I had been on the sales floor for only a few minutes when I saw a middle-aged Indian couple walking in. My heart jumped. I took off my nametag, out of impulse, and slipped it into my shirt pocket. I tried to not be the first one to talk to them, and I pretended to look like a shopper myself. I was embarrassed to be talking to another Indian as a salesman.
I saw my parents in the bespectacled, grey-haired man and the fifty-year-old woman. I couldn’t look in their eyes when they looked at me. I went to hide in the backroom.
Then Cindy came into the backroom and said, “Deepak, we have some Indian shoppers who want to buy a DVD player and they want to know if it would work in India. I told them one of our team members is from India. He can answer your question better than anyone else,” she said, with a grin on her face.
I had to come out.
The man smiled at me, and said, “Are you from India?”
“Yes, I am,” I said and smiled back.
“Which part?”
“North. I am from Lucknow.”
“Okay. We are from Mumbai.”
“You have a question?” I asked.
“Yes, yes. My son is in medical school here. We were visiting him, but now we are going back,” the lady said and scanned me top to bottom.
“Okay, what can I help you with?” I said, trying to avoid the next question. Back in India, mothers of my friends often volunteered their son’s salary and then quickly asked mine. It was their way of judging their son’s success.
“We are trying to buy a DVD player, but we want to make sure that it will work in India.”
“Let me see,” I said, and walked to DVD section.
“Are you also studying at the university?” the man asked.
“No, I am not.”
“So, what are you doing here?” he said with a curious face.
“I am working here,” I said.
He fired the next question. “What’s your background?”
“Yes, this DVD will work in India,” I said.
“Okay, good.”
“And my background is in media,” I said. “I am in new in America and I am trying to find a better job.”
“Yes, I was thinking about that. You seemed to be an educated chap. You can do better than this,” the man replied. I don’t know why, but I was acting as if the couple would fly to India, and go straight to Lucknow and tell my parents about what was I doing. Out of more than one billion Indians in India and around the world, the chances of the Indian shopper in my store turning out to be someone who knew my parents were next to zero. But it didn’t matter. I couldn’t get the inhibition out of my system.
When the training finished, I had no business being in the backroom unless I was unboxing the newly arrived merchandise. All of a sudden I was in the open. My first reaction was to avoid being seen working as a salesman by anyone who looked to be Indian.
Although I didn’t know any of the Indians who came to shop, it seemed as if I could read their minds when they saw me working at the store. “You pathetic loser,” they seemed to say. “You came to America to do this?”
I took a deep breath after the Indian couple left. In the next few minutes a white lady came into the store. She looked to be in her eighties and walked very slowly. Cindy gestured for me to take the initiative and help her. I waited until she came up to the counter where I was standing. I didn’t say anything. She came up to me and said, “Hi, I am looking for a battery for my watch.”
My brain did a quick search through all knowledge about batteries that I had acquired a few days ago. She took her wristwatch off and set it on the counter; I found myself clueless. I knew that I had learned about finding batteries for watches, but I couldn’t recall anything. I asked her, “Do you know what kind of battery this watch takes?”
“I don’t know, but you guys should be able to look it up on your computer, can’t you?” I looked at Ron, who was dusting some merchandise.
“Hey, Ron, could you please help me?” I said.
He stopped dusting and came up to the counter, picked up the customer’s watch, put it back down, turned around, grabbed a battery pack, handed it to me, and walked away without saying anything.
The customer looked at Ron with a smile and said, “That was easy!”
“It comes from years of experience and a lot of knowledge,” Ron said.
“Well, you made it look real easy. It seemed you could tell by just looking at the watch what kind of battery it required.”
“Yep, knowledge and experience, that’s what it is.” Ron laughed in self-appreciation.
I put my password into the register, and scanned the barcode on the battery pack. I told the lady her total was three dollars and twenty-nine cents. She opened her purse and started looking for something. She said, “Oh, there it is,” and pulled out a checkbook.
She set the book on the counter, fixed her glasses, brought her head very close to be able to see clearly, and started writing a check for three dollars and twenty-nine cents. While her pen moved slowly on the paper, I started wondering about the steps involved in accepting money in the form of a check.
I asked for Ron’s help again. He replied with a sigh. He came with heavy steps, and asked the lady to show some kind of ID. When she presented her driver’s license, he hit a key on the keyboard, and started entering details from her license onto the computer.
I watched Ron go through several steps—noting down the customer’s identification details, stamping the back of the check with red ink, and keeping the check in a special drawer—all for just three dollars and twenty-nine cents.
When Ron was entering details from her driver’s license, I noticed the date of birth of the customer. She was born in 1926. It was the same year my grandfather was born. I was quite attached to him. He died when I was only seven years of age, but I could never forget his date of birth. I couldn’t help but tell the lady that my grandfather was born in the same year she had, and that he had been dead for more than twenty-five years.
Putting the driver’s license back in her purse with shaking hands, she said, “Well, I am still here.” She smiled, turned around, and walked out slowly.
As I watched her leave the store, I wondered if she had any children, or grandchildren, and felt sorry for her that in her old age she had to come and buy a watch battery herself. My grandmother, who died at the age of eighty, often asked me to get her eyeglasses fixed, pick up her medicines, or mail letters; she never had to go anywhere herself. I couldn’t imagine her going to buy a watch battery on her own. People would have judged my family very harshly if she had to do that. I am sure my neighbors and friends would have thought we were selfish and irresponsible.
While I was lost in these thoughts about my first customer, Cindy put down the screwdriver she was using to tighten a shelf on the TV wall, and walked hastily towards me.
She came up to me, brought her face right up to mine, and stared at me from only a few inches away—all I could see was her white face. Smiling, but with gritted teeth, she said, “Awright, what did you learn about customer service in your training?” I stood there blankly, and said nothing. She said, “Let me remind you and don’t you ever forget that every customer has to be greeted within five seconds of setting foot in this store, awright?”
I said, “I will not forget this.”
She stepped back, pointed towards the entrance, and said, “Also, you should walk up to the customer, and not wait for him to come up to you.” When I said okay, she raised her one thumb up in the air, and said, “Awright!” She smiled again and went back to what she was doing.
I’d forgotten to greet the customer, and I had waited for her to come to me, because I wasn’t confident that I’d be able to answer her questions. Things got quiet after Cindy’s rant. I felt awkward. I didn’t know if this was how American bosses talked to their workers, or if it was just Cindy. While these thoughts filled my head, I decided to defuse the awkwardness, and asked Jackie to show me how to find a battery. I wanted to learn it myself so that I didn’t have to ask someone every time a customer came looking for something.
Jackie was enthusiastic and keen to teach me. She hit a red button on the keyboard that said “Hot.” It took us to the company’s webpage. She clicked on the menu and selected a tab that said “Batteries.”
“Now,” she said, “you have to put in the model number of the watch and it will tell you which battery you need. Easy, ain’t it?” She looked at me and smiled. Jackie made me feel better. Her smile was reassuring. She told me she would help with other things, but she was getting off work soon that day.
While I pondered this, I saw two young ladies coming in with a plastic bag in their hands. They walked straight up to me.
“Hi, how can I help you?” I said.
“We just wanna make a return,” one of them said.
I took them to the cash register. They pulled an alarm clock out of the bag and set it on the counter. This was the first return of the day, and the only thing I could remember from the training was that it was a lengthy procedure. It was easy if the money was to be refunded to a credit card, but if the purchase had been made with a check, I was required to feed a lot of data into the computer and ask the customer many questions.
The procedure became even more of an ordeal if the purchase had been made more than thirty days ago, or if the customer was trying to return the merchandise without a receipt. Since I was going to be doing this for the first time, I wanted to get it right. I told the customers that I was still in training, and I needed to ask my colleague—who was helping another customer at that moment—for his help.
By the time Ron returned ten minutes later, the ladies’ patience had reached its limit. They were tapping their fingers on the counter, making me nervous. I realized it would take much longer if I did it myself while Ron watched me. So I said, “Ron, could you please help these ladies?”
But, contrary to what I was hoping, Ron said, “Why don’t you do it yourself—I’ll watch you.”
I felt cold sweat on my forehead. I dreaded beginning the process, but I had no choice. I was the one who had originally talked to these women, so they were my customers. There was no one else in the store who could help me. I had two angry women staring at me from the other side of the counter, and Ron watching me struggle.
I began entering the information from the receipt into the computer, pushing one key at a time, with my chin digging into my chest, trying not to look at the customers in front of me, and turning to Ron for his help at every step. I asked the customer, “What’s your zip code?” Irked at my slow speed, she said, “It should be there on the receipt.” I looked down carefully and found it at the very bottom. I noticed Ron and the customers exchanging a sarcastic smile.
“How long have you been working here?” one of the customers asked me in a sharp tone.
“This is my first day,” I replied.
“You’ve been training for a week,” Ron said, “You should know how to do this.” He looked at the ladies, and gave the ladies an exasperated eye roll. I looked at him, surprised. I wasn’t expecting him to say that in front of a customer.
I printed out the return receipt and handed it to the ladies. They looked at me, smiled, and one of them said, “You’ll get there.” As I saw them walking out of the store, I took a deep breath and wiped the sweat off my forehead. I felt like I had just endured the longest twenty minutes of my life. I thought Ron could have helped me not to lose face in front of the customers, but instead he had watched me go through the humiliation.
I looked at my watch and said, “It is almost time to go.”
“Not yet,” Ron said. “We gotta do a few things before we close. Why don’t you grab the vacuum cleaner and I’ll count the money in the cash register.”
I wondered if Ron hadn’t tried to help me because he was insecure and not a good enough salesman himself. I wasn’t sure.
I left work after a very long and emotionally exhausting day. Holly came to pick me up, since the city buses stopped running after nine at night. After I put on the seatbelt, she put the car in gear, and we drove off.
A few seconds later she asked me, “So, how was your first day on the sales floor?” I didn’t know where to begin. I wasn’t sure if the eighty-five-year-old lady coming to get a watch battery was more shocking than Cindy berating me for bad customer service, or if not being able to help the two young women was more embarrassing.
Holly looked at me after I didn’t respond, and said, “How was your day, honey?” I took a deep breath. She said, “It’s alright, we can talk when we get home.”