Tales of a Retail Nothing

I don't usually put content warnings on my work, but some of the stuff I'm going to discuss here might be upsetting.

CW: animal abuse, intimidation, workplace intimidation, sexism, racism, sexual harassment

So here it is, probably the least hopeful thing I'll ever write, and it's a journey; at the beginning of it I had some hope. Since this whole series is about finding humanity in impossible or improbable situations, I'm going to be honest and say I'm not sure how this fits in. I just had my last day at what proved to be the strangest, most awkward, most uncomfortable work environment I've ever experienced. It was, in so many words, fucking bonkers.

A little under a year ago I epically burned out (like slept for weeks, unable to use mouth words burned out), oddly this was also the time I started writing at Vocal, I contribute a lot of my healing to this community. So uh thanks!

I had a small amount of money saved, I had myself convinced I could get up and start working a new job in a month.

Needless to say that did not happen, so pretty soon after I found a very part time job at a pet store that specializes in reptiles. We're just going to call it the reptile store and leave it at that, for reasons that might become obvious as I spin this part of my retail tales.

I went there to listen to my books as I was cleaning cages, it was not glamorous work but I could think and spend time with the animals. I had gotten a slightly weird feeling at the interview, and it was obvious the owner and I deeply disagreed on politics, but besides that it seemed straightforward, and more importantly people were going to leave me alone.

What I actually found was a deeply toxic and somewhat dangerous environment that ended up changing my views on reptile keeping forever.

The danger did not come from the animals, though I did get a nasty bite from a monitor that should not be in captivity (I'll get to that) but from the people orbiting the store. The vibe was set up by the bosses to keep the employees hatred of each other on a slow simmer. Everything was tense, and therefore anything out of the ordinary set off a chain of events that made it hard to breathe.

One of the things that I tend to miss socially, is when I'm being manipulated, it's happened before, though I'm lucky enough that the majority of the people in my life wouldn't do that. I didn't notice until I saw it happening to someone else. My convictions are strong, however I do take what people tell me at face value, because in real life that is how I interact with the world.

I'm not sure what the goal was in pitting the "new girls" against the "boys" who had worked there long term, but that was what was presented to me. Keep your head down, do your job, don't interact with the boys they're up to no good and we want to get rid of them.

The longer I was there, the more I realized that the separation that was created was more an excuse to have the "girls" (not a girl, but two genders was too high for these people to count and it was NOT safe to be non-binary) to be doing work like deep cleaning, vacuuming, dish washing, and other generally household-y stuff on top of our responsibilities taking care of the animals. The phrase I often heard was "that's the morning crews job" which meant why didn't the girls do it? You may have noticed that I keep using the word girl instead of women, it's because that's how my boss referred to us. It felt yucky reading it, it was even grosser in real life.

I've worked in a lot of places, I knew from the beginning this wasn't a long term position from me. My instinct kept telling me to leave but my ability to do things was still pretty severely compromised. The level of energy I was working with was about fifteen hours of work, laying in bed either listening to a book or watching TV, occasionally writing something, sort of making visual art, and seeing my partner. So I was stuck, like so many of us are, in poverty, in disability with no safety net, in a job that was unsafe and in shame of the realization that I might be incapable of doing something full time.

I explain all of this, because I need people to understand that poor folks don't choose their poverty. The system is set up against those of us who are running on a different operating budget, physically, emotionally, literally.

Now that we've gone on that little tangent, here's the experience I had, and I hope no one ever has to put up with the things that I put up with at this job.

Naturally, everything has to eat. I'm not going to go into too much detail, but there is a recognized ethical way to feed kept reptiles without the suffering of their prey. The place where I worked I had a coworker who thought of the feeders as "just food", and therefore felt that it was okay to cruelly take them out. Anyone who knows me knows that I cannot think of any living thing as "just" anything. Life is valuable and while a living thing is in your care you have the responsibility to make its life as good as possible. Even if the ending of that life is dinner.

The coworker also would "punish" animals by not filling their water if they knocked it over. Which, if you know anything about reptiles they are all still wild animals, they do not understand punishment. So the coworker would essentially be withholding water because a wild animal in a tank that was way too small for them knocked over a bowl.

This coworker also mentioned they didn't feel empathy, that was about a week before I left. I'm no therapist nor do I play one on TV but those are chilling words to hear from someone who could easily subdue you and knows what your car looks like.

Most of the time I was there I was completely ignored and then complained about behind my back. Mostly for things that were fairly irrelevant to my actual job performance and more, well I think it was probably the breasts to be honest.

One of my strengths at work is sales, but that was what the guys do. Another is fact retention for things I'm interested in, but I had no clue what I was doing and no one should listen to me.

The owner, had views. Those views were not remotely close to mine. Those views made me feel unsafe around him. He gladly expressed those views to anyone who listened. I'm not talking conservatism, I'm talking truly terrifying takes on what is happening in the world. This included blocking my exit from a boiler room so he could tell me about his fantasy of shooting "gang members in the city". Which was not a dog whistle but a full on siren with the rest of the context of the conversation.

Every day I would finish cleaning and feeding the animals in boarding and on the floor and then I had to go in to his office to do the work on his personal collection. He typically sat there in his underwear smoking a cigarette and yelling at (with?) Fox News.

Now of course at this point I was as actively looking as I could manage. It was becoming dire, I felt unsafe and I knew that I was experiencing illegal things, but these people were scary. The people who came around as customers were scary. Small business culture has always been more casual and sometimes very inappropriate, but this was something that if I didn't live it I wouldn't have believed it. If it was a TV episode or a movie I would have said the writers put a little too much in to make it believable.

Since I always try to look at the bright side, and these are not my only stories from this place, I will let you know what I learned. I learned that the reptiles I have will be my last because I no longer think it's ethical to keep them at all. They will have the best life I can give them but I cannot in good conscience continue to keep them without what would amount to a small zoo.

I learned an awful lot about rat genetics as I was tasked with breeding "pets". I am sorry to say that the pet rats never got advertised or sold so that was a lot of research down the drain.

Mostly I learned to trust my gut, that when I have the bad feeling about something it's usually right.

I also made one friend, who looked around and saw the same kind of horror show I was seeing, that everyone else in the building seemed to miss.

On my way out for the last time I grabbed my favorite rat mom to bring to a rescue. If I could I would have gotten everyone out of there, but I knew would have obsessed over it if I didn't get Mittens out of there.

So off to a new adventure, greener pastures, less toxic environments.

Trust your gut, really consider if you have the space and resources before taking on an exotic animal, and if your boss calls you "girl" get out of there.