Sunday, January 27, 2008

• Do you bottle up anger, or do you let it out, and how?

  When I was working in the used book shop in Chapel Hill, the owner went on a month-long tour of Asia, and in his absence one of my coworkers became a real pain in the butt.  The owner had left an extremely competent and experienced manager in charge, but this one guy seemed to assume that because he was kind of a pet of the owner's, he didn't have to do what the manager said.  She could ask him to do something as simple as change the light bulb at the head of the stairs to the basement (where we kept the paperback section), and he just told her she had mistaken him for somebody who cared.  When a software problem wiped out a day's cataloguing--everything over $5 was catalogued for our website--and we had to pull everything we'd just shelved without the computer to tell us where it was, this dingleberry just swept the floor and went home early.
  
  At the same time, he seemed to have the idea that he was the only one of the lot of us who ever did a lick of work, and the whole store would collapse without him.

  The last straw was shortly after the boss got back from Asia.  Dingleberry went to lunch--we only got half an hour for lunch--and two hours later called to say he was sick and wasn't coming back that day.  The manager told him not to come back at all.  He called the owner at home, and the owner promptly rescinded his firing.

  The rest of the staff was furious, including me.  I took to referring to Dingleberry as "that whiny-assed little pissant," and this kind of language coming from me startled everybody.

  They were surprised, of course, because they'd never seen me get angry in the whole year I'd worked there.  A couple of people had previously worked with me at another bookstore in town, and only one of them had seen me angry in the three years I'd worked there--I'd chewed out a coworker for sitting behind the counter reading Foxtrot cartoons for days while I shelved and straightened and pulled returns.   

  I now work at a public library, and in the seven years I've been there, only a couple of coworkers have seen me raise my voice. 

  I get irritated a lot, usually by teenage patrons with no volume control, but it takes a lot to make me angry.  I don't let it out easily or often, with the result that when I do finally get pushed too far there's an explosion of epic proportions and I frighten people who thought they knew me.

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