[My views are my own].
My father (Big Al) has a favorite saying: “One of the secrets to success is to not let the shit-birds get you down.”
A shit-bird is someone that flutters overhead and drops negativity bombs.
He picked up this little gem at boot camp in the early 1960s; and he passed it along to me in the late 1980s.
I was a junior in high school, working as a bank teller.
This was before ATMs. So, at night, after the branch closed, the kids would work the drive-through windows.
During the holidays it was your worst nightmare. The line of cars would stretch down the street for hours.
By the time the customers arrived at the window, everyone was pissed off — and nasty.
One terrible evening, my drawer was off by $25, and I had to spend three hours tracking down the mistake. I got home at 11 o’clock totally exhausted; and I had school the next day.
I told my father that I was going to quit.
Big Al told me that quitting was not an option.
If I could learn to deal with shit-birds (like he’d learned in boot camp), I’d have a skill worth way more than the $5 an hour I was getting paid by the bank.
Our strategy was that when people got nasty, I’d match their negative energy with equal amounts of positive energy.
They’d get angry. I’d be really happy.
They’d blame. I’d apologize and tell them I totally understood.
They’d yell. I’d by magnanimous.
It became a game. I enlisted my friends at the branch. We started a betting pool to see who landed the worst customer.
And . . . we went from being really unhappy to laughing so hard we would fall to the ground.
It’s been over 30 years since I was a bank teller, and Big Al was right: “One of the secrets to success is to not let the shit-birds get you down.”
Oh . . . and make sure you tip well. People who do service jobs don’t get paid nearly enough to deal with all the assholes.