Dreams of Being a
Wal-Mart Greeter
by Liz
Flaherty
I wore
my favorite green slacks (size ten) and the velour shirt that
matched them. I was thirty; age-wise I fell to the younger side
of the middle of the work force at my new job. One of five women
in an office of fifty employees, I was so nervous on that first
day I must have gone to pee every half hour. Which was, several
men commented dryly, no more than they expected from a broad.
They supposed I would be the next one to get pregnant and stand
around and ask for help and not be able to do my job.
What
was I doing here? I
certainly didn't fit.
Two
of the women I worked with were pregnant. They didn't stand around,
and they always did their jobs. We all did, and the only ones
we asked for help were each other, because we didn't like being
called broads and we didn't like being bitched about.
I learned
a lot in that first few months. That some men gossiped and lied
and that cute young women in tight pants (smaller than a size
ten) didn't have to work as hard as others. That no one cared
if my youngest had spots and a temperature of a hundred and climbing;
I was supposed to be at work. On time.
But
I also learned that working with men isn't really much different
from working with women. I had female bosses who were as susceptible
to a fresh-out-of-college man with washboard abs and a beguiling
wink as their male counterparts were to the aforementioned cute,
young, and tightly wrapped. I learned that behavior explained
as PMS in women is just a bad mood in men.
I worked
very, very hard because that was the way I was brought up and
because, truth be told, more was expected from the five women.
We had to prove that we could do historically male jobs as well
as the men. So we did. After while, no one used the term "broad"
very much and though the bitching didn't lessen, it did become
pretty much gender-blind, which was all most of us cared about.
Now
I'm fifty-something. I wear blue jeans to work most days, the
ones with elastic insets in the sides of the waist because now
I buy a size fourteen. The office still has about fifty people,
but the man-woman ratio is closer to fifty-fifty these days. Of
the women in that equation, I am the oldest. Young, cute, and
well-built still pays off - time hasn't changed human nature that
much. Working hard, once a source of personal pride, has become
something rather pointless, even foolish. Response to the word
"loyalty" is generally a blank look. Be on time? Why?
"I
hate this place," I mutter on a semi-daily basis. My friends and
I talk about retirement, counting off the days toward it like
children waiting for Christmas. We talk about traveling at our
convenience rather than our employers', being Wal-Mart greeters,
sleeping till we feel like getting up. It will be so much fun,
we say, even though we'll have to be more careful with money and
pray harder for good health since insurance costs will be heart-stopping.
We can't wait!
Oh,
but there's the rub, because I can wait; I'm not ready.
I want to give my 401k a chance to recuperate a little from its
recent dip into the toilet. I'd also like to shore up my mad money
account, buy some new appliances, and maybe trade cars. I have
a new grandchild due to arrive in Vermont in March. I live in
the Midwest, and I want to see this sixth grandbaby more than
the once a year my retirement income will allow.
I've
always planned on retiring at sixty, or fifty-five at the earliest,
but I don't feel welcome in the workplace anymore. I work too
hard, and have little patience with office politics and tales
of who's bonking whom. I resent pregnancy being treated as an
illness calling for hours of break-room rest instead of a planned
condition that one works through with care. I'm sick to death
of the cry of "it's not my job" no matter what the job is and
of the terse "because I can" when a supervisor is asked the reason
for an order that seems out of line.
What
am I doing here? I certainly don't fit.
But
I've learned more things as the years have gone by.
My
work ethic is mine, and it's not something I can visit on someone
else just because I don't like theirs. Although I will still give
loyalty because I don't know how to do anything else, I am now
smart enough not to expect it in return. I've learned, and repeat
to myself almost every day, that my employers don't have to value
me; they have only to pay me. I finally accept that being in the
minority on an issue doesn't make me right or wrong; it makes
me out-voted. Being a sort-of-liberal residing in Indiana, I should
have known that anyway, but I'm still voting for underdogs every
time. I don't fit in my ultraconservative geographical area any
better than I do in my thirties-oriented workplace.
But
my home is still my home, and my place of work is still where
my paycheck comes from. Just as I love my neighborhood even if
I am a square peg in its round hole, so do I like the office where
I've spent twenty-some years of my working life. And it really
doesn't matter if I fit.
