A long, directionless bike ride into work to fill out some paperwork this morning gave me exactly what I needed: quiet, reflective time to ruminate.

My new nephew was born yesterday, at 2:06. I was at work, on the phone with a customer when my phone vibrated in my pocket. I had gotten special permission to carry my phone with me, because I had gotten a text message from my brother earlier that morning, saying "Today is going to be the day!" Periodic updates throughout the morning let me know all the details, how she was progressing, how my brother was holding up, most of these from my mother as my brother was with my sister in law while she went through labor.

I slipped the phone out of my pocket and saw the text message from my mother. "Touchdown," she wrote. I laughed, and could not wipe the grin off my face. I felt a simple joy. I spoke to my mother, who cried when recalling the sound of my brother's voice when he called her from the delivery room to say his son was born.

Then about 20 minutes later my phone vibrated again, and my brother had sent me a picture of his son, my second nephew Finnegan. I cried. I showed everyone within shouting distance. I didn't care that they had never met my brother, or his wife, or their delightful five year old Braeden.

And then, an hour or so later, in the true spirit of my life and the natural progression of things that happen to me, I got my yearly performance review delivered to me. Prior to that, the review process had been silent, tracked only by additions to a complex and awkwardly laid out Excel spreadsheet. I wrote the first half of my review, my manager wrote the other half.

My first year as a manager in my company was last year, a year of economic turmoil, a long but ultimately victorious election, and unease in the general population. It feels silly to say this, but even if you are not involved in the financial sector at all, you can feel the state of the economy in a retail store. Especially in a management position. The pithy complaints get filtered out by cashiers and floor associates. Management, by design, is the sounding board for the righteously indignant population.

"You mean YOU haven't tried this either?," one customer said, waving a package of glue that cost less than $3 at me. "You are the THIRD person I've talked to here, and NONE of you have tried it! Don't you know anything about your products? I want to know if it WORKS before I waste my money on it!"

"You blue-collar people just don't understand how to treat someone like me," said a woman, who was at different times, in different conversations with members of the management staff, both a doctor and a lawyer. It became an in-joke among us. "Oh the profit and loss statement? I don't understand all those funny numbers, I'm just blue collar," for example.

Regular customers, who we know by sight but not necessarily by name, became suddenly self-righteous. Wanting to be escorted around the store, to be shown all of their options for a particular project. Wondering why X item is X dollars less expensive on a web site. Criticizing our selection compared to X or Y company's (almost always an online venture), and then ultimately leaving, empty handed. Deciding they want to shop online. The one retail format that is by its nature cold and solitary, where no one is there to hold your hand through the shopping process. No one has personal experience with the activity you are trying to do. There isn't anyone who even has a familiarity with their entire selection, if for no other reason than handling the packages on a daily basis. After 45 minutes of having their hand held by a hapless employee, who was just on the way to the bathroom, they go home to sit in front of a computer, alone*.

(* You will, however, never hear me complain when a customer says "I'm going to Y store instead" when Y store is an independent company, or small local business. Despite my desire for my company to succeed in an uncertain economic climate, I often can say nothing more after being told this than "Have a nice day!" because I applaud them for supporting small business owners.)


This very tendency of customers to want their hand held was the very reason for our move of freight breaking shifts to an overnight time slot. We tried early mornings, but my team was held up by a train of customer after customer, and called to ring on registers for hours at a time. We started at six AM, then five when the holidays got closer. Still entire carts full of merchandise sat untouched from one shift to the next. Four o'clock was the next, rational decision when we realized that out of an eight hour shift, only three of those were undisturbed. Finally it was our district manager who told us, in no uncertain terms, that the overnight shifts that I had tentatively suggested (always met with outright refusal) were exactly how we were going to work freight, no two ways about it. But in my first year as the manager of the freight team, which I began in February, this decision, and the rolicking success we experienced in meeting goals, came the following January.

To say that my first year was a failure is a bit of an understatement. Repeated visits from the district manager showed the same, 10-12 ft. stacks of merchandise in the back room, as the holidays got closer. She asked for a plan. I warily repeated the process I go through, the setting of goals, the fact that really, we're trying as hard as we can.

So when the review process began, and our entire district was told, plainly, in an email, not to score ourselves too highly, due to the lack of leadership she saw in her stores. We joked, amongst ourselves. "Guess there's no raise coming this year," and "Good thing I've got the credit card mostly paid down" and then in the coming weeks, it became clear that that was exactly the case. No raise, for the first time in my going on ten years in retail. When I started out with my first company, it was a 10 cent raise every year. I moved up, and through companies where it was about 30 cents an hour, which was my last raise. It goes without saying that I was not expecting much, just maybe a "Thanks for playing," a little bone thrown in my direction.

I'm not allergic to criticism, and the general failure of my team to produce results was evident even to me. So it's really not unfair that this was the outcome. I came to terms with it quickly, glad that the process would be over soon, and I could move onto another year, this one something to show off, to be proud of.

So when I had my performance review delivered to me, face to face, by my current manager and my former manager, and there was only one significant criticism to be discussed, which I agreed with, it was a bit shocking. Sure I had seen the review written by my former manager, which we hadn't discussed up until that point. I wanted all of my failures to be laid out, I wanted a flogging, so to speak. The style in which I wrote my self-review was profoundly self-critical, my manager even mentioning offhandedly that I was awfully hard on myself. So to hear that I was doing ok and even excelled in some areas was not what I was prepared for. I wanted to feel like I DESERVED to not get a raise. But instead I walked out feeling.. confused.

I met Ben after work to run an errand and for some stupid reason, in reaction to something insignificant he said, burst into tears. He thought he had offended me. He thought I was upset about where we were going, then he just got upset. I couldn't tell him why I was crying, I had just experienced too many conflicting emotions in one day. A burst of ecstatic joy, happy tears, mild anxiety and anticipation during the review and then an uncerimonious, anticlimactic denouement. I was exhausted, and just couldn't process any further emotional input until I let it all out in a howling, gasping, blubbering explosion.

I felt better afterwards. I feel amazing now, after coming home and wandering listlessly around the house, an empty husk, having one of the best nights of sleep I've had in a long time, and then giving my body a pounding in the form of a long and mostly directionless two hour roundtrip bike ride.

Now I'm going to pick up some photos that I ordered, of our newly expanded family, of my cats, of my boyfriend. I don't know where I'm going to put them, or why I want them really other than the fact that they represent things that cause joy in my life, and for which I am grateful. Because in five years, I'm not going to remember bursting into tears on the ride home from work, but I'm sure I will remember bursting into tears at the sight of my new nephew, his eyes open for the first time to the love of his family around him. I think that's something worth remembering.