5 Things I Would Rather Do Than Work in Customer Service
“How may I help you?” NO. How can I help MYSELF? As someone who has worked multiple customer service jobs ranging from cool (floor managing The Daily Show) to hellish (floor managing The Daily Show), I have often grieved the fact that my empathetic nature and people pleasing tendencies make me the perfect customer service employee. That being said, this is a list of things I would rather do than work in customer service:
1. Eat a handful of rusty nails
Listen, I have my tetanus shots. And there HAS to be some kind of beneficial properties in rusty nails for my anemia. If Elle Fanning can suck on rusty screws to film The Great, why can’t I crunch crunch crunch yum yum yum to save myself from a life of servitude to a woman named Janette who NEEDS khakis in a size 8 for her daughter’s baby shower.
2. Watch the entirety of Joey King’s filmography
There is something about that woman that deeply and profoundly gives me the ick. She looks like the kid in your fourth grade class that always has a popsicle stain around their mouth and asks if they can brush your hair. But I will watch The Kissing Booth, The Kissing Booth 2, and The Kissing Booth 3: Lost in New York if it means that I do not have to watch a 15-year-old high school student become my manager.
3. Admit to my sister that I was the one who stole her Nintendogs DS cartridge
Daisy, sit! Maxwell, come! Caroline, forgive me! I was ten years old and she hadn’t touched her DS in years. If you think about it, I saved those dogs. This was back in the day when video games didn’t coddle children. If you didn’t log in every day those dogs would run away and leave you a devastating letter about how irresponsible you are. But I would rather hear I’m irresponsible from a cute virtual dog than my manager, Dan, after not coming in because I was attending my grandfather’s funeral.
4. Let a man explain crypto to me
Please! Please tell me how investing in a drawing of a monkey could help me buy a house! I’ll even flutter my eyelashes and act super confused. I’ll tell him he’s funny and that he’s way too smart to be a cashier at Michael’s. Anything! Anything other than listening to the guest at Hershey’s Chocolate World ask me, “Don’t you think you should know how many ridges are on a Reese’s cup?” A thing that actually happened to me.
5. Find a nice partner, decide we want to spend our life together, get married at a courthouse with our closest friends and family present, travel the world together, have our first born daughter (a girl named Siobhan), support each other through an economic crisis only to find it is putting an untenable strain on our marriage, go through a litigious divorce, watch him get married to a woman I have to admit is very good for him, and find myself at 45 years old having to rediscover my own identity after an entire life has come and gone.
I’d probably grow as a person. And I wouldn’t have to pretend to care that we’re out of Japanese Cherry Blossom hand cream.