The Spiritual Psych Lab

I was amazed to hear a coworker, the lead cashier, tell a customer the other day that working at our thrift store was "stress free."
(The customer had asked what it was like.)

I added, laughing, "It is wonderful here, but I do scream sometimes."

The cashier looked confused. "The customers?"

"No," I said, "it's all the STUFF."

Stuff like donations of boxes full of moldy books do get to me sometimes. But actually, even more, it's my coworkers.
Or, more accurately, it's me.

The week after Christmas, I'd spent hours weeding Xmas crap that the Housewares Ladies were going to box up and save to put out again next year––after it didn't sell this year, even at half-price.
A bag of battered old pine-cones someone had priced $2.99?
I put most of it in the dumpster.  

I was trying, and failing, to convince the manager we should price all the remaining stuff 50¢ per item, and I said in frustration, 
"Are people brain damaged??!?"

Great, I immediately thought, I have hit a new low.

In fact, some of my coworkers are literally brain damaged, one way or another. A couple of the ladies have a touch of dementia, for instance, and do things like price and put out one-time-use food containers.

Others are just damaged. Old, poor, missing teeth, missing family, and wounded in various ways. "I'd rather get beat up than shot again," one of them announced the other day.
The cashier who said our workplace is stress free comes from a country at civil war.

I'd asked several of my coworkers if they'd gotten anything good for Christmas.
I stopped asking after five of them told me they'd gotten nothing, except what they got from work. (One of the managers gave everyone something she chose specifically for them. A big bottle of whiskey for a drinker. I got a pair of tiny, pink bicycle earrings, which I love.)

And here I come swanning in with my bright ideas. 
They ARE good ideas, objectively speaking, but they don't necessarily fit. Good ideas that don't fit aren't good ideas.
And when they don't fit... 
Well, I'm getting to see myself at my worst!

I catch myself and apologize (the manager brushed my outburst off, "It's normal"), but man oh man, I am no angel of acceptance and understanding.

I truly don't understand how a lot of my coworkers make decisions, even when I factor in cognitive biases.
Why do the ladies think it's a good idea to save rejected Xmas decorations for next year, when we don't have the room, or the staff to handle it?
We didn't even get out on the floor all the Xmas donations we'd saved throughout this year!

If I ask, they cannot tell me. They think I'm weird for asking.

I can guess at some of their motivation--they come from a generation that abhors waste, for instance. 
But the sheer inefficiency and illogic of the operation boggles my mind.

However, that's my problem, and I want to shed my outrage:
the social good the store does is HUGE (including providing work, paid or unpaid, to people who aren't wanted elsewhere), and that's way, way more important to me than if we waste time and effort on storing broken tchotchke.

A couple weeks ago, Big Boss called the first staff meeting we;ve had since I started seven months ago. I'd hoped we'd talk about merchandising, but we spent two hours mostly talking about how to be kind to difficult customers. 

Everyone had stories to tell. Me too. For instance, I'd washed a homeless guy's feet in the mop room because when he was changing into the free boots I'd given him, his feet gave off a gagging stench. Actually, I didn't tell that story because washing feet is too Jesus-y of an example, but we've all have done things like that. 

The guy who'd said he didn't ever want to get shot again, one tough dude, said proudly, "What other store would let a guy come in off the street and sit on a couch and read a book for hours?"

All of my coworkers believe that we should be kind, and kinder--that was no more up for debate than the belief that we should save last year's Xmas ornaments.

I LOVE THAT.

So. You know it's not enough just to think, "I'll just change x, y, z about myself––snap, like that!" 

I went into this job intending to look upon it as a spiritual psych lab, a place to practice dealing with conflict, being kind, etc.
And it really is practice, like Hanon's Exercises for the Virtuoso Pianist: "for the acquirement of agility, independence, strength and perfect evenness".

Today, New Year's Eve day, I am going to practice saying to myself, "with precision, very distinctly," what my coworker said:
"It's stress free!"

And sing to the tune of "Let It Snow," let it go, let it go, let it go-oh-oh!