I have always firmly believed that everyone should have to work in customer service for at least six months of their lives. There's something about working with the general public that teaches you infinite amounts of patience and life skills that you can't get anywhere else. I got my first job when I was sixteen. I worked at a McDonald's that was very close to the freeway, meaning I interacted with people from all over. I worked shifts during the morning, midday and night, and the diversity of people coming in during those times was astounding. Morning- especially right around six- was when the elderly flooded in for their breakfasts. Most of the time, they ordered the same thing every time they came in. Saturdays and Sundays were busy by nine AM. The lunch time shifts were full of businessmen and women in suits, parents bringing their herd of small children in for a cheap meal and a toy, and in the summer, people coming through for a soda or sweet tea roughly the size of their head.
Working retail was different for me. I started at a retail store when I was eighteen, and I really was expecting it to be like working fast food. It's not. The people are, for the most part, much nicer. I've been giving the opportunity to exercise my ability to make small talk, which is something I'm not a huge fan of. I've gotten very good at talking about the weather and pretending I like the shirt someone's buying, even when it looks like something that got designed by mistake.
One of the biggest things I've learned through working in customer service is the importance of patience, and not just with the customers. Working on a team with other people can be very difficult, and you don't have a choice in who you work with. When people say their coworkers are "like their family" I can only assume they mean that they're forced to get along with them and spend large amounts of time together. Your coworkers are going to suck sometimes. Some of them are going to ignore policy, or not clean up after themselves, or just be plain lazy. I learned so much about dealing with people I don't like, and even how to get along with them. After working at the same place for a year, I don't have very many coworkers I don't like, because I've managed to find good qualities in all of them. There are very few other scenarios where you get to work in an extremely high stress work environment for several hours at a time outside of a job, which is why customer service skills are so important to learn.
Even though I eventually hope to be able to move up in the world and onto the career I've always wanted, I'm grateful for the experience I've gained through working customer service. Not every day is good, but even the bad days teach me something, and I couldn't ask for anything more.
