My "Fatsuit" Experience

I organized a fund raising event, this past weekend, in collaboration with Marble Slab Creamery. They offer a 50% cut of total Saturday and Sunday net sales for any nonprofit organization that works in their store. It all came together after three weeks fo planning, poster-making, flier designing, duty delegating, and overall organization. I was very proud of the work I did and my meticulous preparation made Saturday's 3 hour shift seem like 3 minutes. At the end of the day, the store manager told us that we were on track to beat the record set by another club. I went home and created a Marble Slab jingle, wrote two more signs, and went to bed full of confidence.
I arrived at the store early Sunday morning and began to check people in. When 10AM rolled around I had already accumulated 12 people--the number of people who RSVPed their availability. Each person was given their duties and put to work.
If you're going to open an icecream business, let me give you a piece of advice: don't open on Sundays. Not only do people not want to buy icecream on the holiest day of the week but they get extra pissed if you screw up, as I found out soon enough. The lunch crowd started coming to buy icecream at about 12PM so all of our volunteers were forced to step up the pace. In the middle of the rush, a middle aged haole lady of stocky stature came into the store with her equally massive hubby trailing behind. A sophomore girl took her order but, forfeited the job to me because the icecream they wanted was too hard to scoop. She was so flustered from the rush of people that she mixed up the clients' orders--the lady wanted a banana-double-dark-chocolate-with-marshmallows-in-a-peanut-waffle-cone while the man opted for the double-dark-chocolate-with-walnuts-and-sweet-cream-in-a-waffle-bowl. *gasp gasp*. I ended up making two icecream orders that represented somewhere in between what they actually wanted. When I handed the lady her "order" she was furious! I apologized profusely but she responded by telling us that I had to start the order over again. This time I made the order correctly but the lady had words of advice for me before she pouted away. "You people should train your workers before they get started--the service was awful and I didn[‘t appreciate your attitude." It seemed as though the store was at a stand-still because everyone wanted to see what was going on. I apologized again but she turned her head in disgust, waving a “talk to the hand” in my direction, all the while muttering to herself about how rude and inconsiderate I had been.
There is no way to convey the emotions I felt at that moment. It was a cross between embarassment and anger, which I am not sure I was justified to feel. She should have known that we were a bunch of inexperienced high school Red Cross members who just wanted to raise money (there was a ton of signage going on outside the door) so I didn’t understand her strong reaction. My indignant attitude fought my feelings of humility so it was hard for me to grin and bear it. Some people have told me that I have attitude problems when I converse in everyday conversation (justified), but this was different because I had been perfectly courteous all weekend. Then it struck me...hard! I don’t know how it is for most people, but I know that I have been guilty of treating people in the food service industry with less than the respect they deserve. Not as ruthless as the lady had treated me, yet not as nicely as I might treat a friend. This is an ICM because it gave me perspective into the lives of working people who have constant contact with the public. Having never held a job of any kind in my life, it was a pretty shocking and eye-opening experience. I have stood by while my mother complained to our servers at restaurants, sometimes using tones that were less than courteous, but I didn’t have a chance to see it from the perspective of the worker. Sure, I felt sorry for them but nothing compares to experiencing it first hand.
In a way I am both grateful and upset about what happened that day. Grateful that I got a chance to get to know life from a different standpoint, but upset that this kind of thing happens everyday. From that moment on I decided to be more conscious of the way I treat people, whether they stand behind the counter or on duty. A persons identity is more than just their ethnicity or gender, etc. Not having held a job before made me realize that you take on another aspect of your identity when you start working. People can now judge you on your job’s prestige and performance in that job. Remember the Tyra Banks's famous "fat suit" experiment, in which the supermodel mogul “fattened” up for a stroll though New York? She walked away realizing that the grass on the “average people” side of the hill wasn’t as green, or tasty. My day at Marble Slab Creamery was somewhere along those lines though not so embarassing, but just as revealing. :-D