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Customers

I had a lovely conversation with a customer today. It was very normal, but there was something in it which I think touched us both.

The man’s name was Martin Wassel (I wrote it on my hand because I just wanted some way to remember him. I think the name suits him). He was from LA and he’d come into work to trade in some DVDs with no post-code for the UK so I signed him up with the work address, but took his name and examined his LA driver’s license. Normally I’m not very good at talking to people, especially not when I’m ill and tired, but he seemed nice and lost so I got up the courage to ask him why he was over here.

Turns out his dad had died recently and that was why he was back (I assume he’d lived here once) in the UK. I was racking up 40p prices for his deceased father’s old DVDs, something which would normally have perturbed me, but then he said something so sweet that made him different from most of the smelly oafs that come into my work. “Getting rid of his old things is like the mist passing away over the fields after dawn. It just disappears slowly piece by piece without you even realising”.It was a genuinely lovely idea, and he said it with a quaint smile that maybe it was a stupid notion, but I think we become poetic when we’re grieving.

I said I was sorry for his loss - I genuinely was - and then went on about my Grandma, how my dad had been in the same boat and my Grandad hadn’t even wanted to look at the things. Then I proceeded to drop DVD boxes all over the place and explain that I was clumsy and most of the people at work thought I was silly because of that. He said he thought it was an endearing and sweet quality. His response to how long he was over here was “as long as it takes”. It made me a little sad for him. Maybe he didn’t have brothers and sisters like my father had had  - and if he had a family they would probably be back in LA. We spoke about my grandad some - about how he’d moved on to a new woman in Spain, he said his father’s wife dying had put the most stress on him.

Finally we went on to what I was doing, he thought I should be studying English and Philosophy - I laughed and told him I had decided to become a midwife because of “the way the world is now”. But it was a lovely thing of him to say. I wonder now if he was a writer of some sort. I felt sad in the end when he had to go, I gave him his £47 for his DVDs and he shook my hand and said it was a pleasure to meet me.

I don’t think I’ve ever quite been so touched by a customer. I don’t know if it was just a complete openness of feelings or the bittersweet air to most of what he said, but I felt for a moment this strange connection between two people that is so rare to find. Just talking because you can, because perhaps he had no one else to talk to and for once my words didn’t stutter or sound stupid. If I ever see him again I’d ask to add him on facebook or for an email just because… I suppose he’ll only ever know me by the name printed at the top of his receipt - if he ever looks.

My phone saved my life

And no I wasn’t stranded on a desert island or stuck down a mineshaft or in some other hidden place where it was my only way of contacting the outside world. At least not physically anyway, but we’ll come to that.

For just under two years now I have worked at electronics shop come video-game store CeX. As the prices are cheap and the stock is all second-hand you get pretty much every type of person in there from people wanting to sell their spare iphone because their spoilt-rotten son demanded they have the latest game to people who will argue with a 40p trade-in on their stone-age PC game. Basically what I’m trying to say is you never quite know who you’ll be serving today and sometimes it’s not always who you want. However I think what I found most surprising recently is the number of female customers who I have served who have hinted at a current or previous abusive relationship.

Perhaps hinted isn’t quite the word. One woman even got told of by her boyfriend right then and there in front of us for talking to our gay supervisor. I think I only really thought about it all as I was helping a woman trade-in her old nokia for a blackberry when she said to me quite plainly “my ex wouldn’t let me get a new phone”. I suppose his motives for that would have either confused or seemed trivial to others, but to me it made perfect sense. By controlling his partners possessions and the value of those possessions this woman’s ex had not only gained some higer ground on her, he had cut her off from the possibility of ever owning a smart-phone. On her nokia everything would be via text to contacts within her phone which could be far more easily regulated than say an iphone with texts, emails and many third party messengers at her disposal. She would have been, in essence, harder to watch.

I tried to identify with her, telling her my ex never let me get drunk or go out - she had the same situation with an added “used to beat me black and blue as well” which always makes my problems seem small in comparison. In the end though we’re not that different, our boyfriends followed the same patterns, the situation with the girl who got told off in front of us was all too familiar. Maybe I didn’t let my ex push me around as much and that’s why nothing escalated (he was pretty much the same size as me anyway I think I might have even been stronger than him) the point is that we were all three - two of us out of a relationship and that poor girl still stuck in hers - manipulated mentally to a ridiculous point. I don’t know why we allow this to happen to ourselves.

However back to the point of the phone, my iphone in the end saved me. Obviously not on its own, but the contact it gave me with other people - mainly my current boyfriend - helped me escape from that rut I had been driven into. I live in a place without signal so before it was pretty much impossible to text - and my ex could hear me typing on my laptop when I talked to  him so instant messengers were pretty difficult unless I wanted to copy the whole convo to him. With my iphone I could type quietly hidden from the screen of my PC and just say I was fiddling with something on the floor. It all seems silly now why didn’t I just shut off skype and do what the fuck I wanted, but that’s the situation I was in and I couldn’t escape from it, it mareswell have been a dark cave or a desert island - for some reason I was trapped in that cycle.

It sounds really silly, but my iphone was a catalyst - it gave me the ability to talk to who I wanted to without having the whole conversation pried on. It gave my boyfriend now (before my boss how weird does that sound!) the chance to talk some sense into me and show me - not always directly - that the situation I was in was not normal, that I shouldn’t be bending over backwards trying to please this man who didn’t deserve it. Without it, without that ability to break out of the cage my ex had me confined in I might still be with him - and that’s a frightening thought.

Whenever I see a girl in a relationship like the one I had, or the beginnings of one, or even something remotely similar I want a way to reach out to them and make them think. I wish there was some way to talk to these people and tell them there is a way out of it. Until then I just watch them come and go and hope by sharing a little bit of what happened to me it will jolt something in their minds. I wish there was a way to make people more aware how little things (like disallowing a woman autonomy mental or physical) can make things better or worse. I wish I could step in when I see a man mistreating a woman and say something. Until it happens to you in any way (it doesn’t even have to be to the extreme of physical abuse or whatever) I think most people think that it would never happen to them and the woman who gets manipulated would have to be stupid. But in the right circumstances I’m pretty sure it could happen to all of us - because love (or what you think is love) does make you stupid. I wish there was a way to make the whole world more aware of this and to help women avoid these situations entirely. I just wish I could help.