Apologies

First, I want to apologize for this mini rant. These are my feelings about things that have been told to me by my daughter about her friends and coworkers and strangers. It’s hard enough to live in this world constantly second-guessing yourself, but it makes it so much more difficult when people are cruel.

Story Behind the Rant

A customer told one of my daughter’s coworkers to kill herself because she was wearing the shirt of one of her favorite sports teams, who they hated. Take a moment and read that again.

I know that working in retail is hard. Working at any business that deals with hundreds or thousands of customers on a regular basis is hard work. Retail is one of the hardest because you may never see the person again or you may see them all the time because they are local and come in regularly. On top of that, you can never tell which customer is going to be the lunatic that blows their top.

I hope my daughter and her coworker never have to see this person again.

Even worse with retail: you have to be nice. It doesn’t matter if you’re told to kill yourself, you have to smile at the customer and say “Oh, gee thanks, sir! Is there anything else I can help you with?” because even if you aren’t being mean someone can call up corporate to start ranting and raving about this crazy employee who started screaming and yelling at them for no reason whatsoever.

I can’t wait for my daughter to finish college and get a nice, safe job where she isn’t threatened to be jumped when she gets off work. She’s actually called local police to file reports because of a customer that threatened her. The officer that came kindly filled out a report and then walked her to the car. I wish I could have thanked him but she didn’t get his card.

Why I’m Angry

My daughter goes to her supervisor to tell her about this and the supervisor basically shrugged it off like no big deal. If a customer came into my job site and told one of my coworkers to kill themselves for any reason what-so-ever, I would tell that coworker no-effing-way are they allowed to take it to heart. I’d tell them all the reasons why they are fantastic and should ignore anything that this customer says.

When did it become okay to treat people like shit all the fucking time? The internet affords trolls and bullies freedom to threaten people anonymously. Luckily, more often than not, those people don’t follow through on their threats. Unfortunately, some do follow-through. They stalk and threaten and wave their arms and people shrug and say ‘That poor person.” and then something bad happens and everyone comes forward saying “Oh wow, I didn’t think they meant what they said.” because no one took the threat seriously.

Obviously, if someone tells you to kill yourself they (hopefully) aren’t going to come and kill you because you didn’t follow their sage advice.

Moral of the Story

We all live in this world. We also die in it. The sad thing is, there are people out there in the world that seem to forget that we’re all in this life together. There is so much sadness and negativity in the world. The anger boils over so easily. So easily that seeing a complete stranger wearing the shirt of a team you hate obviously deserves to be told they should commit suicide.

Stop the hate. Stop the bullshit. Treat people with kindness. It really isn’t that difficult to be kind, even when you don’t want to.