Retail Workers Share Their Best Methods For Passing The Time

Counting the seconds.....

Retail Workers Share Their Best Methods For Passing The Time

So many of us will have to whittle away so many moments of life in jobs we're not fond of having to partake in, but making money is making money. Retail is it's own beast. When it's busy, people are crazy and when it's slow it can be soul crushingly boring. It almost makes you feel like you're back in school just counting every second until the bell. So how do we survive. Boredom can be insanity. How to survive?

Redditor u/kylewoods69 wanted to know what are the best ways to watch the clock without tears by asking.... Retail workers of reddit, what is your best method for passing time?

Carted Off....

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When I worked retail I used to go out and sloooowwwwly gather the carts. Bo-Po-Mo-Fo

Haha did this too. Nobody else in the store would get carts so I had an excuse of saying "Hey, at least I did it." AtticusNari

In the Fold. 

Folding.

I got so good at folding (without a board) so would spend hours perfecting stacks of shirts.

Also, dusting, organizing, and cleaning things that people never see. As long as I had decent music it could really help the shift go by fast

But if anyone told me to clean I would get annoyed lol. johnmcdracula

I organized.

I organized. My last retail job had a long-standing policy of no one was allowed to be doing nothing behind the counter because a significant amount of merchandise was behind the counter (which was so stupid) so customers could shop while we were working. I made sure the shelves and pegs were organized, clean and shop able. aliveinjoburg2

It's not just retail.

Chatting with co-workers mostly, that and imagining a different reality in my head. NicolasaDownes

It's not just retail. Office workers do it regularly, sometimes literally since I do know some aspiring writers that just take the downtime to draft things. I can always tell which ones are the fanfic writers. CompetitiveProject4

Piece of advice to some of you.

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I had a friend that worked at a Walmart in college and he was convinced that a employee that "looked" like they were working was invisible to the management staff. So he took a big broom and walked around the same set of isles for an entire 8 hour shift and did nothing else to see if they would notice. The same manager walked by him 22 times and never said a word to him.

Piece of advice to some of you. TollinginPolitics

Clocked...

I work as a grocery cashier and it gets boring fast scanning items and standing for hours and time goes by VERY slow. I play a game with myself where I choose look for/count for one specific thing like bad tattoos so every 10 people I see who I consider to have a bad tattoo I check the clock, every 20 people who come in with their dog in a stroller (very common in my store) I check the clock etc. ch0r1

So Blue....

I used to draw sad clowns on the back of receipt paper The sadder the better Edit: picture somewhere in the thread of what a sad clown and teen melancholy looks like. Pengusta

Eyes Shut...

Do NOT look at the time. Big mistake. Lyrawen

I worked with a guy who checked his phone non-stop and would just whine all day like "damn it's only 10:15." I wanted to slap him so bad, holy shit man, just let me zone out. He was useless in general, so it made it all the worse being with him. Best part of the day was when he'd just disappear. Sure I had to do the work alone, but whatever, that was preferable. MomentarySpark

I hate this.

Dissociate. UrsaMinorNinth

I hate this.

But its the best way to deal with it. You don't want to live in this reality so you separate yourself from it. But it just results in you being dead inside for that time.

And the worst part is you know you spend that time every week being dead inside with only the chatter with your co workers to fill it up. You want to think you are different and you have hobbies and you do other things but the reality is that you spend your days waiting for work to be over.

A soulless living. Existential dread.

Edit - dw people I'm done with that crap. Im working in education right now. Retail sucked but a combination of that and working for lyft helped me pay my way through college. PossiblyAsian

The Sound of Sanity.

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I worked at Party City for 4 years and would not have been able to do it without Bluetooth headphones!!! My hair goes past my ears, so I'd put one head phone in one ear and hide it with my hair, then have the other ear free if people needed me! Podcasts and audio books saved my sanity. -jellybrobro

REDDIT

Who else makes the bad moments better?

retail workers

People Share Unspoken First Date Rules Everyone Should Follow

Reddit user Quotedkarma asked: 'What's an unspoken rule on a first date?'

Two people having coffee
Photo by Chewy on Unsplash

Countless emotions arise when going on a first date.

Making this all the more difficult is that a first date is one of the few things that absolutely must be done solo, so bringing friends as backup simply isn't an option.

Leaving one to wish there was a handbook for navigating a first date successfully.

Of course, while there is no official guide, everyone has rules and beliefs about what to do and what to avoid on a first date.

From how to effortlessly bring out your best qualities, to a foolproof escape plan if your date is anything but the one you've dreamed your whole life of meeting.

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first dates

People Divulge Things Their Coworkers Have Done That Should've Gotten Them Fired But Didn't

woman in white t-shirt looking at the window during daytime
Photo by Dan Burton on Unsplash

My second college internship led me to a small content creation company. It was so small that the two editors were the only paid employees. Everyone else was an intern.

I was excited to start so I could add more to my portfolio only to realize that one of the editors replaced my name with hers every time she edited one of my articles. Not much of the content was changed, but I was too shy to question it.

I eventually found out that she did this to all the interns, and most of the interns had learned to private message their draft articles to the other editor, who did not take the bylines.

I asked one of my fellow interns if the founder of the company knew the editor took bylines. Turns out, the founder knew, but for some reason no one else could figure out, the editor never got fired.

It turns out this story isn't unique. There are lots of instances when someone does something at work that should get them fired, but they manage to hold on to their job. Redditors have plenty of stories like that and are eager to share.

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fired

People Share Simple Mistakes That Have Actually Ended Lives

A black and white picture of a cemetery
davide ragusa on Unsplash

Not to startle any of you, but death stalks us.

We all have nightmares about diseases and murderers.

But what if, in the end, we just choke on a pickle we inhaled too fast?

Maybe instead of a pickle, a little coleslaw would have been the wiser choice.

We'll never know.

The most minute things can send us packing.

Redditor SuffocatedByThighs wanted to discuss the things that can extinguish our lives in the most basic ways, so they asked:

"What simple mistake has ended lives?"

Tripping over untied shoelaces.

It can break your neck.

TIE YOUR SHOES!!!

Off the Rocks

On No Falling GIF by Outside TVGiphy

"There have been too many instances of rock climbers rappelling off of the ends of their ropes, which could have been easily avoided by tying stopper knots at the ends of their ropes."

LZRDLZRD

Seconds

"I worked at a tire place for a summer and the first thing they told me was 'See that torque wrench? One mistake with this and you can kill a whole family in a matter of seconds.' I thought well, better take this thing seriously."

FrenchMicrowave

"Man for a second I was thinking 'F**k you'd have to swing that thing around fast to take out an entire family' and just bluescreened on the idea of changing a tire."

lurking_my_a**_off

How Vexing...

"THERAC-25. The world’s deadliest software error. Cost several radiation patients their lives by administering lethal amounts of radiation, and for a while, the doctors didn’t even know."

Longjumping_Event_59

"THERAC-25 suffered a particularly vexing sort of error known as a race condition. Essentially, the circuit required multiple inputs in a particular sequence, but sometimes the timing of that sequence could get thrown out of whack and it would lead to all sorts of nonsensical output."

"This is less than ideal when all you're doing is manipulating pixels, but when your software is handling radiation beams you really don't want this to happen."

"Even more vexing is that race conditions are frequently heisenbugs, which can vanish altogether when one attempts to study them. If you don't have a good idea of what's causing the error, you may never cotton on to what sort of bad input is required to test it. Under those circumstances, it's easy to write them off as imaginary, only to then find."

dancingmadkoschei

Heavy Drifting

"Leaving the stranded vehicle on the road in winter and trying to walk to get help. It happens in rural parts of our province once or twice a year and they find the body a few days later. They get disoriented and freeze."

Regina_Runner

"I got blown off a road in high winds. Heavy drifting. Less than a mile from a friend's house after I had turned around. Drifts made it impossible to complete the trip. Trying to run a mile in full blizzard conditions was a fight for my life as an in-shape 24-year-old male athlete.

"rotyag

Simple Slips

Uh Oh Omg GIF by BounceGiphy

"Almost any simple mistake can end a life if you're an anesthesiologist, that's how my grandpa died in his early 60s."

dwserps

Any second. Any moment.

Stay vigilant people.

Celibacy could be better...

Oh My Wow GIFGiphy

"Not being honest with doctors about Viagra. It has many dangerous drug interactions and can cause a lot of problems from what I’ve heard. Trust me the doctor ain’t gonna judge you guys, they have seen many more embarrassing things. And it would suck to die because you wanted to hide something just for it to be later stated in your death certificate."

The_upsetti_spagetti

Check the Numbers

"As a healthcare worker, giving the wrong amount of insulin."

UzumakiHorror

"During the first shift of my first clinical rotation in nursing school, I watched a nurse draw up insulin out of an auto-injector pen that was CLEARLY marked to specifically not do that AND she was drastically wrong about the dosage and almost killed a guy by giving him essentially like a hundred times the intended dose."

someguynamedg

Stay In

"Pulling the knife out of someone."

rcadephantom

"Yeah, I did that but it was a broken tree branch that had impaled my leg. Without even thinking I pulled it out. Blood started gushing so I pulled off my shirt and tied it into a pressure bandage. I was lucky I didn’t bleed to death."

Olddog_Newtricks2001

"Shock is an IQ reducer. I once sliced a bit off the side of my hand with a broken glass, and sort of dazedly picked off the piece of me and tried to stick it back on. It did not work."

UncannyTarotSpread

Stay Dirty

"Mixing cleaning ingredients."

Jonnysource

"My dad was trying to unclog his kitchen drain and mixed drain cleaners by adding one then adding another a few minutes later. It started bubbling and he began coughing intensely. I heard him coughing from the other room, saw what happened, and opened the nearby window to get rid of the chlorine gas he just produced."

"I forgot there was a large hive of wasps that had moved into that window and they did not appreciate this unexpected interruption. I took him to the emergency room for the gas exposure and it was tough explaining that the wasp stings were not why we were there."

CharmingTuber

Dear God

Jeff Goldblum What GIF by The Late Late Show with James CordenGiphy

"A friend’s husband locked himself out of their home. He tried to get in through a window that had security bars. While squeezing through his foot slipped and he essentially hung himself on the window sill."

Cokej01

Life is fleeting. Here is proof.

LIVE!! But live smart.

death

Expensive Foods People Genuinely Do Not Understand How Anyone Enjoys

Gourmet meal at high-end restaurant
Photo by Jay Wennington on Unsplash

We all have foods that we like or don't like, and depending on how passionately we feel, it may be pretty hard to understand why someone likes a food that otherwise grosses us out.

But if that food is also expensive, we'll also be left wondering why they'd spend so much money on that dish.

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expensive dinner