Home Depot: Part 2

I’d always had a bit of an aggressive streak. Pretty much always. I could pretend that’s a symptom of all the trauma from my childhood, but I know it’s not. Nothing really terrible happened until I was 5, a few months before I moved in with my mom and her boyfriend, and I had an aggressive streak before that too. In preschool I would get in trouble for bossing other kids around and yelling at them when they wouldn’t listen to me. So there’s nature and nurture and being a tad aggressive is a nature thing with me.

But I guess to give you the full picture of the sort of aggressive I am, it’s like this. When I was maybe four, I got into this argument with another little girl because she wanted to wear my Barbie smock for art time. We argued back and forth and for some reason, the teacher gave the smock to her. It was my smock, so I don’t know why she did that. Well I tried to ignore the injustice of it all, until I was so livid I just couldn’t. I walked over, knocked the paint out of her hands and tried to physically remove the smock from her. I told her she was too fat to be pretty, so she didn’t need a pretty smock. She cried really hard and then I felt bad. I wasn’t allowed to do art the next day, so I asked the teacher if the other girl could wear my smock, since I was in time-out anyway.

So am I nice or mean? I’m both. I’m still pretty much exactly like I was back then. If you’re not listening to me or doing what I want, I’m likely to be very mean and aggressive, but for some reason, I’m always shocked when I’m able to hurt people’s feelings, and then I try to make it better however I can.

Should I have learned something in the past twenty-something years? Well, probably. I guess I’m a bit of a static character.

I don’t think I was ever quite AS aggressive until I worked at Home Depot.

Because I was aggressive to everyone. I was aggressive to the sorts of humans I was always a little gentler with. Look if you throw a bunch of aggression at a timid little shy person, well then you’re just a jerk. Then you’re just a bully. And even back in middle and high school when I was literally a bully, I couldn’t be mean to the girls who looked terrified that I was talking to them. I bullied the girls who could sort of hold their own against me. There was one mousy little thing in 10th grade. After my boyfriend and I broke up, he asked her out and I think she was afraid I’d try to come fuck her up or something. She quite obviously mustered up all her little courage to come find me at my locker and tell me she was dating him now. I hadn’t expected that, because she was so different than me, and I snapped on her. I yelled at her to get away from me and a few other choice words. And even then, I felt bad. I was heartbroken and I felt bad. She couldn’t match my energy. She was afraid of me, and maybe I like to fight, but I don’t like people to be afraid of me. It’s like…that expression, pick on people your own size. You know? Where’s the fun in fighting with people who are just gonna curl up in a ball and shake until you go away?

Well, at Home Depot, I became a workplace bully and everyone was fair game. Even the women who looked terrified I was talking to them. Even the men who looked terrified I was talking to them. And if I was a little gentler with shy meek women, I was always even more so with shy meek men. Except at Home Depot.

It started with this women whose job I wanted. Her name was Anna and she had an office in the back of the store. She worked regular hours, monday-friday. What a sweet fucking schedule. And everyone had so much respect for her.

“She’s a bitch, but she gets stuff done.”

“Anna will be really rude to you, but if you pretend you don’t notice, she can always fix any situation with an installer or customer.”

The store manager loved her. Everyone went to her with everything. She was the problem-solver of the store. She knew all the tricks. If I called her for anything, she would cut me off, snap at me, talk to me like I was an idiot.

She did it to everyone.

And everyone had so much respect for her.

I wanted that respect. I wanted it so much.

I tried to be as much like Anna as I could.

I was mean. I talked down to people. I snapped at people. Rolled my eyes.

A new girl started at the service desk. A mousy little thing. The sort of person I would have been a little more gentle with in the past. I snapped at her, demanded to know why she was calling me, instead of trying to solve the problem herself. I located the PO within seconds. A customer very sarcastically said, “Thank you. Finally. Was it that hard?” I let him talk shit about this girl right in front of me. I felt bad, but that doesn’t matter, because i kept on being mean.

Within two years, I had Anna’s job. I got an office in the back of the store. I got regular hours Monday-Friday.

I was “unapproachable” “bitchy”.

Mean. I was mean.

That girl I was so mean to at the service desk quit a week later.

I think of that ASM who was so rude to me and how when he died I thought “He’s just an asshole who died.”

It would make sense if other people thought the same about me, if I died out of nowhere like he did. “Jen was just an asshole who died.”

And it also makes me think what was it that made him so mean? Was he trying to get something? Did he think he had to? Or was he like me, just always a little bit mean, turning the mean-ness up as high as it went so that you could get a little more money and a better schedule.

Well, I dunno.

It was nice to have weekends off. It was nice to have a desk and business cards. It was nice to feel like I did something.

It was nice to not be on the receiving end of that mean-ness. I know that’s very cliche. It is true though. If you’re not mean, other people are mean to you.

But also, that’s a shitty excuse, because like I said, I was always sort of like this.