Over the course of past couple of years I’ve become steadily hypersensitive of people working at any of the various jobs we’ve placed under the ‘service’ ‘retail,’ or ‘minimum wage’ umbrellas...

 

     Part fascination and part compassion, I find myself entranced by store employees’ discrete peeks at cell phone screens and clocks that never seem to inch deeper into the day.

 

     As my friends and I grew up and started working these jobs I began to learn firsthand the god-awful, soul sucking, oft-exaggerated tediousness that is food industry or retail: Making me only further aware of burger flippers, floor cleaners or lotion salesmen that I encounter each and every day.

 

     It’s easy to get swept up in a mall’s modern current: rushing through shiny places and screen-illuminated faces at an exhausted speed until twisted in pointed and deliberate conversation with someone performing some service for you (often as an afterthought.)

 

     It has become weird to instigate conversation on a checkout line, nearly blasphemous to stand on any line without glancing at your phone and receding into some virtual world. When we do finally reach human interaction in any store it’s more often than not sparse and quick, empty and forced. A service is complete, and our lives move on.

 

     This past week though, right on this very campus, an unforgettable woman shattered my perception of employee interaction. It is in a sort of literary memorial that I tell her story.

 

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     This past Saturday I had the unique pleasure of locking my keys in my car: a feat I had successfully avoided accomplishing in my four-plus years as a licensed driver although never ruled out given my twenty-plus years of absentmindedness.

 

     Thirty minutes, four phone calls, and three phonetic spellings of my last name later a woman named Roxanne arrived up top in her red company issued Nissan, ready to save the day.

 

     For all intents and purposes Roxanne should have absolutely hated this job:

 

     1) It took far longer to arrive than expected. 2) She had to deal with my confused and anxious attempts at campus navigation via bad phone. 3) To top it off I did not realize I was wearing a t-shirt that said “Like A Champ” on the front.

 

     Basically, even I’d hate me.

 

     I was expecting the worst as her car pulled up, the scorn of an underpaid and exhausted soul, but was instead greeted with a toothy smile and sort-of high five in celebration of her having finally found me (sort-of because it caught me so entirely off guard.)

 

     We struck up a conversation immediately, her being an older middle-aged woman (or whatever the most correct and respectful way to say she was probably about 50 is) I found myself at ease with her motherly concern and kindness, traits cherished on any college campus.

 

     I was led carefully through the process of retrieving keys and at a point caught my reflection in a side window only to see a child attending some field trip staring back: unsure whether or not she would expect me to raise my hand if I had a question. Flashing sharp humor and a shy intelligence I can only classify as wisdom our conversation rolled and ranged from poverty to higher education to stories of her youth in Jersey City (all the while poking and prodding at my stubborn car door.)

 

     After ten minutes of conversation and contraptions, my keys were successfully retrieved and Roxanne packed up to leave. She closed her trunk and approached my car to say goodbye when I finally came clean about an awful realization sitting heavy on my mind: I had no cash to tip her with.

 

     So there I stood, atop my sensitivities regarding physical labor, the frustrations of work, and the knowledge that I made this entire task far more difficult for Roxanne than it should have been: And I couldn’t even tip her for her service.

 

     Upon hearing both my confession and desperate apology though she laughed, and handed me her business card, informing me that when she wasn’t retrieving keys for the stupid and forgetful across New Jersey she was actually working on a much more ambitious career, a dream of hers.

 

     Roxanne Hutchinson wanted to open a drug rehabilitation center for women veterans in North Carolina: informing me that there were very few centers established to help women veterans specifically and that it was her passion to one day open her own.

 

     “Find our website and make a donation, that’s the best tip you can give me,” she said as I reached down to pick my jaw up off the pavement and clumsily shove the card into my wallet.

 

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As the holiday season commences and we each inevitably find ourselves at some mall buying some thing, it’s both refreshing and critical to remember that beyond the company issued t-shirt or sticker adorned nametag is a very human heart beating for some passion far greater than any store, restaurant, or locked car door.

 

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Copyright 2013, Eric Dolan