Skip to main content

Acting Right

The concept of acting your wage is not new - its how most people who make too little money to warrant extra effort act. In my neighborhood the last shift on week-nights at the grocery store is manned by a bunch of retirees - not sure why the demographic is skewed so senior for this specific schedule. It is safe to assume people in that age bracket are not working these unpleasant hours for the joy and fulfillment. More likely than not they were not able to retire as planned, still have bills to pay and people they are responsible for. The wages they get are no different from the high school kids bagging groceries after school - maybe a smidge higher given the odd shift hours. 

If I ever happen to be there late in the evening near their closing time, these employees make sure they hustle everyone out the cash register and out the store a good fifteen minutes before official store closing time. In the last fifteen minutes all self-checkout machines are closed and no one can be found at the cash registers. Most doors are already closed except one. 

These folks are all acting their wage - they don't want to stay a second past close of shift and if that means the last dozen customers have to be rushed out, frustrated and unhappy with their experience so be it. There is also the inverse behavior of people not acting their wage - being over-paid and holding titles for roles that they are not qualified for. That leads everyone else to wonder how these folks were hired and why they continue to be employed and even get promoted. 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha...
5 comments
Read more

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more