If these heels could talk...

If these heels could talk, oh the stories they would tell. I’ve always had a sore spot in my heart for retail and it takes back almost twenty years or so ago. Now at the grand age of almost thirty-five, I’ve taken sometime to look back, reflect and attempt to understand why I am sitting in the very chair I am today and what has shaped me into the person I am today. I asked myself the question many times, “is there any one thing that truly enhanced, proliferated, and was the driving force in pushing me forward? What remained constant?” The answer was Retail. The following story that you will read outlines my life, but it’s not an autobiography. It has some added fun exaggerations for your reading pleasure. I mean after all, whose life is really that interesting anyway. My hope in the end is that you, the reader, will be entertained and come away being able to read between the lines of the book and see the side of me I never knew myself existed till after writing these passages... So without further Adieu, this is my story.

My initial leap out on my own:

I moved to a small town in New Jersey and began working at a high-end retailer three miles from where I lived. I met my roommate from New Jersey on a social networking site. My mom and I were watching a documentary on child predators and just as I signed on, I see a woman’s profile pop up on my screen asking me to jump her car. Scared out of my wits I ran to tell my brother who was a cop that there was a woman who needed her car jumped. Mark was his name. He ran to the chance to help the damsel in distress and away he went! The damsel’s name was Kristy. Kristy and I became great friends and ended up living with one another just a few months later after I found out she owned a house in Northern New Jersey, which was only twenty minutes from New York City. It seemed like the best deal in the world. She let me set my rent rate, but little did I know there would be hell to pay for living there. I lived in the basement, and at first did not seem so terrible, perhaps because it was the summer and it was cool temperature wise. The winter came and I was frozen. There was no heat in that room. It looked like a room straight out of a horror movie, spiders, snakes and all. It was small, dark green, and tile floors and was about twelve feet across and the ceiling was six feet tall. Kristy had an extra upstairs but told me it would cost me three hundred more a month than I was paying to stay there. I simply could not afford to do that at the current moment. I was still working at the discount shoe retailer and was commuting over three hours round-trip each day for work. It was an arduous trip, but I needed to do it. Then I finally got the call! My dream job had returned my call! I had gone to this retailer in the city many years earlier and opened a credit card never thought I would ever end up working there. Everyone in there seemed so poised and had that certain Je ne sai quoi about them. I didn’t think I had the ability to be standing amongst such greatness. But like all things, once one gets involved in the actual task being involved with something, it completely demystifies the whole experience and it did exactly just that. It was a playground for me. The characters I met here were so diverse, but yet still had some similar qualities that one will find just about anywhere. It’s strange how you are often told when you are young, “no matter where you go you’ll meet the same people over again”, it’s so true!