Mike

Mike is my third colleague at the gas station. He’s the newest here, but he has done a lot of this work over the last few years. Mike is clearly burned out from this work – as is Paul, and as I am more and more becoming, after a year at it.

Mike’s way of handling his burnout it to keep his energy tightly held in, to extend as little as possible to customers. One day he said to me, “My policy is to interact with these people as little as possible. I take their money and give them their change. Otherwise, they’re on the other side of the window and I’m going to keep them there.”

He is not totally consistent about this policy. Some people come in that he knows – either from other jobs or from here – he will be friendly and goof around with them. And clearly – maybe he’s in a good mood – something motivates him to be friendly or nice with some other people. But otherwise he is just amazingly flat – his voice is frighteningly dead. “Yes, ma'am”, as if he was dealing with something other than a human being. The other day, a cute little girl, maybe all of six, came to the window, bringing up her mother’s gas money. “Surely he’ll give her a little extra juice,” I thought. Nope. The same – just “no ma’am”.

Mike also has some choice labels for our customers, like “crackheads”. There certainly are some crackheads in this neighborhood. (A twentieish girl came in one day to retrieve the drivers’ license her mother had left. “She’s a crackhead – always has been, probably will be until she dies.”) So he may sometimes be right. But I don’t know how he can tell in each case.

(I also mostly don’t like the word. It feels pretty disrespectful. Even the more simply descriptive “drug addict” leaves out so much of who they are. Drug addiction is not who they are, but something the do, or are struggling with.)

Mike obviously thinks that he is somehow protecting his energy by relating to people in this distant sort of way. But I don’t think so. I think he’s killing his energy, and – at least a little bit – himself. There’s a way that treating other humans as if they were something less – even if we call them “customers” – takes away some of our own humanity.

Paul has done this work longer and is, also, clearly burned out. When he comes in to start his shift, he makes no bones of the fact that this is one of the last things he wants to be doing, but has to because he needs the money. Or, when I relieve him, he always says that he is “real glad to see you”.

But Paul handles his burned-outness in a very different way than Mike. He has a little game he plays with almost every customer. No mater what they ask for (“$20 on pump 4”), he says “No” – but with such a sweet little lilt, almost singing it, that people know he’s teasing. Some of these customers (usually young women, for some reason) will playfully sass him right back, saying, “Yes”, very definitively. But almost all seem to enjoy it.

(Not all – some just look at him like he’s speaking Greek. He shrugs it off, saying, “He didn’t get it.” And it does no harm and is just a little price from taking a little risk with people. I have worked in a couple of buttoned-down corporate retail situations where this kind of playfulness absolutely would not have been allowed. I actually got fired from one for just this kind of banter with a customer – who did “get it”, but the manager did not. Here, our manager does get it, and appreciates the way Paul is giving a little something extra.)

It doesn’t matter that what Paul is doing is not really creative or truly spontaneous, since he does it with almost every customer, for the whole shift. But still, he is injecting a little extra energy and people feel, I think, like they have been acknowledged.