There’s Something Wrong with the World Today - Summer 2017

I have been struggling with some things for a while now, trying to comprehend where we are going as a whole, and how no one seems to want to do their jobs – always passing the figurative buck.  I am tired of self-centered, selfish, enabled people.  There I said it: I work, and I work hard – I don’t half-ass it and I don’t put my work onto other people.  I don’t inconvenience others by putting more on them. If I don’t know something, I ask questions to make things run smoother.

I don’t like getting taken advantage of, and mostly that is how I feel at the end of the day. People in today’s society are giving me a distaste for humankind.  For instance, how is it okay for a group of high school students to cut in front of you and your children while you are trying to get into the amusement park, when you and your children actually got to the park in a timely fashion to situate yourself in line and wait for the gates to open? Are we not teaching our children proper etiquette and manners?  That you cannot just take something from others, that we need to show respect and be courteous?  That’s what is lacking here, RESPECT. No one shows it, no one uses it.

Then you have the fast-food workers demanding higher minimum wages – but they take their good time getting you your order, and half the time the order isn’t correct – and just so we are clear, it’s not their fault that the order is wrong, it is yours.  If you try to argue the point, they just roll their eyes at you and huff and puff. Well dearies, I can roll my eyes too – I am not paying for you to text or talk about your sex lives, or to hear you chatter about meaningless high school drama, I am paying for my meal to be hot and accurate.  The time my mom and I went into a store and the woman ringing us up was much more concerned about telling her co-worker about her sex life than helping us paying customers, I called her supervisor, and refused to go back there.

You want a raise, earn it – don’t think you are just entitled to it.  The entitlement is my biggest problem.  No one is entitled to anything, you need to work for it.  No one wants to work. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to see people starving because they are making below poverty line wages; my problem is people who don’t want to work, and expect a fat paycheck.

There is the argument that people need to feed their families, that they need the $15/hour to survive.  This is a no win situation.  I think this country of ours needs more job training for people – that they can get entry level jobs doing office work or maintenance (to name a few), and the ability to move up in a company.  The problem with fast food people making this kind of money, they are going to have to raise prices of food to ridiculous amounts and people will stop going when it is no long economical to stop and buy their family a ‘quick’ meal.

Same with retail outlets, why do you think there are more self-checkouts, less baggers at the stores, higher prices and less staff to help you out? It’s because the outlets need to pay the hourly wages.  I don’t think people should have to work multiple jobs to make ends meet – there should be jobs out there that pay decent salaries and if there aren’t, then I think the wrong people are padding their pockets… meaning, profit is high and there is probably a host of higher ups that have padded pockets while the underlings are busting their rears and getting paid nothing.

That generally goes for when I am in a store, too; nothing frustrates me more than when I am at a check-out and the employee is engaged in a conversation with someone else. You find it rude when I am on my cellphone – well, how do you think it looks to the customer to see you chatting with someone else? I worked in various customer service positions when I was younger, and when there were people in my check-out line, I focused on them—not my other co-workers, not my phone, not anything else.  Show me the same courtesy by being pleasant, putting your phone down, and not talking about other people in the store.  I swear this is why more people shop online now-a-days, they don’t want to put up with this aggravating behavior. I am not saying everyone in retail is awful, as I have a lot of friends that are in retail – and they work hard – but there are certainly those few that seem to ruin it for everyone.

Recently I hired a performance artist to come to my house and entertain my sons and their cousins while I was setting up food for a party we were hosting.  Now first of all, I don’t think he performed his full 45 minutes that he was supposed to, but at this point, that is neither here nor there.  The fact that he sat in his car while still in my driveway and badmouthed me on his Facebook account doesn’t sit well.  Paraphrasing here, he said that ¾ of the guests got up to leave the performance to go eat and whatnot.  That is not the point; the point is that it was a show for the children – who were watching and entertained. And I paid you, so I don’t care if the room were empty – you put on the best damn show you can and don’t think you are owed anything beyond a paycheck simply because my husband’s elderly aunt was in the kitchen eating. Also, the snarky comments, such as ‘those people in the kitchen are missing a great show’ or ‘you are really missing something great out here’, during the performance were uncalled for. I will gladly re-hire someone if they earn it, but telling my son that he should ask for another performance for his birthday does not win points with me.  Sure he could have been joking about it, but the tone in his voice just screamed snarky to me.  Also, what if I didn’t have the funds to pay for another performance – but you just told my child that he should get one… Parents, you know what I am talking about here… there will be an endless amount of whining, pleading, etc.

The thing is, I am not going to put up with the poor behavior of our society. Restaurants are slowly getting pinged off my list one by one as well, because they can’t get orders right or just generally give off that ‘I don’t give two shits’ attitude; well, I guess I don’t either, because I won’t go back.
I guess I struggle with this because people actually cared about doing their jobs when I was growing up.  They paid attention to details and engaged the customers in conversations that were proper and polite.  I miss that.  We need to straighten up, we need to work, and we need to stop putting off our work on others.  You have a specific list of duties you do during your shift or work day, don’t pass the buck to the person that comes in after you… do what you need to do and do it to the best of your ability.  Don’t leave your work for someone else to do because you don’t want to. We need to take responsibility for our actions, get our heads out of our rear-ends, and quit doing our jobs half-assed.  It’s not fair to the ones that actually put forth the effort to pick up the constant slack of those not doing their share.

Nicole Leckenby is co-founder of The Holiday Cafe. She runs after two energetic little boys at home. She wrote her first book, My Crazy Life in 2008 .