Shiva Reborn

Yes, I write about retail. Yet, I think about the world as a reflection in many ways. As a single pebble can cause an avalanche, this same pebble sitting properly can help avoid the same chain-reactions. Man, humanity, homo-sapiens as the destroyers, is this outlandish?

Moving into a macro-scale, we can consider human beings as a trend through history. These are the killers and hunters, the creators of extinction and genocide. We transform the land. Look around you, without a doubt you are sitting no more than five-feet away from a human construct, a change, a disruption in the balance of nature. We do not conform to the world, we force the world to conform to us. We destroy, we change, we topple, chop, dig, and break. We build, yet the ramifications of our creations often harbor far greater destruction.

We topple each other’s nations and civilizations. We find greater ways to kill each other. We destroy our ancestral homes, pillaging and stealing from long honored and revered sites. How many have sought destruction before others have sought restorations? How many tides of human lives, pools of blood and massacre are laid before monuments, and how much of the land was razed just to create such monuments?

Even in today’s age, even every single one of us, how uninformed are we about our own natural propensity for destruction? I have measured my ‘carbon footprint’, and even though my impact measures far less than others, I have the understanding and knowledge of how much destruction I shall cause through my lifetime. How many bags of trash do I create each year, even with recycling? How can I live without producing trash since it is the very fabric of our beings-the wrapping of our own personal daily gifts, may it be food, clothing, or other additions to our personal life.

Look at our transportation and how it was designed. Our cars, our pollution, our single, personal modes of transportation streamlined and made to be as efficient, yet pollutant as possible. The idea of using clean fuel did not come naturally, nor was it something we even thought to do. We move backwards through time–our efforts to save species from extinction only as an answer to the fact we’ve driven so much life to death. Our civilizations worked to ‘conquer the old worlds’ decimating people and culture.

We are, at our base, easy destroyers and hard-to-become creators. In our ignorance, in our natural state, we destroy, we change, we shatter. It takes a great deal of concentration, focus, and work for us to overcome our natural state of being. Before each of us dies, if we took the time to examine how much destruction our life creates, and we try in opposition to instead create and save, do we see how difficult it is and how far away we are from being such pure and mighty creatures–even if we divine ourselves to be so?

I put the magnifying glass to the microscope, I bring nothing into the scene again–I focus on the pebble before the avalanche. I look at customers shopping in stores. We know all stores have some form or vision for their merchandising standards–a look they want, piles folded, shirts hung, and everything set in it’s place. It is a good template for a natural order, if humanity was nature. The customers, our barbarians, pillaging, destroying, and leaving ruin in their wake. How many educated ones know how easy it is to separate a pile of medium from large, and easily replace the mediums on top of the large? How much effort is that? Let us think about how hard this is versus grabbing and ripping a large size from under a pile of clothing, toppling the pile, creating a mess of destruction. Can we actually parallel that to transforming the landscape of the world to our desires? Can humanity, as an evolved species, understand how to take the little it needs without destroying everything around it? I would highly doubt it, if humans can’t even learn to take a size without destroying a simple peace of nature.

It is the state of humanity. It is our basal nature. We are destroyers. We don’t even have the commonest courtesy to keep our destruction away from each other. Just as someone must eventually deal with the trash of our existence–may it be our descendants or the Earth itself–someone must also clean up after the destruction you create just ‘browsing’ through a store. It is an odd, yet useful metaphor.

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Eighth-of-an-Inch

At the rear entrance of our store, there is a carpet which has been worn away slowly over time. The carpet was built into the floor, so now there is a ridge roughly 1/8″ (an eighth of an inch) at the edge. The ridge is no larger than a normal street crack, but one day I had to find out how terrifying this is.

I hear a lot of commotion on the walkie-talkie. “Oh my, someone just fell!” “There’s an old lady on the ground?” “Where is she?” “At the back door, someone is on the ground?” “Is she okay? Is she moving?” “Do we need to call an ambulance?” I arrived, to find an ancient woman shrunken by time, with a beanie on her head. Her youthful daughter looked to be about sixty-years old, which would make her mother anywhere between seventy-five and one-thousand. Along with our stock supervisor, they helped to get her up, and had a seat placed for her to recover. There the old, old woman sat staring out the back-door entrance–so each customer coming in had to be greeted by that. So she sat, hunched and unmoving, people walking around her like a statue, as the daughter yelled at the supervisor.

“What is wrong with you people? That’s dangerous!” She points at the ridge.
“I am so sorry,” my supervisor states, doing all the things he’s trained ‘not to say’, “It is our fault. I’m so sorry, what can we do to help her? What does she need? Should be call an ambulance?”
“No,” the daughter continues, “That’s not needed, she just needs to rest. You need to get that fixed! Now! She could have died!”

They continue this ridiculous banter, as I chuckle nearby behind a pillar. Seriously, when you’re that old, and you can’t even lift your foot off the ground, you need a wheelchair, or better yet, don’t leave the house to visit the hectic mall. Remember the good old days, when you used to be able to walk miles to school over rock, gravel and shards of glass while hailstones flew at your head? Well those days are long over. I’d hate to watch you tripping over cracks in the ground, because that’s far more dangerous out there. I’m surprised she didn’t explode into a pile of dust when she hit the floor. Seriously? Leave her at home.

Thirty-minutes later, the old woman gets up with her obviously useful cane, and begins to walk away. Her feet don’t even leave the ground, they just slide across the floor. She must be very good at cleaning dust off the floors, like that video I’ve seen of a dog used as a mop. I actually don’t know how she even walks on the sidewalk. It takes a while for her to leave the store, as she slides one foot six-inches, then the other six-inches more. Yes, definitely, leave her at home next time.

Customer Type: Big Baby, The Complainer, Don’t Kill the Messenger, Lowered Expectations

The Benefit of the Doubt

A customer comes in with a return, it seems her pants tore on the butt the first time she wore it. It was beyond the return period, and kind of old. She didn’t have a receipt and the item was worthless in price, but after a discussion with a manager, he told her, “We’ll give you the benefit of the doubt, and let you exchange it for another pair.” So she goes off on her merry way to find a new pair of jeans. After her search, she returns to the register, and the same manager returns to help her. She now says that she had it altered and hemmed, which really does stretch our return policy. Yet, again, the manager said, “Alright, I said we’d give you the benefit of the doubt, and we will. Just this one time, you can exchange your jeans.” The story I was told, since I was nearby, but not included in this story, she exchanged her pair of hemmed, torn, used pants and got a pair of brand new pants.

Half-an-hour later she returns, and says she doesn’t want the pants anymore. She asks for specific managers by their name, none of which were working. Instead another manager comes out, since she doesn’t want the first manager helping her. She starts crying saying she doesn’t want the pants and wants her original pants back. The manager asks why. The woman tells my manager, “He called me fat.”
“What do you mean?”
“When he said he was giving me the benefit of the doubt, he was calling me fat.”
“I’m sorry, mam, but I’m quite sure he wasn’t calling you fat.”
“He was!” And the woman sobs more heavily, crying more. “He was calling me fat, and saying he’d give me the benefit of the doubt, because I’m fat!” Of course, she was about 34-inches and about five-foot two-inches in height. Yet, my manager was right, he wouldn’t call her fat, since that’s not his style. After a lot of crying, sobbing, and fat-over-usage, the second manager comes into the back to tell me and the first manager the story. A third manager comes along, one of the people she kept asking for when she was crying. We described her, and he didn’t know her at all, but went to look at the security cameras just in cast.

Because, you know, the whole world thinks she’s fat, which is why the pants tore, right? I know you’re thinking that, stop giving her the benefit of the doubt, people! Shame, shame.

Customer Types: Big Baby