a suggestion for some customers…
grimmstale asked: Please Please Please stop calling him your owner! For your own sake!
:x
I quit my frozen yogurt job via voice mail message…
My new favorite customer:
Me: Do you need any help?
Man: I need a lot of help. *twitches*
Saturday, 8/27/11, 9:00 am:
At this point I’m in bed, hitting my blaring alarm back to snooze, trying to pretend I don’t have to be at HealthyFrozenYogurtChain in 1 hour. As I fall back asleep, I receive a call from work. I immediately sit up in bed cursing.
Fuck. I fell asleep. I’m late. I must be late, calls from work almost always mean that I am late.
Me: Sorry.
My Manager: Uhm what? I’m calling to let you know we’re closed because of the hurricane.
Me: Oh, awesome. Good night.
My Manager: Uh yeah. See you next week.
Relieved to have no reason to leave my bed, I roll over and immediately fall back asleep. I am awakened shortly by a text message.
MyCoworkerFromThePizzeria: Hey any chance you can work today?
I consider this proposition. And then I gently place my phone on my floor and go back to sleep.
Aaron in transit: becoming me: I was fired from my job today for being transgender.
They first had the person from my staffing agency contact me (instead of speaking to me personally) requesting that I not use the correct bathroom, because I might make people uncomfortable. When I asked him to please find out if there was a unisex bathroom in the building I could use (as I did not want to go to HR/my supervisor myself and make it a big deal) they informed him (and thus he informed me) that there is no unisex bathroom available and that I was no longer a good fit for the company.
When I contested that there was no issue, I would suck it up and use the wrong bathroom, they changed their tune to say that they didn’t interview “Aaron”, they interviewed “(legal name)”, and that I was “obviously” not the person I claimed to be.
What really disgusts me is that at 5:00pm, before I left, my supervisor was telling me how great I was doing, that I seemed like a really great fit and did so well with training, set me up my own desk and computer and told me when I came in tomorrow, I’d be on my own. At 5:40pm it was confirmed that they were not willing to work anything out, my “situation” made me an ill fit for the company, and they had already lined up someone else for my job.
It makes no difference that my skills, experience, and qualifications were the same, regardless of preferred name/pronouns. If I had requested to be called by a preferred traditionally feminine name, like say, a shortened version of my legal name or my middle name, I would still have my job.
For more information, please read the wikipedia article on the federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act, and get involved in helping to fight for its passing.
EDIT to add: There are no laws in the state of florida (or most other states) to protect transgender people from being terminated based on gender identity or expression. It was perfectly legal for them to fire me based solely on my trans* status. I appreciate the mutual anger but no, I cannot sue them. Legally, my hands are tied.
Reason #13:
Today at my new job, I told my coworker I was a sophomore in college. She responded “oh my God, you are so OLD!”
The Christmas Store
This is from the Winter I spent personalizing ornaments at The Christmas Store.
Elderly Customer: Can you write Simon, Elizabeth, Joseph, Melissa, Catherine, Lindsay, Matthew, and Doug, Christmas 2010?
Me: Sure! Are these all your grandchildren?
Customer: Oh, no. These are my cats!
Me: Oh…
Customer: They’ll be so happy to see all their names hanging from my tree!
Reason #12:
Told my owner I was quitting. He replied no.
The Most Depressing Wage Gap Statistic You’ve seen today…
To put this in context for you, A woman needs a PhD to make as much as a man with a BA.
Men who have attended College or University but haven’t a degree earn about the same as a woman with a BA
