Category Archives: Blog

Carpe Diem; or, Where I Was That Day

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You hear it asked, every now and then when September rolls around, the simple question: Where were you? If you lived through this day in 2001, the question needs no further explanation. It was my generation’s Kennedy moment. My father still talks about that, remembering tiny details as if it were yesterday. I completely understand. I fully get it. I still remember everything about my day on September 11th, 2001.

Looking back on it, I feel foolish. I wandered around the whole day in blissful denial. I didn’t even see a television or listen to the radio until I got home after school had let out that afternoon. Then reality struck with the force of a freight train. I saw a replay of the towers falling, and nothing was the same after that.

I was sitting in my first period study hall when one of my classmates stuck her head into the room to tell us that “a plane crashed into a column of the World Trade Center.” When I heard “column,” I dismissed the event entirely. “Oh, it’s nothing,” thinking a little Cessna had crashed into one of the exterior columns at the base of one of the buildings.

In the hour that followed, panic began spreading throughout the school. The teachers set up a teacher in the common area, but since all of my classes that day were in the opposite direction of that area, I never saw it. Parents began calling their children and rushing to pick them up. Over head, F-16 fighter jets roared into the skies from the nearby joint reserve base.

At the time, I didn’t think much of it, probably something overblown. Looking back on it now, though, I really wonder why the hell didn’t anyone snap me out of this fog of stupidity sooner? Around noon, my sister poked her head into my math classroom to tell me our mom had come to pick her up and wondered if I’d like to go home as well. I remember thinking, “Why? It’s not like we’re going to be doing anything today anyway.”

I don’t remember everything about that day. I don’t remember which teachers were still actually trying to teach their classes. I just remember the complete stupidity in which I went about my day. I was sixteen years old, drove an old, oversized truck, and was a complete, self-absorbed idiot. I kept myself on the periphery of events that day. By the time I left school, there weren’t many students left around. I drove home and blasted whatever classic rock I was listening to that day.

The television was on CNN in the living room at home. I rounded the corner from the den, looked up, and everything changed for me. I saw the first tower fall, not in the horror of real time, but in a replay, and I could not believe my eyes. I hated myself for my attitude all day. My heart broke for what had happened to those people, to my fellow citizens, to my country. I fell, both inside and out. Maybe I was lucky, having spared myself that pain all day, delaying the inevitable. I feel like it’s all so selfish. For the rest of that night and into the following day, I was as everyone else: numb.

The following summer, I went with my church’s youth group on a mission trip to New York City. We worked in homeless shelters, soup kitchens, cleaning up avenue medians. One morning, we were invited to go up into the offices of an Episcopal bishop down near Battery Park. His windows overlooked Ground Zero. There had been a rumor swirling that this invitation had been extended to us, but no one either knew or would say so for sure. As we went to that part of the city, we were consumed by a nervous energy. We would finally be brought face-to-face with the horrors that had consumed us that day.

And it was…nothing. It was essentially a construction site, by that time, earth movers maneuvering around a massive crater where the towers once stood. If you hadn’t seen the news, it wouldn’t have seemed like anything at all. If you hadn’t known they had ever been there, it wouldn’t have been anything to you at all. But I had seen them standing, and I had seen them fall, and so it was something to me.

In an instant, I recalled my first trip to the City a few years prior. We were there with my sister’s dance company for a cultural trip. During a walking tour through Chinatown and SoHo, we stopped on a corner, waiting to cross the street. My dad looked up and said, “Oh, look, the Twin Towers!” I looked up for a moment as well. There they were in the distance, gleaming in the sun. “Oh, yeah. That’s cool,” I said and then crossed the street.

Isn’t that amazing? How can you take such incredible buildings for granted like that? In my time on this Earth, one lesson seems to keep returning to me: Nothing is guaranteed. Jobs, buildings, lives can all be erased and relegated to memory in an instant and for no discernible reason. Enjoy it all and appreciate and learn what you can while you can. That’s all that I know. One day, perhaps I’ll even take fully to heart. If I could get tattooed, I’d have “carpe diem” written somewhere on me to remind myself to actually seize the damn day.

It’s hard to believe it’s been seventeen years. My view here at the airport is so different. The skies are grey and hazy. A light rain is falling steadily. The air is cool. Perhaps that’s fitting. Nobody wants the sun today anyway.

Anywho, that’s my tale of foolishness and stupidity that will forever mark my memory of this day.

-The Retail Explorer

Back to Being My Own Person; or, The Things I Have to Do to Forget About How Big of a Pain in the Ass You Are

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This goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: Working in the service industry is remarkably stressful. From dealing with regular duties to putting up with Shoppers all day, decompression is an absolute must. If you do a search for the hashtag “retailproblems”, you’ll get a good idea of the kind of crap we have to put up with on a daily basis. It’s staggering how terrible people can be without giving a damn about anyone else but themselves.

So, relaxation is of utmost importance. Unwinding is critical. Venting is a necessity. Every now and then, you hear comments complaining about how all we do is bitch on Twitter. There’s a phenomenal reason for this: If we said out loud half the things we tweeted about, we’d be fired in a heartbeat. We can be treated like shit, but we can’t return the favor. Fun double standard, isn’t it.

Anyway, when I clock out and pull into my driveway, the first thing I do is change clothes. You’d be surprised just how much that alone can help. Next step, I get out the booze. Usually, it’s a beer (being summer, my current favorite is Lienenkugel’s Summer Shandy), a scotch and soda (yes, I’m secretly an 80 year-old man), or an Arnold Palmer (yes, of course, with vodka; don’t be stupid). After that, I grab a book, followed immediately by my hammock. I then park myself in said hammock and the rest of the world can fade away.

Now, I don’t do this every night, or as often as I’d like, for that matter, but I at least do one or two of these things every night. Finding activities that you enjoy that boost your well being are as important as eating and breathing, because if you can’t let off that steam, you will explode, and it will not be pretty. You don’t want to be the one who ends up on local news for yelling at and strangling a Shopper.

Regardless of how you do it, just take the advice of Jimmy Buffett: Close the world at five and go away. How do you unwind after a hard day?

-The Retail Explorer

Need; or, Inigo Montoya Calls B.S.

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Beautiful inigo montoya meme Demystifying Chicken Picking Fretboard Anatomy

It’s because they don’t know what it means.

If I could put my finger on the most overused word in my store, it would be “need”. I hear it every single day, and it is never used correctly. “Need” is defined as “to be in want” or “to require.” It’s simple but always misused. The word has a connotation of importance to it. When you say you need something, you are required to have it; you have to have it. To the Shopper, however, this is not always the case, as “need” is constantly downplayed to something along the lines of “I’m required to have this for my studies, but only if it’s not too expensive.” At that point, “need” becomes “nah,” and I commence with the eye-rolling.

More often than not, I’ll get a phone call looking for a product of which they are in need, or they’ll wander into the shop needing something immediately, only to have them either not collect said item or put it back and not purchase it because they deem it not worthy of the price. If you truly needed the item, you would have picked it up ASAP and purchased it regardless of price.

Now, I get it; people want the best bargain they can find. I can’t blame them for that, but it’s not like they’re getting gouged here and can find these items for half the price we sell them. So, what gives? Why does this keep happening? Here’s my theory.

Part of it is based on circumstances. The bottom line is, and I cannot stress this enough, aviation is expensive. All of it. From training, to maintenance, to management, to ownership, it’s all fucking expensive. Many people come into this field with incredible misconceptions, and they’re shocked when they understand the truth: Everything in aviation is expensive. If you cannot afford to do it, or arrange funding to do it, DON’T DO IT. Aside from instructor fees and plane rental fees and class fees, there’s always supplies to buy.

The other part of it is ego. The Shopper always thinks he can get a better deal elsewhere, and thanks to places like Amazon, that’s often the case. Here’s the bottom line with that though: You may find a better price, but you’ll have to still pay for shipping and then you have to wait for it to arrive. Want it there sooner? Well, then you’ll pay even more. At that point, I want you to stop and think about just how good of a deal you got online and whether or not, all things considered, it’s still worth all that. Or you could come to my store, buy it for our price, and take it home today where you can begin to use it. The choice is the Shopper’s.

Honestly, we don’t give a crap which way you go. We’re just annoyed by the semantics of it all. Don’t come in saying you “need” something only to turn around and not buy it for one reason or another. Why does that get under our skin? Well, we’re taught certain skills as customer service agents, among which is to assist the customer as best we can and with relative urgency. So, when a customer comes in throwing around the word “need”, it signals to us that help should be given because the customer is seeking an item of importance.

Here’s an example. What’s the difference here: “I need a sectional chart for Chicago,” and “I’m looking for a sectional chart for Chicago.” Which sounds more urgent? While both sound equal in requiring an employee’s attention, the use of “need” clearly elevates it. There is the indication that the shopper requires this item for their life to function properly (in this case, for them to be able to fly around the Chicago area without potentially getting fined by the FAA or busted by an examiner on a check ride). Now, if they turn up their nose at the price, and decline to purchase the chart, then you know they’ve lied to you about it. They didn’t need it after all.

And maybe that’s what really annoys me about the use of the word, similarly to how people get annoyed about using “literally” and “figuratively” interchangeably. (If Merriam-Webster says it’s fine, I can deal.) If you tell me you need something, and then you don’t purchase that something, you didn’t need it, so why say that at all? Don’t corner yourself into something and then not do it. It’s grating, disingenuous, and wasteful. All it does is make us want to help you less, because now, we know that you don’t mean what you say, or know what words mean, for that matter. It does one thing for us: It helps cement in our minds that you will not provide us with a good experience.

We don’t forget the customers who give us bad experiences. When we see them coming, we know to brace for the worst. You only get one chance to make a first impression, and if you’re just going to squander that and give us the runaround, that’s what we’ll expect from that point forward. Why should we look at it any other way? Should we be optimistic that it was an aberration and look forward to helping you in the future? Probably, but we’ve all been broken and jaded by a history of customers like you (and much, much worse) that there is no hope for you. Is that a bad attitude to have? Yeah, it is, but we don’t let it affect us; in fact, you’ll never even know the difference. Because we are, after all, professionals. So, choose your words wisely, for they will be used against you in the court of retail public opinion.

-The Retail Explorer