My Last Day Mistake

At last, The Great and Dreadful Day has come and gone, and I can now officially say that I am finished with my pawn shop career (even though I may consider working at a pawn shop where I’m moving since I am led to believe it would be more exotic), and what a career it was.

Over all, nothing terribly exciting happened on my last day at the pawn shop. I was in a really good mood for the most part. I smiled a lot more than I generally do because I couldn’t hide my thankfulness for leaving behind the many annoyances of the pawn shop (understaffing, overworking, not getting breaks, dealing with stupid customers, dealing with moody managers, haggling, having more merchandise than we can sell and not knowing where to store it in our already overflowing warehouse). Like I said before, it’s not that I hated working at the pawn shop, but it definitely had its low points. But, other than my blatant euphoria, there is one story I would like to relate about my final day.

It begins with a slightly annoying woman entering the pawn shop with the purpose of buying an MP3 player me being the unfortunate employee who was wrangled into helping her find what she wanted. After finding an MP3 play that satisfied her, she realized that she also needed to buy headphones.

The pawn shop has several varieties of headphones. We have some pretty nice used Turtle Beach ones and then we have brand new ones which are very cheap. The woman was, of course, interested in the cheaper headphones, and, for some reason, I told her how it seemed like the headphones she was buying tended to fall apart soon after being purchased.

Well, guess what happened. The woman bought the MP3 player and headphones, the headphones fell apart, and the woman returned with the shoddy headphones in hand. Only, this time, she came across the store manager instead of me and explained the situation without forgetting to include the detail of how I had warned her of the potentially shoddy craftsmanship of the headphones she was purchasing.

What an annoying, tactless woman.

Of course, I had no idea that the woman was returning the headphones (and MP3 player, too. It turns out the headphone jack was stripped). I was just going about my business, unsuspecting any pending chastisement, when the store manager approached me and said she did not appreciate me telling customers that our merchandise was crap. She then asked why I had never said anything about the headphones breaking so often before that and why I would have sold the headphones if I had known they were worthless.

I explained that I wasn’t talking bad about the merchandise, but that I was more or less thinking aloud. I had seen three pairs of those headphones turned because they had “fallen apart” on the customer, but it hadn’t been until then that I had connected the dots and considered the fact that they were all poorly made.

Oops.

There wasn’t much more that I could do other than apologize and I did that and then went back to work. I felt horrible, but, eh, I made a mistake and it was my last day. Did I really care that much? Maybe I should have, but I didn’t.