For one year, I worked at Pacific Sunwear, now officially PacSun, at the mall. I liked that job. I was very good at it. I was promoted to Assistant Manager within about 3 months of being there. I liked that position, too. I enjoyed shipments, Black Friday’s, promos, bad customers, etcetera.

Ready for a ridiculous story? Well, here goes.

I had a family come in once. A mother and her son and daughter, both 16-18 years old. I have plugs, and at the time, probably had tunnels so you could see through them, which I wish I hadn’t worn. The boy came up to me, stared at my ears, and the following drivel came out of his mouth:

Dude! You could smoke cigarettes out of your ears! You could smoke cigarettes out of both ears. You could have two chicks smoke cigarettes out of your ears. Dude! You could have two naked chicks smoke blunts out of your ears!

I believe my response was something the lines of, “I suppose.” This entire time, his mom and sister were right there, basically approving of the vomit-esque garbage that was spewing forth from his mouth like if you ate a month old raw chicken sandwich. Why would you ever eat that? Why would you ever say what that kid said?

I was in charge of getting some holiday help and managed to hire some kids that I went to school with at the time. All sucked. One kid fell asleep on the racks of clothes. Idiots.

One gripe, which made it easier to leave, was the fact that you had the following tier of management:

Store Manager
Two Assistant Manager
Associates
Holiday

The Store Manager got all the recognition for everything, no matter what happened. So in my case, I got three “perfect shops”. A perfect shop is when the company hires outside people to shop in your store and test the staff’s competency. I got all three myself, and nailed all of them. Because of that, there were not one, not two, but three bonus’ in my boss’ paycheck and nothing for me. That was bogus as she wasn’t even there. I loved her, and have no complaints, and don’t even mind that the only other time I saw her was downtown in front of a bar with some jerk dude who was smoking a bowl in the middle of the street. No hard feelings if you’re reading this right now.

I ultimately left that company for another similar company in the same mall. I thought it would be better…it was and it wasn’t.