Fridays are great. Why, you ask? Let me take a minute to expand on one of the other staff members I currently have to tolerate on a regular basis. Negative Nelly. No, that’s not her real name, but it might as well be.
Have you ever met someone that can take anything you say and turn it into a negative? Have you ever met someone who never, ever, EVER says a single positive thing? Do you know someone whose body language, facial expressions and even tone of voice manage to scream negative even if they are trying to be nice to a customer? She works in my store too.
To give you an example – you might try to make conversation with her, and you might say “Looks like it’s a beautiful day outside”. Her reaction could be any of the following.
a. Yes but I’m stuck in here, aren’t I?
b. I won’t get to enjoy it.
c. The minute I finish work today it will start raining.
d. All the customers will go to the beach. I might as well go home, no sales today.
Now I come from an industry where you *have* to be positive all the time, or you’ll plain go nuts. Try working in a call centre with an attitude like that, you’ll last less than 5 minutes. You need to find positives to motivate yourself, and you need positive people around you. So it’s all I can do to stop myself from strangling this woman when she talks like that. I can’t even say anything to her – I’ve learned that at work I can’t speak my mind otherwise the shit hits the fan. What would I want to say? The following as well as a few other things.
a. What you put out there comes back to you – if you are negative, your customers will be too.
b. If someone asks you how you are, you say “Excellent!” – it will surprise them in a good way, and it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. I know this to be a fact.
c. If you can’t stop being negative, f*ck off because you’re just annoying.
d. When you are negative like that, it affects everyone in the store and not in a good way.
That, among other things. I’ve actually had two days off because I have been sick – my neck swelled up and I was kinda freaking out wondering what was going on. I went to see the Cute Doctor (a story for another time) and in his rather cute accent he told me I have acute tonsilitis which is very contagious. I decided not to be nasty and go to work and cough all over the people I don’t like. However it seems many of them have already caught it from the admin people, who had this last week. :( Back to work tomorrow and thankfully I look almost human again.
Did he suggest removing the tonsils? It almost seems to be standard fare over here to not have your tonsils. However, I still have mine, and I think that the frequency might be going down now, but I don’t have any statistics to prove that.
The line that they’d always use for folks who are having their tonsils removed is that they can eat all the ice cream they want after the surgery.