worth of food every time they're in the store, either that or enough food to feed a huge family for a few days. Asians are very big on leafy vegetables and they want them bagged exactly right. God help you if you screw that up. Also, Asians love watermelons, forget the stereotype of blacks and watermelons it's the Asians more than any other group. Crazy. Actually, the fried chicken and grape juice thing with blacks isn't true either. Where do things like that come from? People on the Atkins diet with buy twenty boxes of Atkins shakes and a sack of potatoes. Idiots.
-I used to think that hobos were a victim of society; sad example of hardass landlords, cruel employers and plain bad luck. Now I realize a lot of them are homeless because they're crazy, lazy, violent or otherwise completely unemployable. It's their own damn fault.
-The big thing that I realized that I found the most disturbing in terms of how I had become jaded to the world was pregnancy. Sunflower's cashiers are almost entirely female, some of them are older and are just cashiering as a secondary job. But many of them are young, like my age or younger, single mothers who are supporting one or more kids on a $7 an hour salary. That alone is pretty sad, but it's the fact that they do it to themselves that gets me. Dropping out of high school freshman year and getting knocked up, you can say it's the guy's fault too but only up to a point. There was a point when all of the young cashiers were either pregnant or had kids already. When one of them learned that they were pregnant my mental reaction was the same as if they had said they got an STD. It was only when a married 26 year old college graduate in her dream job told me she was expecting and I had the same reaction did I realize that my job had seriously skewed my view on that subject. "Congratulations!" should be the initial response to news like that not "Oh..."

Well, I'm done with all that, so now my rehabilitation can begin.

Word of the Day: syncretism- Reconciliation or fusion of differing systems of belief, as in philosophy or religion, especially when success is partial or the result is heterogeneous.