(Psst, audio version here.)
In college, I worked part time as a pharmacy technician. It was a shitty job that probably gave my mom a lot of false hope. She probably thought that my extreme and constant proximity to prescription medications would get me hooked on drugs — like, in the good kind of way. Like, in the oh, I’m so addicted to working in health care and letting old white bigots yell at me all racistly kind of way.
Unfortunately, it cruelly didn’t work out for her, and she will never get to pretend to be chill and cool as she proudly says “my daughter, the doctor” to another soul, ever ever ever ever.
I quit Rite Aid the moment I graduated from college and gleefully let my tech license burn to the fucking ground. (I didn’t pay the $40 a year required to renew it.)
However, I did not quit before I fought tooth and nail for the pay increase I deserved.
When I started at Rite Aid, it was my first real job ever. My only experience with work prior to that was my dad paying me and my sister $3 an hour to paint an entire fucking house.
My Vietnamese parents — who fled Vietnam by boat as refugees in the early 1980s — were incredibly protective and incredibly paranoid. They always walked around acting super convinced that we were constantly just two microscopic decisions away from being sexually assaulted, two missteps away from becoming teenage pregnant, two whiffs away from being ass-deep in a mountain of cocaine.
They worked really hard to shelter us, protect us, and to not let anything distract us from school because they accurately saw education as a permanent entryway toward freedom, and they were so scarred and haunted by the denial of their own educations and the denial of their own futures because a government was hostile to who they were as a people. A consequence of having the constant weight of shitty memories pushing down over their heads all the time — was that they worked really hard to make their children want for nothing.
Well, I wanted to get the fuck out from under their oppressive presence. I had gone through high school watching a lot of my peers have part-time jobs and develop all of these social skills — while I still a fucking painfully shy and weird little freak who had a hard time looking people in the eye. Like, even at the young age of 18, I knew that something was off about me and I needed to rectify it, for the sake of my future adult self.
I begged my mom to tell my dad to let me have a fucking job so I could learn to not be such a fucking weirdo.
My dad was totally scared I’d get high on making minimum wage and would respond with, “Fuck college!” as a result. He was a firm no on the job for a long time, for that reason.
Until he relented.
Look, it’s been so long that I can’t remember anymore, why my dad caved. I like to imagine that at one point, he got struck with clarity and bolted up in bed — at like three in the morning. And he was probably like, “Tâm, wake up! I’ve realized that I’ve been completely batshit psychotic with Thanh and Thy. It’s time to let go of my vice grip on them.”
(Tâm is my mom’s name. Thanh is my name. Thy is my sister’s name.)
I started my first real job scared of everything. I was scared of messing up the cash register. I was scared of running out of change. I was scared I’d have too many pennies. I was scared I would do math wrong and cost Rite Aid money. I was scared I’d embarrass myself and everyone would know I have never had a job before. I was scared of every single customer. I was scared of all of my coworkers. I was scared of my managers. I was scared of not knowing when it was okay to clock out for the day — like before or after the till is reconciled because sometimes stuff like that is kindaaa ambiguous — and I was scared to ask for clarity.
Some customers were nice. Others were terrible. And in the beginning, I absorbed it all — their appreciation, their apathy, and their disdain — with wide eyes and a lot of frightened silence. I was scared when people were nice to me. Because I didn’t know what things to say back to them.
Because it was my first job, I took in a lot of toxic and abusive shit as normal. Like, I thought it was normal for my boss to yell at me over nothing — just because she was having a bad day. I also thought it was normal that my coworkers just opted not to do work and left work behind for me because I was a meek little bitch who just did their work for them because what else am I supposed to?
I thought it was normal to constantly take abuse from customers — because you know who the happiest people are?
Yes. Addicts who are told that they have to wait fifteen minutes for their drugs.
Yes. White women who think that having a child with a cold means they can cut to the front of the line because what they are going through is more important than what the man dying of cancer is going through.
Yes. Everyone who shows up without their insurance card and then responds with an insane amount of outrage when you shyly tell them you can’t fucking pull their insurance information from out of your fucking butthole.
I thought it was normal to be told that my dignity didn’t matter from a corporation that thought I deserved to be dehumanized because they were annoyed their profits were being eaten into by mail-order pharmacies. I thought it was normal to watch a lot of customer service training videos teaching me to put up with white people who throw money at me like I am a dog.
I was so miserable in that job.
And when I expressed this to my parents — my mom was like, “Uh, what do you think work is? A party all day?” And my dad was like, “You think your job is hard? My job is actually hard.”
I eventually got good at the job. Like, very very good at it.
This was the very first instance of me becoming very good at something and then turning into a bit of an insufferable megalomaniac because of it. I didn’t know then — at 20 years old — that this would become a repeating pattern in my life.
I got really good at billing insurance and holding a rolodex of randomass insurance codes and stupid-illogical insurance-related information in my head. I got really good at memorizing stuff about drugs — their brand names, their generic names, their strengths, their manufacturers, where to find them on the shelf using just muscle memory. I got good at inventory — tracking it so I could order the right drugs on a weekly basis order to reduce overnight McKesson orders to save fucking Rite Aid some pennies because they were obsessed with squeezing out every bit of from the $12 an hour they were paying me.
I was better at my job than the people I was working with — and I started to really believe it and grow some confidence because of it. My mind started to get really wrapped up in the concept of fairness. Like, I started to qualify it as unfair and fucked up — that I was doing more in my part-time hours, compared to Pam who made more money and worked full time hours.
It was my first exposure to the concept of seniority — that people get paid more than you because they have been there longer.
Check it — I never expected to make more than Pam. Pam was probably making like, $14.50 an hour. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine my raise would get me up to $14.50 an hour.
I dreamed of $13 an hour though. I dreamed of a dollar increase on the eve of the anniversary of my getting hired.
It was my first raise ever! I didn’t know what the process was all about! I didn’t know if Randy, the store manager, was going to call me into the office one day to congratulate me and pour me a bottle of champagne, which I would have to kindly reject because I wasn’t 21 yet! I just didn’t know what was going to happen!
I tried to find out. I went around slyly asking my coworkers what I could expect. Like, what kind of raise did they get? They didn’t need to tell me a specific number, but! A percentage would be useful!
I think based on my casual polling, I was totally expecting a dollar.
So I was shocked when I ripped open the envelop that held my biweekly paycheck, the first one since my raise was slated to go through, and saw that my raise was 25 cents.
TWENTY-FIVE CENTS.
I fucking freaked the fuck out.
I started telling everyone about it. And I started telling everyone just how fucking pissed and unhappy I was about it. People could not escape hearing the story of the fucking injustice I had suffered. People at different pharmacies heard about it. The district manager would eventually hear about it.
And I didn’t know it at the time, but that also would become a repeating pattern of my work life — really annoying, really self-righteous, and really beautiful self-aggrandizement in the course of defending myself.
My immediate beef was with Randy. I remember literally stalking him around the store, as he was trying to speed-walk the fuck away from me. I remember being like, “What happened here, Randy?”
And he said some weakass useless lying shit about it. I can’t accurately recount what he said to you because I am really bad at listening to people that I strongly disagree with. I started tuning him out the second he started saying his fucking lies.
I started telling everyone that Randy was a bitch.
It was super unprofessional in hindsight. And I have no regrets!
And Randy put up with it and didn’t dole out any repercussions or correct me because he was a little bitch.
I started seeking out answers in other places. In the course of doing that, I discovered this incredibly common tendency in people when confronted with aggression or even just a sniff of tension and conflict:
They start mumbling. They start smearing their words together so that they are indecipherable.
People would explain my shitty raise and Randy’s part in it as, “You know, just blergh. Randy. You know? Gaaah.”
So I made things up in my head.
I decided that Randy was a fucking little bitch, and he fucking hated that I was better than him and that my life held so much more possibilities than his dead-end shit. I decided that Randy hated that I advocated for myself and overstepped and didn’t wait my place in line obediently and quietly.
Yo, so my very loud and incessant unhappiness made its way to Nirmal, our district manager who was way above Randy. I was very young at the time, so I didn’t really understand that it was bananas that the busy-as-fuck district manager got pulled into my shit, over 25 cents. His own salary was definitely over six figures. And he had to call me on the phone after work hours — because that’s when he had the time — to talk to me about the injustice I was dealing with.
I must’ve sounded so youthful to him. I must’ve sound so ridiculously young when I recounted everything to him and explained to him that I deserve more money for everything that I was doing.
On the phone, I believe Nirmal explained to me what a cost of living raise was.
And I probably was like, WHAT THE FUCK BUT I AM SPECIAL! about it.
I remember Nirmal sounding tired. I also remember him being a really good guy who was always stressed out. I remember him being like, “Stacy, I can get you up to $12.50 an hour. But you have to do more for $12.50 an hour. You’ll have to float.”
(Floating is basically being a traveling pharm tech. You bounce from pharmacy to pharmacy filling in for people who go on vacation or who are sick.)
This happened during my summer vacation, so I was like, “Cool! Deal! I will do it!”
I was so proud of getting myself a 50-cent raise instead of settling for just 25 cents, I was telling everyone about it!
And right now, I’m look back on the memory of that — and I’m trying to track down the exact feeling of it. I just keep thinking that I’m a little bit sad over it. Like, I will never be so fucking happy over such a little amount of money ever again. Like, I will never have all of this unencumbered time and vibrant energy to terrorize the fuck out of a middle-aged white man who, frankly, was just probably doing his job to the letter, non-exceptionally. I will never approach money in such a pure and innocent way ever again.
Like, there is a bit of loss here.
I regret that I didn’t savor it more. I think I did that thing that everyone who is 20 years old does — I kept looking forward and trying to transition to my future state unnaturally fast. And I didn’t understand how lovely it would have been, to linger and really be in those moments of flaw.
Like, I’m telling you this story, and I am cracking myself up. Because the more and more I force myself to recall the details, the more and more I realize how ridiculously hilarious I was at 20 years old. I realize how much fun I was having and how much learning I was subconsciously doing back then.
But the thing is, when I was 20, I didn’t think I was being hilarious at all. I didn’t think I was learning shit because I thought I already knew it all. I thought I was an adult, and I took myself super seriously.
And this should totally be a lesson I take and apply to the present, because in the present, I take myself very seriously all the time. And I really need be better at stopping myself in the middle of terrorizing someone to be like, “Hey, Stace, enjoy this, okay? Stop and smell the roses a bit right now.”
I just don’t want to be 60 years old, looking back on now, and feeling like I was so busy anticipating the future that I didn’t ever let myself enjoy the present, you know?
This is amazing. I too felt the injustice of a $0.25 pay raise courtesy of McDonald's when I was 16. I think it was my first realization that just being good at your job and following the rules didn't mean SHIT. I totally forgot what a blow that was until I read this! In retrospect, a great life lesson that I am honestly still learning because I seriously still feel I am special lol.