Perry - Mommy needs a raise: because quittings not an option

Some people, wise people, take a respite between life stages. They pause to reflect, to travel, to experience new things before shouldering the mantle of professional responsibility. I, on the other hand, have set numerous courses and plunged headlong without skipping a beat for so much as a nap. This is a function of my highly driven personality, and my need to just get on with it. I have a problem being still. This is my mothers fault. My father once said her motor runs at a higher idle than most peoples. Mine is in fifth gear all the time. Genetics, yall.

Every summer in high school, I had a job. I started working in my fathers law office when I was sixteen. My fifteen-year-old sister worked with me. Worked is to be interpreted in the loosest sense. I was plied with promises of Taco Bell at lunchtime. This was a prime example of how much I loved food (only slightly less than books) and also how easily manipulated I was. It took nothing more than a beef mexi-melt to get me off the couch. The work was simple enough: collating, stapling, mailing. Sometimes it involved taking Post-it notes off my back that said kick me, lovingly placed there by my sister. I did some research in the local law library and inhaled the aroma of aged leather and old books.

My parents were industrious types, and even today, at an age at which they should be contemplating retirement, they travel more than a rock star on tour for the five jobs they hold between them. I am exhausted just thinking about the work they do. They likewise encouraged productivity in us. After that stint in my dads office during high school, I joined him again as an intern when he became the regional director of a nonprofit civil rights firm.

This kind of work was headier stuff. I was now expected to do real work during my summers, with the understanding that what I was doing was contributing at least in some small degree to the exercise of First Amendment rights. The work involved lots of research and taught me the utility of caffeine when stuck ears-deep in research on constitutional standards of interpretation. But as nonprofits are wont, the association didnt pay its interns a salary. The experience was great, but I needed to bankroll something before law school started. Not realizing I would take home a sheepskin and $120,000 in student debt, I may as well have taken a month in Belize for all the good my next job was going to do. I had graduated from college a year early and had time to kill.

So, naturally, a job at the mall seemed like the perfect fit. Naturally.

Not wanting to leave books for long, I took a position at the Walden bookstore near my parents home in Virginia. Walden Books was a subsidiary of Borders at the time and expanded to include Coles Bookstores, WaldenKids, and Brentanos Books. There were at one point 205 retail locations in the United States. I mention this only to say that, after what seemed like a meteoric rise to bookstore predominance, the company was liquidated in bankruptcy in 2011, after I had worked for them. It is unnervingly coincidental. But probably unrelated, right?

At this point, I will say a little something about the fiefdom of retail stores. Particularly mall stores. Here is how the organization of people expresses the basest of human inclinations: everybody wants to be king. In our location, there were only eight employees. We were divided into managers, assistant managers, key holders, and proles. The proles held no power whatsoever. This meant that people like mepart-time, seasonal, temporary employeescould be dictated to by any eighteen-year-old key holder power tripping on telling us when we could take our lunch break. Key holders had the ability to open and close the store and to void transactions on the registers. They held no real power other than that indicated by the single key dangling from the red rubber bracelet on their skinny wrists. Assistant managers and managers had real key setsjanitorial-grade ensembles, heavy and brassy. They evoked real power. These were people who called headquarters to enter inventory data in the morning, counted money drawers at store open and close, and made deposits at the bank. I was just someone who loved books and was killing time.