Sweetie

Sometimes at work, I'm southern.

It happened on accident at first. I had helped a Texan find a Morgan Freeman movie and she spent enough time talking to me at the circulation desk that I subconsciously internalized her speech patterns. This has happened to me before. I once listened to the Harry Potter series on cassette tape and I spent a week talking like I was from Northamptonshire. But at that time I didn't work in customer service so the only real victims were the members of my family. I guess it's true that you always hurt the ones you love.

Anyway. After the Texan left, I took the next person in line and they owed $65.20 in overdue fines. I told her how much she owed but because of the Texan when I spoke it came out sixty-fahv and I noticed that instead of getting mad, which this lady had been about to do, her face softened and she smiled. “Oh, of course. Hey, where are you from?”

I don't think well on my feet (or my butt, as the case was) and I said “Mesa” before I could consider the atypical nature of my fahv. She looked puzzled so I blurted out that my father is from Texas. This is mostly true, but I could just as truthfully say that my father is from Westminster, California or Chicago because he grew up all over the place.

“Oh, I just love your accent,” the lady told me, and she handed me her Visa card. I was so nonplussed by her change of demeanor that I didn't swipe her card fast enough the first time and I had to try again.

One of the only advantages to working with the taxpaying public is that there are myriad opportunities to perform sociological experiments. This is probably an ethical gray area but I decided last year that as long as I don't attempt to perform any statistical analyses or publish in the journal of the American Psychiatric Association, I'm in the clear. So after the Texas incident, I decided that when I interacted with customers I was going to speak with an accent.

There were objections. Not by any supervisors, because I never tell them when I'm collecting data, but from coworkers who are used to me talking like a character on an American sitcom. Three customers in on a Saturday morning, Brittany said, “Jill, that's creepy and you need to stop.” I made note of her objections in the Excel file I use to track the results of experiments I perform on coworkers and switched from East Texas to West Louisiana. After lunch I segued into rural Virginia.

I can't speak to the validity of my research methods but after seven days I seemed to get a better response from customers as a Dallas native. I also noticed that the accent was working on me; I provided better customer service when I spoke with a drawl. I tabled the accent as a full-time experiment but drop fahvs at least twice a shift and when I need to de-escalate a dispute with an unhappy customer.

At a county-wide staff training session last month we were asked for ideas on how to handle an angry patron and apparently I am the only person in the Maricopa County Library District who feels that “Pretend to be Southern” is an acceptable means of calming someone down.

The only problem with the accent is that it increased incidences of being addressed as “Sweetie” by about 320%.* I don't know if it's the hair or the cleavage but about one in three male customers will be unable to stop himself from calling me by a cutesy nickname, usually “Hon.” But I get “Sweetie” from both genders equally (approximately one in five customers) and when I am Southern, it's Sweetie This and Sweetie That and all of a sudden my smile doesn't quite reach my eyes and I will shank a B.

I realize that I've got epic hair and I'm probably showing too much supraclavicular soft tissue but I am a professional, dammit, and I would like to be treated with a little respect. Sweetie always feels demeaning and last year, around the same time I started using caffeine as a substitute for sleep, I had had enough.

The first thing I tried was to stop being nice to people at the desk. This was both convenient and acceptable because the thing about working for the government is that people expect you to treat them poorly. I was never rude but I was deliberately unhelpful for probably a solid week. I was your stereotypical stern librarian, which I hypothesized would result in more respect. Unfortunately I grossly underestimated the number of men who have librarian fetishes. The week culminated in someone's great-grandfather asking, “Do you want me to pay the fine, or do you want to spank me?”

Although on the upside, that same week I intimidated a little Mexican guy into calling me “Sir.” But it takes a lot of effort to be a jerk consistently and I didn't have the energy for it. I asked the internet what I could do to command more respect from the taxpayers of Maricopa County. Most of those things involved effort, too, and the other thing about working for the government is that people expect you to be lazy. I don't want to disappoint them, which is why I spend most of my working hours watching cat videos on YouTube and playing really juvenile pranks on my coworkers.

The laziest thing I could think to do was just to start calling people Sweetie back, and I have gotten away with it every single time. Not only have I gotten away with it but people have asked for my name and then e-mailed the branch manager telling her about that nice Jill who provided exemplary service.

The downside is that it's hard to break the Sweetie habit. A month after I started offering reciprocal Sweeties, my supervisor asked if I would shelve a cart of DVDs and I said, “Sure thing, Sweetie.” She didn't react, but when I called in sick the next day she did suggest that maybe I take the next day off too, because she was worried about me.

I compared her worry to the data from the rest of my experiment and I have decided that, in the interest of workplace harmony, the next time I call my supervisor Sweetie I need to do it with a southern accent.

*I got a B in research methods in college. I earned a C but fought my way up to a B using arguing skills I picked up in the logic class I took that semester.

#selfie

Two days after Christmas, my sister-in-law got into a car accident and as a result I had to join Instagram.

I never really felt like Instagram was for me. I'm not a hipster, for one (I loathe hipsters), and also I've never been struck by the overwhelming compulsion to photograph my food. In addition, I've always felt like people who know me remember what my face looks like without me posting a new picture of it every single day. So what would be the point of Instagram?

But I went shopping with my aunt and cousins after Christmas. I had never been shopping with my aunt and cousins before. I don’t know that, strictly speaking, I was invited. My sister-in-law was invited, and she invited me, and then someone hit her car on the freeway and it was just me and my aunt and cousins. 

It probably sounds a little cold and unfeeling that we shopped anyway, but my sister-in-law was fine, I swear. On the other hand, I was now shopping with three people I'd never before shopped with. I wasn’t sure how I felt about this, because I strongly suspected that I wasn’t interested in any of the stores they wanted to go to, but I had already driven 7 miles to the mall and I was in need of a snazzy dress.

I'd never shopped for a snazzy dress before. My clothes shopping excursions are rarely so specific. Perhaps they ought to be; I tend to wander the mall for hours because I need things like “shirts” and “pants" or, worst of all, "shoes." It's awful. Adjectives, particularly those akin to snazzy, don't often come up. When I am clothes shopping, I ask myself three questions about a garment:
1)      Can I put this in the washing machine?
2)      Am I comfortable?
3)      If a man sees me in this, will he want to “hit that”?

Snazziness has never factored in. But I was planning on attending a New Year’s Eve dance for which the dress code was "snazzy." I thought that perhaps my family and I could unite in the snazzy-dress cause, and unite we did. If we hadn’t been on the lookout for snazziness, we never would have gone into a store called Windsor.

If I were a 15-year-old with a spray tan, low morals, daddy issues, and 2% body fat, I would shop at Windsor. Everything there is glittery or ridiculous or both. I knew as soon as we went in that I wasn’t going to find a dress there, mostly because I am apparently three times the size of the average Windsor shopper. I found a sparkly skirt that would probably have fit on my leg. I considered buying two, one for each thigh, and then getting some sort of tunic to cover my backside, but in the end my thighs looked a little too big, so I gave up.

I looked around at some other things and found a bunch of shirts with classy, sophisticated phrases on them like “Hey Haters” and “YOLO.” But my favorite, my absolute favorite, said “#SELFIE.” I took a picture of it with my phone, because the moment needed documentation. Something about this shirt really spoke to me on a primal level, and by "primal level" I mean "my propensity to be giddily delighted by the ridiculous." But in the absence of anything snazzy that would actually cover the parts of me that I am required to cover by law, we left the store.

I did not find a snazzy dress that day, and eventually my family and I parted ways. As we said goodbye, I made a joke about the selfie shirt, and my cousin Katy said I should have tried it on and taken a selfie in it. Why hadn’t I thought of that? Probably because my phone was a Droid 2, which had just celebrated its third birthday by requiring five battery charges a day instead of four. Any time I turned on the screen, I lost 20% of the battery life. Taking a selfie would drain the battery.

I went back to Windsor and took the Selfie shirt to the fitting room. I was surprised at how much I liked it. I took a selfie – I took about 15 selfies, actually (taking my phone to 5% battery life), and in every single one I’m smiling like the joker, showing all 900 of my teeth.

If I hadn’t been smiling and laughing like a comic book villain, I might have had a clearer head. But I was, and I didn’t, and I decided I needed the selfie shirt in my life.

So I bought it. I feel certain that my sister-in-law could have prevented this; she would have gently reminded me that I am thirty years old and that most people don't understand my sense of humor. She could have stopped me from spending that 15 bucks. But she wasn't there, and so I bought it. I took it up to the register and the salesgirl asked if I’d found everything okay and all I could do was laugh, which probably only added to my resemblance to the Joker. (At one point I stopped laughing long enough to blurt out, “I’m thirty!”)

The only thing that remained was to share this moment with my nearest and dearest. I considered Facebook, but as a general rule the only selfies I post on Facebook include puppets from work. I had no choice - I had to join Instagram.

I did manage to find a snazzy dress later, and my friends and I were photographed at the dance, and I thought, people should see this, and so I put it on Instagram, with the hashtag "snazzy dress." It got worse - on Saturday I took a picture of some fettuccini.

But don't you worry about me. I'm not turning into one of those people, I swear. I'm no hipster. Remember, I hated Instagram before it was cool.