I took responsibility, even when it was not mine to take. I did not do favourites, and I did not discriminate. If you made me angry, I would set you in your place and tell you exactly why what you did was not a good idea.
That earned me a reputation. I was strict. I was scary. They used my name to frighten the new workers on their first day—just wait until you meet her.
But it also earned me something else: respect.
I became the confidant of the boss and something like a right-hand person. When they could not reach the manager or the owner, they called me. Even at 3 a.m. on my free weekend.
Why? Because my word settled the problem. Whatever I decided, the owner and the manager would accept it. It got to the point where I was not even the shift leader on the floor, and yet when a call came from the two heads and they heard I was working, the message was relayed to me—even though protocol said it should go to the shift leader.
There were also the kids who, at home, were the golden child. In their parents’ eyes, they had never done anything wrong. They would go to the owner and complain about me. The first words out of the owner’s mouth were always: “What did you do to make her angry? You probably deserved it.”
That was the strange gift of that job. I arrived with no language, no connections, and no power. I left knowing that I could command a room, run a floor, and be trusted with decisions that belonged to people above me.
But there is a cost to working that close to people.
You learn things you would rather not know. You see things that change how you look at families, at loyalty, at what people hide. Some of it was small. Some of it changed how I saw my own life.
That is a story for another day
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