So I see a lot of folks on here venting about this job so screw it, I've got a lot of pent up feelings about this shit and am in desperately in need of some form of catharsis;

For reference, I was one of the people who took CAT pay and went on leave for a month. My store never closed, in fact we were pretty much the ONLY store in about 40 miles that never closed. Our hours got shortened to 7am-3pm and we're DT and mobile pickup only, but we never closed.

While I was on leave though, a lot of shit happened in my life (parental abuse and trauma shit, I won't get into it), and I started therapy, reached out to other members of my family, and started to really change. Before I'd went on leave I was depressed, bitter, and angry. But I started learning how to separate myself from my emotions.

Cue me coming back to work, with block scheduling now, so it's the same group of partners I'm seeing every other day. We have a "problem partner" with a bad attitude, we have almost every other partner complaining about her as soon as she leaves, we have one partner that won't shut up worrying about shit in the future that's so far beyond our control, and we have me and one of the shifts (god bless her) just trying to get everyone to stay. fucking. calm. And that's obviously on top of the stupid customers, the massive rushes of mobile orders, the drive thru line wrapped down the parking lot, and, ya know, the PANDEMIC going on. And the cherry on top for me, getting misgendered by customers constantly (if I get called ma'am one more time...)

Every time I work, I find myself needing to remind everyone to just breathe. And I don't mind it, really, I'm happy to help my coworkers! But it sucks that I have to. It sucks that everyone around me is so stressed. It sucks that we're in this situation. It sucks that we're getting paid a barely livable wage to risk our and our families' health and wellbeing just so that Karen can have her venti iced caramel macchiato. It sucks that we're living in an era of late-stage capitalism where the common man becomes a sacrifice for a line on a graph.

And what really sucks is that we can't do anything about it.

It's just like I keep telling my coworkers, all we can do is keep breathing.