Mark and I met at a convenience store near his house, where I worked part-time in my spare time. At nineteen, I wanted to feel financially independent, to put some money aside, so I took several shifts. My parents were proud of me: I was both studying and working, so I could buy myself some new equipment, makeup, or pay for a trip with the band. Mark also thought my part-time job was a great start, even though he was still hanging on his parents’ necks, so to speak.
Our relationship began and developed gradually, but it was very nice. Mark gave me flowers, I fed him chocolates, and sometimes we had late-night dates at the store when we chatted away, taking advantage of the customer’s absence.
Our happiness lasted about two weeks. Mark’s mother humiliated me, and I didn’t want to date her son. Even more – I was ashamed to do so.
On the evening shift, a woman came into the store with Mark. She didn’t notice that her son was winking at me and we were exchanging smiles. When she got to the cash register, the cash register hung up, and the customer started to get cranky. She said that she had bought here a million times and I was the only one who got hung up, which meant that I was a crook, and then she called me a fraud, thinking that I was deliberately trying to cheat her out of her money without a receipt.
– You see, Mark, why do you have to study hard? So you’ll never have to stand here and wipe your snot all over me, mumbling about the cash register being jammed!
It was so embarrassing because she was the mother of my boyfriend, and because there were other people in line that I had seen before who would probably come into this store and whisper about me again.
As much as Mark begged me to forgive his mother, who was having a “bad day,” I couldn’t. While things weren’t so global, I dumped him and quit my job. Luckily, I was lucky enough to find a remote job that paid less, but I could take more work and avoid interacting with people like Mark’s mother.
I think any profession is important and necessary, and when you’re a student, you don’t have much of a choice. It’s cool that some people have overconfident parents who think their child is special and teach them almost twenty, but that doesn’t mean that one day life won’t also slip someone with a degree a job as a cashier.
