Life experience ·3.3·

The joys of being dependent on a job and being a simple employee

People expect you to behave and dress a certain way so that they can identify you as male or female. They can’t deal with things they don’t know, things they don’t understand. They want to push their expectations and world view on you. If you don’t fit into that world view, it’s always you who isn’t normal and who has to be fixed.
They don’t even consider the possibility to change their way of thinking. However they will have to live with the fact that there will be people who will be more than happy to mess up that world view.

I am certainly not born to be a man’s little pretty thing, or a maid or someone you can say things to, like „Darling/Pretty, could you get me and my guest two cups of coffee please?“. I really hated being called that and I still do. So don’t do it.
The latter was something I was told several times during the time I was working alone, alongside my boss, in a small supermarket. Even though I was busy stocking up the shelves, helping a customer or working at the cash register, he asked me to make some coffee at the very back of the supermarket and then he often called me out again, in the middle of making that coffee, when a customer needed some advice or wanted to pay. So I was running back and forth from one end of the supermarket to the other end very often, even while making one cup of coffee. It was really irritating.
He would always comment on my looks and would call me „ugly girl“ in front of customers. Even if he meant it as a joke, he should know what is appropriate at the workplace and what is not. Just because you are somebody’s supervisor, doesn’t mean that you can comment on people’s appearance as you wish (when they are dressed appropriately for their job), insult them as a joke or make sexual and dirty comments.
It is not professional and it is harassment. It is simple as that.

This experience didn’t help me to get rid of my dislike of the opposite gender that has been developing during my school years. Of course there are nice people out there, but sometimes my hate just outweights everything. I want to be proved wrong, yet somehow many things I see and experience remind me that my  feelings towards them are not unfounded.

I ignored the behaviour of my boss back then because the job at the supermarket was my only source of income and I don’t like people to know that something like that can affect me. Even if you explain to them why you think that something like that is not okay, they will tell you to „chill“, they will tell you that they didn’t mean it like that and they will tell you that you are too sensitive. I am really not a violent person. Really not. However, in those situations, I feel the urge to give people, who say things like that, a tight embrace. Around the neck. With a rope.
I thought that he was a cool guy in the beginning, but it turned out that I was wrong. So wrong.

The longer I worked with him, the more I detested his whole being. In the beginning, when he openend the store, he didn’t have many workers. After a while it was just me and him. Because he is also Vietnamese and because I wanted to support him and his store I let go of a really good job opportunity. As stupid as you think it is, it was important to me that his store is going to be successful because there were many German people who were very sceptical about the store. I wanted to prove them wrong. That there is more to us, that we can do more than only working at restaurants. Since we are from the same country, I wanted to support his store and gave my very best. Then I began University and he looked for other workers. The workers were from Thailand. I worked for him during my vacations then. My boss became intolerable. Almost sickening.