SuperFails

At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.

At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.

“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.

The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.

I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.

I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.

I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht. 

i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.

as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.

disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.

at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.

i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.

i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.

I mean sometimes they do yeah. I know a white guy with monolid eyes and zero known Asian ancestors and he absolutely experiences anti-Asian racism on a fairly regular basis because people think he’s mixed Asian/white. I know a woman who was told throughout her life that she was Native as an adoptee with no known history or background who experienced incredibly violent amounts of anti-Native racism until she discovered as an adult through DNA test that she is 100% white. I know white people who tan incredibly dark in the summer comparatively that are constantly accused of being mixed race and experiencing racism due to that, usually anti-Mexican racism perpetrated against white people with Greek or Italian ancestors.

If you think cis butches don’t experience both transphobia and misogyny and homophobia for daring to be women who break gender roles while still holding onto their womanhood you’ve sorely misunderstood just how bad butches have it in this world sorry. If you don’t think cis queens experience transphobia and homophobia and misogyny for daring to be men who break gender roles while being loud and proud about it and still holding onto their manhood then you’ve sorely mistaken just how bad they have it in this world as well.

Not to mention all of the cis men who wear dresses and skirts and makeup and nail polish and heels simply because they like them who experience all of these things. All of the cis straight women who simply just exist but something about them doesn’t pass society’s “woman enough” test, leading to them being caught in bathroom bills and sporting rules and being attacked by people who mistake them for being transgender or gay.

Just like how straight people experience homophobia to such a degree that they literally beat their children out of any potential deviance from rigidly upheld gender roles and let politicians make jokes on national TV about how they’d drown their pre-teen kids if they came out as LGBT. Do you really think a straight kid still figuring themselves out hears that and doesn’t internalize that homophobia? Doesn’t rigidly hold themselves to some impossible standard so that no one could ever possibly think they’re gay? You don’t think straight teenage boys who maybe don’t pass some bully’s straightness test are getting the shit kicked out of them for “being gay” when, surprise, they aren’t? You don’t think all those kids being attacked by their priests and coaches and teachers are being told “this wouldn’t have happened if you weren’t gay” when they’re literally not gay? Do you know how many straight kids had close calls at my school that famously expels all gay kids, because someone made up a believable enough rumor? Do you know how many of them still got their shit kicked in even though administration ultimately decided to let them stay?

All bigotry is violent and all bigotry catches people it doesn’t “intend” to and hurts them as well. It doesn’t matter what someone’s label is, or if they even have one. It matters if the person enacting the violence is doing it because their victim didn’t pass whatever “acceptable enough” test they didn’t know they were being subjected to.