It may be that during your time at university you decide to get a part time job. This is more likely in your first year; it’s good to get away from the stress of sitting in halls of residence doing bugger all for weeks on end. Generally, the more extravagant you are, the quicker you will need a job to provide income. Here are five truths about student jobs that should be borne in mind.
- You Have To Serve Other Students
Serving older customers is fine, since the majority of the middle-aged populace are all knobbly and sexless, lumbering about in various stages of raging mid-life crises. However things become somewhat more complicated when you are serving someone your own age.
First of all, you need to stop talking in your phone voice, because while the over-30s go mad for that Edwardian butler politic, it’s unlikely your student brethren will appreciate shopping for new high-tops when he has Jeeves asking whether he requires a shoe horn or not. So you need to talk to this customer as if you just bumped into them in the SU bar. Difficult of course, since your sole aim at work is to politely part this same person with their cash. A priority that, unless you’re a kleptomaniac, is unlikely to be consistent in your day-to-day life. So you need to talk to them, sort of like they are your best mate, and sort of like you’re trying to politely take their money. It’s difficult.
Secondly, you are going to have to ignore that they will probably be quite attractive. That is not to say that students are a good looking bunch; all the plates of beans on toast render most of them as husks with terrible breath and bloodshot sunken eyes. It’s just that generally you will find people your own age more appealing, if not from a physical attraction, then from a sort of unspoken platonic fraternity of being in your early twenties. You are more inclined to try and put yourself high in their esteems. Of course this leads us slap into our next problem…
- You Don’t Know All The Answers
Being a student will most likely mean that you have only just reached majority, with minimal experience and relative ignorance to the processes of life. Consequently, you probably talk a load of rubbish most of the time; you did a couple of sociology modules last semester , and now you’re spouting about the meaning of existence like a twattish re-telling of Immanuel Kant. As such you aren’t the most knowledgeable man on the job, although to your credit, it may be that as a part-time worker you simply don’t know much about the work yet.
Ultimately, customer service is essentially a contrived round of Top Trumps. They ask you a question and you have to fish about for the right answer. Sometimes it’s conveniently easy like ‘Do you know where the toilets are?’ or ‘Do you get paid minimum wage?’, two questions which both prove easy to answer in the affirmative. However, sometimes they ask you an unusually difficult one, leaving you with nothing to say but ‘I don’t really know’, to which they will probably say something depreciative like ‘Do you not work here?’. Then they’ll probably ask someone else who does know the answer and give you a look that makes your testosterone reserves dry up, leaving you in an emasculated slump of pain and misery.
This isn’t entirely your fault though. Customers range in intelligence from a human being, capable of speech and basic motor functions, to an IQ approximating a potted houseplant. Where I worked, most of them failed to grasp the rudiments of a ‘Department’ store, and so were astounded that me being on the ground floor, and shoes being on the third floor, I was unsure about whether there would be a new delivery of ladies sling-backs in store sometime in the next millennia. Verticality proved an elusive concept.
- You Have ‘The’ Manager
The reason that I say ‘The’ manager is because all managers are inherently the same person. Somewhere there’s a production line where all the middle managers in the UK are hatched out of pods, with a bustling attendant who wipes the pod-goo off their shoulders and makes sure their vaguely hilarious hairdo is in check as they head for the door. Managers are stuck in the difficult predicament of being your colleague as well as your superior, one who forces you to do tedious shit. You can also expect them to have at least a few habits that drive you to distraction. It may be that your manager is a jolly, slightly larger older woman who has a disconcerting habit of touching you on the arm whenever she speaks to you. Or they might leave you to do the legwork whilst they stand about and look officious. Still your manager probably isn’t that bad, and besides, you won’t notice either way because…
- You’ll Soon Become Dead Inside
We’ve already established that your boss flicks your ear a bit, so the only way they are going to leave you alone is if you sell a lot of stock and make money for them. This new drive in your life totally distorts your kind, spunky optimism, until after a few days on the shop floor you are a cold-blooded corporate hit-man with a pulsing black hole where your heart used to be. The emphasis on profit means you find yourself mentally calculating the disposable income of the customers as they aimlessly potter about, and resisting the impulse to push the riff-raff out with a broom. You sidle about the shop, spying for wealthy customers like a magpie with a ‘Happy to Help’ badge. You spend your weekends operating as an automaton of some faceless corporation. Having said that, you still won’t be the most despicable thing in the shop, because…
Personally, I tend to be polite to sales people when I’m buying something. If you are rude to the bloke serving you in the gift shop, you are giving him the power to covertly replace all of your chocolates with crusted cat poos and then hand you the box with a knowing smirk. But your average consumer does not feel the same, since they will gleefully unload the stresses of their daily lives onto you, the hapless sales person. Some go further than this, real nasty little buggers who stare right into your face as they see their incessant abuse snapping the happy synapses in your brain and making your jowls convulse. Being a part time student worker means you’ll be even more ripe for abuse since you are obviously young and thoughtless (although as we established, you probably are just that).