“If you don’t love selling shoes, get out of this business.”
That was said to a room full of us. I had been working as a retail manager for a shoe company for about two or three months. I’d taken the job due to a previous manager and District manager of mine from another shoe company I’d worked at recommending me for it.
This guy, speaking to all of us, was a motivator. I don’t know if he was a Regional boss, probably higher, because everyone else in the room seemed to think it was such a big deal to have him there speaking to us. I was new, I was still getting my bearings.
And I was miserable.
MIS-ER-A-BLE.
I could make a lot of jokes about being a shoe salesman, but Al Bundy had already delivered on that material better than I ever could. I was in my late twenties at this point. I’d worked retail my entire adult life. I’d just come off of a two year stint bouncing around an outlet mall, leaving some jobs because the stores went belly-up, others to find my way to promotions up the ladder that wouldn’t have come otherwise (not in the time frame I was looking for at least). One because my manager was The Devil.
It’s strange to think of my time there as only being two years because it felt much longer. I’d wound up at the outlets because the first job I had in California, a comic shop, had been taken over by another The Devil. Perhaps the illusive Super Devil. Either way, I’d been a manager at a comic store in Michigan, found my way to one when I displaced myself from my home and buggered off to NorCal, and then essentially became everything that Kevin Smith had been talking about when he made Clerks.
“Just because they serve you … Doesn’t mean they like you.”
Which, yeah, can be true. But I found that I loved retail. Or aspects of it. Enough of it to be okay with being there. And that, my friend, is the spell that being just gainfully employed enough to be able to functionally pay your bills and eat does to you. It allows you to think that satisfaction equates to happiness.
Side note: I don’t really know what equates to happiness. If you are reading this thinking I’ll have some revelation for you by the end of what does and how to get it for yourself, you belong here as much a I did that shoe job.
What I do know is that I left that meeting, went back to my store at my mall. And, on my lunch that day, I walked through the place and looked at the other stores. Most of them were clothing, a high percentage aimed strictly at women. There were, of course, more shoe stores. But I walked past one that was a mix of a toy store with a lean towards education, and a adult novelty shop. Not “adult,” but where you’d find interesting things that go clickity-clack in a way that screams “science” to make you look interesting but fun. It was affiliated with PBS, so it had a lot of classical music, Irish tenors and such playing. They needed a co-manager. I applied and got the hell out of… Hell.
I did that for a year and, for the people I worked with, had a great time with it. It was the most financially lucrative job I’d ever had at the time. I had an amazing manager and team. I learned a ton because it was the largest staff I’d ever worked with (let alone co-managed) and the biggest volume of sales. My Christmas there I started to have chest and arm pains because it was so crazy. Not sure if it was a heart thing or an anxiety thing, but I was more amused by it as it eventually passed than I was worried (because I was in my twenties and still felt invulnerable enough of the time to shake something like that off as a once-and-only thing. My thirties and since have mocked me endlessly for believing that).
I was recruited to another job probably two weeks into working there. I interviewed, only because it was, what I’d considered at the time, to by my dream retail job. And I was offered it. It was even more money. And i turned it down, which they were incredulous over, because I felt a loyalty to the kind person who just hired me. I still don’t regret my decision.
A year later, I went back to that dream job and let them know I was ready. Not because I was unhappy where I was. Same deal, I was looking to progress. My manager wasn’t going away. I wasn’t moving up. I was certainly satisfied, but I’d been accustomed to trying new things the last few years. That’s what got me out of my parents basement on onto California. I was no longer interested in being safe. This was the time of my life that I pushed forward.
Dream job offered me even more money. And, quickly, I moved up. Pay increases happened often. Even if I got passed over for a promotion, I somehow got a bump in pay just for being considered for it. It was weird. But it was electronics retail right before the .Com crash (and eventually during and after).
What happened that was most interesting is that I somehow conned my way off of the sales floor and into the tech area. That actually changed everything for me.
Retail sales up until my big box electronics store experience was normally very easy. Someone comes in, they want to buy something. You find it, sell it to them, collect their cash, they take their stuff. It goes on and on and on.
Big box doesn’t work like that. I was fortunately in a place that didn’t work on commission (and I have thankfully never had to do that kind of work), but did have a lot of trackers and charts and things to follow to see if you’d offered about a dozen or so different “services.” ISP sign-ups. Credit card sign-ups. Service plans. Installations. Cables and add-ons.
I was able to see these things as they were. They were a bottom line margin maker for the company that sold most of its stuff very close to price they paid for it. The kick-back of getting someone to sign up for three years of a Microsoft dial-up plan made continuing money. Especially if the person stuck it out beyond the three years. Credit cards are well known for the interest rates they bump up without hesitation after you get done with your introductory period. I actually could see the value of a lot of the service plans (inside baseball allowed us employees to know which ones worked to our advantage. Buy a video game system this year, pop on a $40 replacement plan, get the upgraded version of the system for free in two year’s time). And the margin on cables… That’s where the employee discount really shined, well before Amazon came about, flooded the market with cheap (but working) cables and no one would buy anything labeled “Monster” unless it was liquid crack in a colorful can.
But working at the service bench, while not technically freeing me completely from these other things, really took a lot of the onus off of them for my day-to-day. I got to fix computers. I got to play with technology in a way I never did on the floor. I learned a ton, very quickly, and got super good at my job. The introduction of the blaster worm and my figuring out how to correct it AND what to charge to fix it put my bench at the number one in the company that month. A bit of a fluke and unsustainable for me because I don’t care about numbers or scores.
I cared about helping people. And working on people’s technology allowed me to do that in a way that normal retail doesn’t. People come in frantic when their computer doesn’t work. I was not only able to put them at ease and reassure them it could be fixed, I could meet or exceed their expectations.
I modeled what I did after Leo Laporte at TechTV, which had become the only channel I watched when I got home until Buffy or Smallville came on. Leo’s job was to educate people on tech, make it work for their needs specifically, and to make it less scary and more fun. As if to prove to me that I was on the right path, it was when I was working at the tech bench that I met Leo for the first time. He came in randomly one day and was easily my favorite celebrity interaction. I went up to him, shook his hand, and told him, “I do what I do here because of what you’ve taught me.” And in that couple of minutes, he was warm, genuine, funny, and everything that I wanted to be.
So, again, I felt like I was happy. Maybe I was. I was definitely satisfied with my career.
Things at Big Box eventually hit speed bumps. I got moved from the tech area to operations, and it was about the same amount of misery I had selling shoes. Loved my team that I oversaw, certainly, but felt no joy when I went to work each day. Hated moving back to the blue polo shirt uniform. It was a lateral move, but it felt like I was demoted. It felt like I was degraded actually. But when one of my favorite people at work transferred to another store as a manager (actually, two of them did), I asked him if he needed someone to work as his in-home tech person. And he took me with him. And for another couple years, with more bumps and such, I felt like I was happy again.
Then the economy tanked. And, let’s be honest, my inability to give a crap about score cards and add-ons and margins above making my clients happy… That didn’t do a lot to endear me to the new Big Box management. The company had already gone through restructuring once to cut the pay of most of their in store workers. The writing was on the wall. I was paid an outlandish amount of money (in comparison to other people in the company. In Northern California for the time, though, I was paid something we’ll call “Almost a living wage”). On the fourth of July, we had the day off save for a conference call. On the call, they said that there would be lay-offs coming. I got a call about a half-hour later that said I’d be one of the people having my position eliminated. I had the opportunity to find and apply for another job in the company, which I put a less-than-half-assed attempt into. But then I parted with them, just about two months shy of my twelve year anniversary.
That crushed me. Because, again, I thought I had been happy. And honestly, I very much wasn’t. I hadn’t been in a long time. Part of it was because I could barely make my mortgage on the house we’d bought at exactly the wrong time. But also, I was realizing just then, I hated what my job had become. It was so much less about fixing things and making people happy. It was every bit of the sales and retail that crept back into my tech job.
And now I spent over a year and a half trying to figure out if i had to go back to retail proper. Because that was all I knew. I was lucky, I’d been able to fake my way into doing tech work for the last eight years. But I wasn’t seriously qualified, right? I couldn’t work on servers, or for businesses. I was the guy who fixed your browser, who set you up with a data backup system or a home wireless network. I thought there was no way I could offer anything to the real Tech industry.
But I was wrong. Because, at the heart of all of it, my retail experience and my tech experience that stemmed from it, I loved helping people. Yes, I’d developed a specific path that i wanted to take in doing that. Fixing tech, puzzle and problem solving computer and network issues. Make things work, hopefully better than they had before.
I got an interview and somehow landed what I know now to be the best job I’ve ever had. And I’ve worked at or managed three comic shops (two of which land at #’s 2 and 3 on my favorite places I’ve worked). I was the I.T. person for one branch of a larger company banner head, that had not had their own on-site tech, I think ever. They’d always dealt with remote support from across the country, and the occasional visit from one of the I.T. team. I was hired specifically because I’d been a retail person. Because this building wasn’t used to someone being there who wanted to help them. Who was visible and approachable. Who would pop around the corner randomly and ask how everything was doing.
And that was me. That was what I got to do. Heck, for the first year there, that was mostly all I knew how to do. I learned so much, very quickly, because that’s how these things are. You get something dropped in your lap, you figure it out. I also took it upon myself to improve systems I could see hadn’t been tended to in years. But I was mostly there to be the “Face of I.T” for my building.
And that, i can say, was me actually happy. Happy at a job. Truly.
I’m not going to pretend that everything was always perfect. My last several months there, things got incredibly frustrating, both from a giant project that was simply stressful, but also because of a power struggle that was going on between my different leadership teams. I hated being in the middle feeling like I had less and less power to take care of the people I worked with every day. But I saw all of that eventually working out, one way or another. The only reasons I left were related to both that mortgage that we never could get out from under, and my family.
So, moving back across the country to Michigan, not in the place I grew up but in many ways familiar, I had to essentially start again. I.T. work in this area is different. I don’t know if the kind of family-oriented job that I had out there exists. I work as a contractor for a larger company, and, while a lot of things are the same on the surface, it feels very different. Scorecards and metrics are brought up all the time, which I understand. Instead of selling items to customers, my company is selling itself as a service to the corporation we work for. There’s even more management, so there’s more power struggles between them, and us on the front line. It’s got all the bad aspects of retail mixed into some of the most beloved aspects of I.T. So I don’t know if happy is a thing I get to be at this job, as much as satisfied. Or grateful to be able to eat and have shelter.
But I also don’t know if there were someone standing in front of me, telling me, “If you don’t love I.T., get out of this business,” if I could or would take them up on it. Part of it is that I’m much older. Jumping from job to job doesn’t hold the excitement or promise it used to. Stability counts for a lot.
On top of that though, I can’t say I don’t love I.T. Or if I can think of something else that I do love. And that’s where it gets you. Does satisfaction equal happiness? No. But is happiness something we should expect to just be able to find? Do we automatically deserve it? It was forty years of my life before I found that I.T. job that I loved. Some people never get that. But they go on. Because we have to. And we are grateful for the high points when they’re there, and we struggle through the lows.
But forty-plus hours a week going towards something that doesn’t make you happy. That’s a lot to give to not get something that you need back. And I’m thinking about that. A lot.
I guess it was easier to walk away when it meant I wouldn’t have to touch strange people’s feet all day.
