Promotions

I've quite the motley assortment of jobs in my time; especially since I finished school; In fact I've had 4 career jobs in the last six months alone. I have a problem with commitment.

Anyways, I think by far one of the worst would have been my job doing product promotions. Ultimately I think my main problem is that I'm quite good with people, but I absolutely loathe the general public. This may sound harsh, but I truly believe that anyone who is exposed to the general public, for an extended period of time, gradually grows to hate them with a fiery passion.
So, I was hired to do a product promotion for a rather well know cosmetics company. Essentially, the job requires you to stand at a make-up display (which you had to cart from store to store yourself), for 10 hours with no breaks, befriend moronic tweens, accost as many customers as possible, and occasionally get sexually harassed. In general, by the age of 24, I was so over the whole creepy coworker thing, but there was one store manager who particularly sticks out in my mind, an average 40ish year old man, with one exception: the man had a glass eye. He would check me out with his one good eye, then wink at me with the glass one. So it was really both hilarious and horrifying at the same time.

Anyways, product promotion has to be one of the worst jobs for self esteem! When someone sees you approaching them in a shirt with a brand on it, they automatically assume that you are trying to sell them something they don't want, so they'll just cut you off before you begin, and spare you the common courtesy of saying hello.

Numerous conversations went something like this:

Me: Hi! (big smile)
Customer: No thank you! (hand in my face)

So, in general they didn't care what was going on, or what I had to offer, it was just a big fat "no thank you" to me... really it was just an "I hate you, I don't know why, but I'm absolutely repulsed by you"

It was nice even to get the "no thank you" sometimes a customer would see you approaching, then they'd start walking away, so at this point you couldn't turn back, so you'd follow them-

I mean you didn't want to look like an idiot, because you had already started talking, and couldn't admit to yourself that someone would just walk away from you...you would convince yourself, that maybe they just hadn't heard you-

but then they'd speed up, so then you'd speed up, and you should speak up too (because you know, they hadn't heard you). So basically you'd end up race walking, chasing a customer around a cosmetic department, while shouting at them, until someone finally gave up. A girl I worked with, one time, ended up chasing a woman all over a Walmart Super store.

Totally worth the whopping $12 an hour

Oh, and you maybe asking yourself how I quit...well one day, I was about 2 hours into a particularly horrendous shift, when it occurred to me that I had no reason whatsoever to be doing this, I hated the job, I hated the people, and I was miserable. So without saying a word to anyone, I walked outside, got into my car, turned off my cell phone, and peeled out of the parking lot.