For many college students, winter break is a time for rest, relaxation, and catching up with old friends. However, winter break is also a time of great boredom for a lot of students. In order to prevent the foreseen boredom, I picked up a job at a huge retail store and potentially learned more from seasonally working there than I did my entire first semester of college.

The holidays are scary.

While I didn't work Black Friday (thank you, universe), the days leading up to Christmas can be just as frightening. There's nothing quite like screaming children, long lines, low stock of items, screaming parents, stressed employees, and last minute shopping. Don't even get me started on having to stay at the store until 3 a.m. to get the toy department even semi-organized.

Random items left all over the store are the worst.

Before my job, I never thought twice before throwing a box of crackers I decided I didn't want onto a pile of towels in a store, or something similar. However, after having to face baskets of items from my department nightly and having to put them all back in place, I really try not to do this so much. I get it, we humans change our minds a lot, but I really try to make an effort to put things I end up not wanting to buy back where I found them while shopping.

Trying to get people to sign up for store credit cards is basically impossible.

I always used to quickly cut off cashiers when they would ask me about signing up for a card, but now I understand their desperation. Stores have a quota for their credit cards, and it's pretty difficult to reach with many people being against cards or already having signed up for one. I worked at a store on the border where most of the customers were visiting from Mexico and therefore not eligible, so it seemed impossible to get signups. It seemed like the people who wanted to sign up always ended up in checkout lanes that weren't mine.

Employees are trying their best.

I'm constantly guilty of getting easily annoyed when the line to check out is huge or when I can't seem to find a single employee throughout the store, but after being in their shoes, I see things very differently. Employees are truly trying their best to get the job done and have to juggle several time-consuming responsibilities within a short shift. When a store is out of stock of an item, it's not the employee's fault, and when it seems like a cashier is taking forever, they're really trying their hardest to get everyone out as fast as possible.