#muting notifications

When I was in school, my parents insisted that I get at least 'C's in school. If I fell below that, we'd work harder on homework and such, but I don't think I ever had to. As long as I got 'C's, that was 'satisfactory'. That was 'average'. That was good enough. And so I got 'C's in the subjects I didn't have a natural aptitude for (see: math) and got 'A's in the subjects I did (see: Art & English) and 'B's in between.

I remember the first time one of my friends told me she had to get straight 'A's or she'd lose privileges. Want an allowance? Straight 'A's. Want to go out with friends? Straight 'A's. I couldn't believe it. No one was perfect all the time. No one was perfect in every subject. I was in elementary school at the time, and I understood this. Why couldn't adults? It was later made clear to me that the logic here was that 'student' was your job and you had to do the work to get your pay. I didn't quite buy it, but what did I know? I was ten. Student was the only job I'd ever had.

My first roommate out of college was a good friend from high school who had always been an A-B student. Normally she got straight 'A's, but occasionally something would bump her down one grade. She was fine with that. Then she got to uni. Finals week stressed her out to the point she got stress hives. When she got her first ever 'D' she almost had an anxiety attack. Almost. She was just strong enough to close her eyes, take a deep breath and say "Fuck it, a D is passing! I don't need this for my major anyway!"

The two of us worked at JoAnn Fabric when we graduated. Neither of us realized that the working world had gone from "get a degree and they'll train you to do anything" to "do a million internships so you have the two to five years experience required for an entry level job" while we were in school. We weren't overjoyed by the discovery, but we were both too burnt out on school to go back and funny thing - all of the internships we could find were for students. So we sold craft stuff and every once in awhile a random customer would be asked to take a phone survey. The options were Highly Dissatisfied, Dissatisfied, Neither Satisfied or Dissatisfied, Satisfied, and Highly Satisfied. Once a month, we'd get a district report card showing what results all of the local stores had received. I remember one month we had 25% Neither Satisfied or Dissatisfied, 50% Satisfied, and 25% Highly Satisfied. I was so proud! No other store in the district had a 75% satisfaction rating! One store even had a Highly Dissatisfied, but not us!

...we got raked across the coals for being the worst store in the district. Why? Because even the store with a Highly Dissatisfied had managed to get more than 25% Highly Satisfied. What was wrong with us? I protested. Who's going to give a 'Highly Satisfied' when they come in for a spool of thread and find it easily? That's just basic satisfaction. Just because we hadn't been in a position to jump through hoops for as many people didn't mean we were worse.

No one listened to me. I had coworkers - women old enough to be my mother - hang their shaking heads and say "I can't believe we only got 25% Highly Satisfied".

And that's when I realized what sort of a world the parents who raised their kids as straight 'A' students because 'that was their job' had created: a world with no 'good enough'. A world where satisfactory wasn't satisfactory. A world with only 'the best' and 'better than the best', and yeah, I was younger than the adults, the people in charge, but I was also a bloody English major. The only math I'd excelled at - ever - was logic. My mother was a chemist who had taught me how a basic 'if than' statement worked.

I KNEW THAT THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS 'BETTER THAN THE BEST'.

Without so much as putting the Sorting Hat on our heads, we had all sorted Sparklypoo and now our hair was coming in mouse brown at the roots because there can only be one 'best'.

What's more, now I had a job other than 'student'. Now I actually earned a wage and funny thing: I was a straight 'A' worker, but I got paid as much as the 'D's. Alright, I had better opportunities for advancement, in theory. Except that there wasn't any room for advancement. Similarly, I had a better shot at a better job, but all of the better jobs wanted 2-5 years experience for an entry level position and I couldn't do that without going back to school. Now, I did eventually get out of there and get jobs that paid better, but where they better? At JoAnn I got to play with yarn all day and teach people how to cast on. At the pest control company I got to deal with customers trying to rip me off or claiming (not always inaccurately) that our technicians had ripped them off. I got sent to do a job that wasn't mine, stuck in a truck with people who had sometimes been hired that day. My boss tried to retroactively implement rules and threaten to fire you for breaking them. It still didn't give me sleep issues, stress hives, and anxiety that made it feel like I was having a heart attack like the legal litigation outsourcing company.

So no, they weren't better. They were, in fact, much worse, but each of my friends' parents would have approved of them and considered them higher grade jobs than retail. After all, JoAnn had no health insurance while the outsourcing company had shitty health insurance that took $100 out of each pay check and left me with the same taxable income as the pest control outfit despite making $2 an hour more on paper. Clearly an improvement.

And now I'm back in retail and I'm still a straight 'A' worker struggling to take up the slack from the 'D' workers who earn the same amount as me (assuming that we have the same seniority). And yeah, I have a better shot at management than anyone else, but I don't want to be a manager, so there's that. And people look at me and go "What? You have a degree? What are you doing here? You could get a good job!"

And I say that I have a good job. It may not be the best (it is retail, after all), but I am making more money than I have anywhere else. My benefits are good. I like my coworkers. The commute is under 20 minutes. My managers are fighting to keep me in my current position and schedule, despite some pressure to change things.

I will never have a perfect job, but for now at least, this one is good enough. And the straight 'A' parents would be horrified about that, but you know what?

The first successful suicide attempt my Dad ever went to as a Fire Department Chaplin was a teenage boy who thought he'd got a 'B' on a test.

I survived long enough to have a good enough job.

One of the truest things I ever read was from a webcomic called Head Trip. I don't remember it exactly, but it went something like this:

"It doesn't matter how right you are, if you're just going to be a giant, annoying douche bag about it, then you're a giant, annoying douche bag. Shut up. You're just making your side look bad."

And I really feel that's an important message, because seriously, if I had a penny for every time something's gone across my dashboard that is supposedly supporting something I support, but is so nasty, toxic, and bullying that it makes me want to stop supporting that thing - even if that thing is technically my own rights - I would make Jeff Bezos look like a pauper.

For those outside of the U.S., a penny is worth $.01 and costs $.05 to make. It is coinage we literally lose money producing.