If You Give A Customer A Coupon (How to Be a Good Customer - Part 2)

Almost 2 years ago, I posted on my old blog some advice for being a good customer. Re-reading it, it all still holds true, although at the time, it was written from the perspective of a cashier at a farm supply store. Now that I am back in retail (this time at a lingerie & loungewear store - thank god) after having been stuck at a desk job for a year, I am unpleasantly reminded of all the little nuances of working in retail that I had forgotten.

Especially...

Coupons.

The idea of coupons are pretty simple. I scan it, it's applied to the transaction, you get a deal. Everything's cool.

That's the best-case scenario though, really.

Here's a neat little fact: The transaction does not end at the printing of the receipt; it ends the second you run your card. Once you have either swiped or inserted the chip, you have agreed to pay as much money as I, and the computer, have told you that you owed.

A coupon will change that amount. Therefore, it's very important to apply the coupon before you agree to pay the amount.

It's amazing to me how many people don't understand this.

The items are rung.
Payment is processed.
Items are bagged.
Receipt is printed.

"Did you get my coupon?"

Oh yeah, the one you didn't tell me you had? Sure, of course, working this minimum wage retail job gives me magic all-knowing psychic powers and I can always tell automatically when someone has a coupon.

Here's another fun little tidbit: I'm not allowed to offer you every discount in the book. The fact that I'm hired is already costing the company money, so my job is to make them more money by selling things as fairly as possible so that they can break even. It is entirely your job to find the discounts. If you think you might have a reward from the loyalty program, ask before you run your card.

ESPECIALLY if your transaction was an exchange.

Because, when we inevitably go back and return the whole thing (funny thing - you can't return a return - and, also, returns impact the sales reports negatively, because this is a small boutique, not a mega corporation), you're going to ask why the amounts are different.

That doesn't seem right, you say. That's returning more money than I paid.

First of all, why would you turn that down? Second of all, yes, because the value of the return affected your subtotal the first time around. You bought an amount of merchandise that was worth more than what you paid, because you also returned things in the same transaction.

I can see that now, in retrospect. But, at the time, it's half an hour until we close, it's the end of our shifts, we're tired, we're under pressure, and we're confused, and we're trying to figure out why the totals are different, because all we want is for you to be happy.

So we spend twenty whole minutes trying to explain to you how this works and why we need to do two separate transactions to do the return and then buy back the merchandise. The coupon specifies a dollar amount, and it will therefore not work if we do all the returning and then the re-ringing to come out to zero.

It takes forever. I've asked for your phone number for rewards four times now. I've memorized it (because I gather you're also the type to get uppity about putting stuff on your loyalty account, which is something I detailed in my first post). My manager wants to go home, I want to go home, you want to leave, nobody is having a good time, but we're trying to figure it out with sympathy and with cheerful attitudes, because that's our job.

You turn to your friend and stage whisper, "They'd better hope I don't review them this time," as if we're not human beings with feelings that can be hurt. As if we're not people who have jobs we need to keep to pay our bills.

Twenty minutes, three transactions, and five printed receipts later, and you seem to finally be somewhat satisfied.

All of that.

For.

Twenty.

Dollars.

Off a $200 purchase.

Good for you.

The moral of this very true and very recent story is to ask for coupons at the beginning of the transaction. And if twenty dollars matters enough to you to make that much effort to get it back because you missed an opportunity to use a coupon, maybe you shouldn't be spending $200 on lingerie.

When you run your card, it's too late.

If you can't make your own hope, store-bought is fine

I'm at a low point in my life right now. Like, right smack in the middle of rock bottom... again. I've been here before. It's a horrendously painful, yet familiar feeling.

It's at this point a lot of people would turn to religion. I've felt it. I've wanted to believe that someone somewhere is looking out for me and has a divine reason that I'm suffering like I am.

The problem is, I know praying doesn't work. I know that because I've prayed to every deity listening that I just miraculously won't wake up tomorrow. Or ever again. 

It hasn't worked. Obviously. I'm still here. Not only that, but I haven't gotten any response whatsoever, so either whoever is listening doesn't care, or they just don't exist.

I know nothing great will ever happen if I don't work towards making it happen. The problem is, I don't know what the goal is, and I therefore don't know what to do to make it happen.

Right now, the goal is ultimately death, right? You work and you live until you're old, and then you die. So my Depression's reasoning is, why not just speed up the process and die right now?

Except I don't want to kill myself. It doesn't seem easy and it doesn't seem like a fun time no matter what method I choose, and the goal really isn't great enough to be worth the effort if it's just going to happen anyway eventually.

So now, the only option really is just to wait until someone tells me what to do with my life. I need someone to come to me with a big exciting opportunity. Because I have no fucking idea what I want. Goal-setting has always been a challenge for me. I'm not a goal-oriented person. I don't have goals. Whether they were tasks assigned to me or just things I enjoyed doing, I've always just done things, with no ends to the means. I never bothered with ends, because the thing about ends, are that once they're over, they don't matter anymore because they're over. They're in the past. Hakuna matata.

I have a psych eval scheduled for next week. They're going to put me back on medication. Part of me is afraid that all the medication is going to do is make me complacent to live a life that's not worth anything, that doesn't mean anything. Maybe that's fine. Maybe it really is all my broken brain that's telling me that everything sucks. Or maybe I'm too smart and observant for my own good - ignorance is bliss, right?

So basically, I'm just living off of everybody else's hope that things will get better for me. People tell me that all the time: "People love you. You have friends and family who care about you. You have a job. Things will get better."

In terms of personal faith-levels, I'm running on empty. But the fumes that keep me going on the basest level are the simple fact that I can't die, because that would disappoint a few people. And I live to please.

This post isn't motivational. There's no happy ending here. I'm just sad and angry and pissed off and I just want life to get better for once.

(Late) New Years Resolutions

I'll be the first to admit that New Years Resolutions are overhyped most of the time. "New year, new me" is a phrase that is dismally overused compared to how much the intention behind it is actually acted upon, which is frustrating to me, because I am a huge supporter of the theme of it. Introspection and changing yourself for the better are two things that are very important to me, and I think it's an incredibly valuable skill to have to be self-aware and work on improving yourself to be the best version of yourself you can be. A new year is a perfect excuse to do that.

I'm getting started on mine kinda late, but it's really better late than never. I don't have to wait for another new year, I can just do it now. That's the beauty of being a human being with the freedom to do virtually whatever I want.

I've decided I'm going to speak up more. OCD has majorly hindered my creativity and my self-expression. I often get stuck in feedback loops in my head, wondering if what I'm about to say is worth the effort, if what I've already said made any positive impact, whether or not I got my point across adequately and/or coherently.

The problem is, I've seen way too many people share the same thoughts that I've had myself on a public forum, and get lots of praise and attention for it. It might be vain, but I don't necessarily think it's wrong of me to want that kind of validation and positive attention. I do want people to see me and notice me, but at the same time I also want to be able to make connections with people and reach out in whatever way I can to positively make an impact on someone's life, even if it's in a tiny way.

I've decided to adhere to the philosophy of, "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take". Because even if I take a shot and it misses, at least I'm not missing out on the chance of it being a bullseye. At least I'll end up with a solid knowledge of the outcome.

I have major anxiety over being perceived as creepy just for talking to somebody innocuously, and I think my biggest hurdle is going to be to try to get past that. I have made strides in this area though, and so far I have sparked a very close friendship over it. Being the one to initiate conversation is extremely liberating when the other person is receptive to it, and I'm trying to focus on that rather than the feeling of rejection which was what was holding me back previously. There really isn't any harm in just telling someone you're a fan of their art, or you think they're cool and you hope they have a great day. They don't even need to respond. At least you made an effort to make their day a little better.

Right now I kind of feel like I'm at war with myself. I've been off my medication for a few months because of insurance issues, and the days which I describe as "Bad Brain Days" have been very common. In fact, the one I'm in right now has lasted for more than a few days, and I'm fighting furiously to get through it with aggressive positivity and optimism.

It's all a process. But then again, really, isn't life?

Persistence (the Bad Kind)

The Dream is coming back, stronger than ever.

I got let go from my job back in December, and while I've never looked back, I've been unemployed for far too long now. I've piled up more debt. I'm hiding from several people. And in times like this, I turn to my fantasy of running away.

I haven't checked my email in a long time. I opened the browser window to find the most recent one when I applied for state health insurance and saw that I had over 160 unread emails, and I just don't have the willpower to go through them. I don't have the strength to be berated by CapitalOne for not making my payments and my credit score going down as a consequence. I don't have the mental capacity to visualize exactly how far overdrawn my checking account is from bills I had set up to auto-pay. I just can't.

My excuse is, I can't "right now". But It's been like that for a month, and I don't know when "right now" is going to end, or if it ever will. In fact, my need to run away is making me consider setting up an entirely new email account just to get out from under it.

Suicidal ideation is a product of a very bad mixture of currently-untreated mental illness and current events. I wouldn't have to deal with this if I were dead.

That part scares people when I mention it. I've been shamed into keeping those thoughts to myself. When, really, if I don't talk about them in a casual setting, it makes me feel worse about having them at all. I'm never going to act on them. One could argue, however, that there's no point in bringing it up if they don't affect you to the point of consideration.

That being said, consideration and desire are two very different things to my OCD. Is it true that death is technically a way out of hardship? Yes. Do I want to kill myself? Absolutely not. Ultimately, my want to live is greater than my want to die, and the cons otherwise heavily outweigh the pros. I love my family too much to nonconsensually dump the consequences of my shitty decision-making on them. But the obsessive-compulsive part of me has to consider every option for some kind of debate. And I always have to have plans A-Z prepared, just in case mania strikes and I do something stupid and harmful and act on some random impulse that crosses my monkey brain.

One of these days, I'm sure I'll learn how to face my problems like a real adult, but right now, turning to the fantasy of flight is immensely comforting when I need it the most.

I've been looking at places I could trade my car in for a cargo van.

Self-Heartbreak

I have this really bad habit of holding in my feelings when they're about other people. A worse habit is falling in love with people who actually don't know I exist.

I can be deeply in love with and desperately pining for somebody on the inside, but the way I end up expressing that is by running away, and avoiding any and all interpersonal contact with that person until the feeling hopefully wears off.

However, by myself, without them around, my mind ends up creating complex dream scenarios where the subject and I are together, in a healthy, happy relationship, and they are in love with me just as much as I am in love with them.

This method helps me bypass harsh realities. It's a coping mechanism to avoid heartbreak at the hands of this person. Because I know that I am capable of feeling and showing an astronomical amount of love, and it's possible that it can push someone away.

My love doesn't die easily. I know that consciously, and so when I realize fully that I don't just have a crush on this person, and that I actually am in love with them, it's probably just as painful. Because I know my habits, I know my behaviors, and the pattern shows that this will inevitably end in heartbreak.

There is another flaw with this, one that I guess I forget: These people about which I feel this way also feel love and affection... for other people.

Jealousy is all too familiar to me. More than once, I've avoided the object of my feelings until they start dating someone else.

The worst part is when they're so incredibly happy together, and I can see the fantasy that I've built up in my head for so long being acted out in front of me, but by somebody else.

And then I can feel the envy crawling around inside me like I swallowed a centipede whole, eating me from the inside out - taking a bite out of my lungs when I see she's more attractive than I am, my intestines when she's more successful, my stomach when they look at each other and smile because they can't help it. She has what I don't. What I couldn't have because of myself.

That hurts more, I think.

My feelings of inadequacy all come crashing down at once. Not only that I'm not as good as she is, as beautiful, or as talented; but also because I'm too much of a coward to go achieve this for myself. I've only been rejected once, because I've only ever tried once. And I think I probably still blame that one time for all the subsequent heartbreaks I've brought upon myself, because he made me too scared to try again.

More inadequacy attacks from the sides as the fact sneaks up on me that I hate that I feel this way in the first place. I really do love him, and I want him to be happy. I want the very best for him in every situation. So then I feel like a shitty person for being jealous, because in this case, she's the best for him. But then it becomes a cycle. Why couldn't I be the best for him?

Feelings-wise, things look grim for the immediate future. Because I know that I'll continue to torture myself by looking at pictures of them together and imagining myself in her position. I'll continue to write speculative fiction, I'll continue to seethe and writhe and melt away in a vat of my own self-pity because I don't know how to cope with such an intense amount of jealousy. And I'll hate every single moment of it.

A Vicious Cycle (What It's Like to Have OCD)

One of my biggest anxieties surrounds the idea that I'm an attention whore.

I know exactly where it comes from: Years and years of an abusive sibling commanding attention from our shared single parent. Depression causing me to withdraw, and having an ambiverted personality thats craving for human interaction would cause the withdrawing to have harmful effects. Somewhere deep inside of me is a part of myself that believes that a person's attention is finite, and any amount that gets paid to me is taken away from something else that probably deserves more.

The problem is, that "something else" isn't identified, nor is it really identifiable. I just spent so much of my life with that lurking Thing that needed the attention, and if it wasn't received, bad things would happen.

I guess part of cognitive behavioral therapy here is realizing that those bad things would have happened whether or not it got what it asked for. It wasn't my fault for receiving attention that could have been directed at the Thing, like a sacrificial virgin offered to a volcano god with the hope that an inevitable eruption wouldn't occur.

Nevertheless, I still grew up with that anxiety looming over my shoulder. I was quiet and shy because I didn't want any undeserved attention. And then the anxiety evolved and worsened when I started worrying over the fact that my mere existence, especially being as quiet and shy as I was, was burdensome. I was excess weight, taking up space, because I wasn't providing enrichment for the atmosphere.

I'm not quiet because I don't have anything to say. I'm quiet because I'm worried that what I have to say isn't good enough. Any time I pause, or hesitate, or have long periods of silence during a conversation, I'm either beating myself up over saying the wrong thing, or I'm obsessing over what to say next, making absolutely sure that what's going to come out of my mouth deserves the attention it's going to get.

Of course, it's never going to be good enough in my personal opinion, but pushing forward despite that fact is a behavior that I'm still learning. Unlike my bipolar, which I'm used to because I've had it for so long, obsessive compulsive disorder is a new diagnosis, only having come up in the past couple of months.

My obsessions come in so many different forms, but they all have the same thing in common; my mind gets caught up on an idea and repeats it, over and over again, until I'm sick of it, until it's the only thing present in my conscious mind, because for whatever reason, my disorder has claimed it to be the most important thing right now.

Intrusive thoughts run rampant. The worst one I've had has scared me to tears, and it just came up out of nowhere one day: I wonder what it would be like to get run over by a train. Specifically, how it would feel to lie down on the track, to have my head positioned on the rail just so, to have the wheel helped by the force and the speed and the weight of the train to rip the skin off my face before shattering my cheekbone, my nose, my eye socket, and crushing the pieces of my skull into my brain before losing consciousness and dying.

Why did I think of this? Who knows. But it haunted me for weeks because I didn't know how to rid myself of the thought.

Similar thoughts have caused me to pull off the highway while driving before: You are in complete control of your actions and your movements. At any time, you could step on the gas and steer into oncoming traffic, almost certainly killing both yourself and the driver of the car you hit. There's nothing stopping you but yourself. Are you strong enough to stop yourself?

Are you sure?

Most of the time, I am. And I can turn up the volume on the stereo, paying attention to the lyrics as I belt them, and continue to drive safely.

But sometimes, I'm not. And I pull over, and I sit in my car, and I squeeze my eyes shut until I see fireworks, and I cry, and I try to think of other things. The train thought. Anything else. Just let me get home.

They really are random. I painted my room two weeks ago and I imagined chugging the paint straight out of the bucket so fast it would fill up my stomach and my esophagus and it would harden and I would suffocate and die. Although logically I know that's highly improbable - the poisoning would almost certainly get to me before the paint had time to harden.

Take a bite out of the abdomen of your cat. Feel the blood rush from the open wound. Taste the raw meat. See his guts spill out as he looks at you with utter betrayal before dying at your hand. You could do that at any moment. Sure, you love him. But do you love him enough to stop yourself?

Are you sure?

Things like that.

I think part of my subconscious believes that I'm not worthy of good attention because the fact that I consider these things makes me some kind of monster. The fact that I ward them off and negate them with counter-thoughts means nothing, since they have to come from somewhere. The subconscious is a gateway into a person's soul, right?

I'm not blind to the irony in the fact that I've counseled others on feelings of inadequacy and guilt from craving validation. Logically, I know it's human to want to share experiences. I'm interested in others; I want others to be interested in me too. And it often feels like the latter isn't the case. Like I'm just there to provide validation for others and not to receive it in return.

It's tiring. And the more tired I get, the more I withdraw, and the more opportunities I diminish for myself to find someone who will validate me.

It's not selfish, it's human. But that thought process is something that's much, much easier said than done.

What it's Like to Have Bipolar

I don't consider myself a very easily offended person. I'm sure most people don't, but compared to a lot of people in today's sociopolitical climate, I really objectively am not. Despite this, of course, I always do try my absolute best not to hurt anybody for the sake of comedy. It's possible, guys. John Mulaney does it.

I was diagnosed with bipolar II disorder when I was 16 years old. I had been on antidepressants for almost two years, which have been known to exacerbate symptoms of bipolar in those who have it. And that's exactly what happened to me.

I hear a lot of people use the term "bipolar" very unsparingly. Anybody with mood swings, or who is known for being flaky, or who changes their mind a lot, is called "bipolar", and, in the same breath, written off as crazy. This doesn't offend me; I'm not hurt by their use of this language. It's also not my fault I have bipolar. It's genetic. It's especially prominent among the women in my family, so the odds weren't really in my favor there. It has affected me, though, in that I'm often afraid of telling people about my mental illness, because I don't want to be avoided and pushed away because of a predisposition that I was born with that I can't control. I want to be treated like a normal person.

As such, I wanted to write this as a reference to try to erase some of that stigma, and possibly spur someone who feels this way to seek help. I've been there. Lots of people have. And, in my experience, it's comforting, when you feel as crazy as you tend to sometimes, to know that there's a name for the thing you're experiencing, and that there's treatment and help available.

So. First let's define some things.

Bipolar disorder in general is characterized by periods of mania contrasted by periods of depression. There are two types of bipolar, simply identified as bipolar I and bipolar II. The difference between them lies in the severity; namely whether they have mania or hypomania.

The symptoms of mania are where the bipolar stereotypes come from. When you're manic, your mood switches rapidly from easy triggers, and sometimes for seemingly no reason at all, because every emotion you're feeling is extremely strong, and they're all fighting for a hand on the wheel at the same time. Mania is loud. It's fast. It's big, and it's intense. And it's incredibly scary, because you have no idea which emotion is going to be triggered next, or what it's going to make you want to do. You don't know if you're going to do something dangerous because of a sudden rush of ecstatic adrenaline that makes you feel immortal and invincible. You have no clue if and when you're going to want to hurt someone else out of rage, or hurt yourself out of sadness or guilt. And the worst part is, you feel entirely capable of anything, from deep-cleaning your entire house to assassinating the president. It takes an incredible amount of psychological power to filter those urges as they come to you as rapidly as they do, because you feel so very capable of anything, and as a result, your conception of consequences is skewed. Sexual hyperactivity and promiscuity are very common because the idea of feeling good dramatically outweighs the thought of getting hurt.

Bipolar I has mania, while bipolar II has hypomania -- I have the latter. Hypomania is marginally less severe than mania; I am less likely to go on a coke binge during a hypomanic episode than Charlie Sheen is during a manic episode. I've never killed anybody (of course, not to say that people with bipolar I are more or less likely to be murderers). But I have hurt myself, and I've hurt others, out of a pure knee-jerk reaction to a sudden unexplainable rush of emotion.

Depression, on the other hand, is the part that a lot of people are more familiar with. It's the part of bipolar that isn't obvious or sometimes even visible at all. It's not the same as being really sad. Anybody with regular old clinical depression could tell you that. In fact, when you're depressed, actually feeling sad would be a breath of relief.

The best analogy I've seen is that depression is the emotional equivalent of watching paint dry. Where mania is feeling everything at once, depression is feeling nothing at all. It's a void. It's a vacuum where stimulus goes to die. Depression is an existential nothingness that's so deep it hurts, but you can't find the strength or the energy to care. When you're depressed, you feel empty and without substance. Nothing feels real, or if it does, it's not important. Within that, too, it's not exactly that nothing matters, it's that nothing that you logically know that matters is worth the energy that it takes to care. Logic and execution are at war with each other. You know you need to shower. You know it's important. But you don't do it, and you put it off for a week, and it's 6 pm and you haven't eaten, and you're sitting around in your bedroom, starving and filthy, because you just don't care. You can't care.

Lots of people who experience depression also give the analogy of drowning. And, without actually having drowned before, it's about the closest you can get. You're suspended in nothing with no way out. Trying to breathe is useless because you know it's not worth anything. But you can't escape, so you just sit there, motionless, waiting for the release of death.

When you've analyzed your behaviors and your emotional responses long enough, you can see the episodes coming. You start preparing your more strict self-control measures in identifying the precursors of your mania, like a werewolf chaining itself up before the full moon. The dread is palpable in the ache that spreads across your entire body as you crash into depression like a hangover. And the miniscule amounts of time spent in between the extremes of the roller coaster give you nothing more than a painful grasp at normalcy.

Having bipolar is like being on a beach in the middle of winter, where huge tidal waves come and overtake you, knock you around, and then leave you cold and shivering, almost wanting to be back in the relentlessly powerful water just to feel something again. There's rarely any balance where the tide ebbs and flows steadily and gives you time to adjust. With bipolar, it's either everything or nothing, and you don't have the power to choose.

It's also not helpful to get words of support, however well-meaning, from people on a beach in Jamaica who tell you how they understand how you're feeling because one time the tide was unexpectedly low at night and they got a little chilly. Especially because it came back evenly at one point, and they had the sunlight to warm them the whole time. Even the people on the shore of Alaska, who are freezing all the time, don't have the experience of a foundation-shaking tsunami. And surfers on Venice Beach don't feel the effects of the cold.

You can't control the wave patterns. But you can control how you handle yourself in them. Therapy teaches you how to right yourself and how to swim, while there are medications that give you steadying weights so that you at least know where you are. Sometimes the addition of an antidepressant can give you an extra layer of a wool coat so that the cold absence feels less like hypothermia. But nothing will give you gills. You just need to learn how to control your breathing so that you can survive, if only for the sole purpose of proving that you can.