This video is from a Facebook Live I did about resiliency, under the #SundayNightStory hashtag (something I aimed to do every Sunday night )
I’m practising my storytelling – but also getting into the groove of providing inspiration, and uplifting real world , actual honest to goodness relatable stories from my life for the Game of No’s – so here goes ! Story Number 1 – with a lightly edited transcript below (for those who prefer to read ).
Sunday Night Story
I want to tell you about something that happened to me as a teenager, which really was for me, an indication of a way to learn how to be resilient.
When I was 15, I got my first paying job working as a cashier/checkout register in a supermarket, at a chain called Checkers, which is in South Africa. My very first weekend working as a checkout cashier at Checkers, I was terrified, I had no idea what I was doing, they trained me, I went in with 2 of my friends from the same high school and we went in to learn how to be checkout people at this supermarket chain.
That Saturday, I worked the register, and about half-way through the day this man came through the checkout with his stuff, I was very studious, very serious, rang it up, said hello to him, asked him how he was, rang up his goods, and looked up at him and told him the total on the register. He looked at me, very serious face, and said to me ‘you shouldn’t be doing this job if you can’t be bothered to be friendly and polite’. I went cold, and I was absolutely stupefied because I thought I’d been friendly, obviously I wasn’t, I was focussing on what I was doing, and was brand new at the job. I froze for a second and then I took his money, gave him his change, and I was silent for pretty much the rest of the day working on the register.
I went home that night and told my family about what had happened, and I really had to make a choice about whether I was going to go back the next day, because let’s not forget, I was 15, this was my first job, there was nothing really formal about it, and if I didn’t want to, I could have really stayed away.
I went back the next day, the Sunday, and I worked the full shift on the Sunday, and I went back the next weekend, and the next weekend, and the next weekend after that, and I continued to work at Checkers for another year or so, before I found another job working at a pharmacy, which paid a better hourly rate.
The thing that’s interesting about that story is that my 2 friends that started the same job with me, actually quit that weekend, they didn’t carry on working at Checkers, it wasn’t for them. Now, this is not to say anything about them, it didn’t fit with what they wanted to do, and they had other plans, and they went to other jobs.
There’s also a story in there about this man that was rude to me, and what was going on in his head, and some people today might call that bullying, and I would say they’re wrong, he was just an asshole, who happened to be mean to a kid who was sitting behind a cash register.
Really that incident, so early in my life, in my teens, in my working life, has moulded a lot of how I look at what resiliency is, and what it means to be resilient. I decided way back then at the age of 15, that I was not going to let assholes ruin my day, and I haven’t, or at least I’ve tried very hard, not to let that happen since then.
For me, that’s a lesson in resiliency and it’s something to carry with you, there will be people, who will bring you down for no other reason than they are not in the space that you are, they don’t know you, they don’t know what’s going on in your life, and they will be mean to you, because they can be. That doesn’t mean that you stop what you’re doing, and it doesn’t mean that you have to quit. It means that you need to take it for what it is, pack it away, move on, and carry on down your path.
