At this point in my life I don't want to shout often. I try to avoid things that make me mad or situations that I don't want to be in. I prefer times enjoying the people around me. Even at these times there are times I get to where I am done with the situation but as a grown adult I have learned if I am somewhere and I don't like what is happening I can leave. And I do. Some of my family have even gotten to the point that they recognize the situation and know I am going to bow out. I am not going to be in the middle of an argument. I know some would say avoiding the situation doesn't resolve anything. No it doesn't resolve anything but neither does arguing. I will happily share my opinion and move on. I have learned to agree to disagree. Otherwise, Brian and I might not be so happily married for so many years. Brian will say that I have to be right and I do have a problem with being wrong but more because I will beat myself up than others.
An example of me being able to shout is also one of my favorite horrible stories about work when I was in my early twenty's and I had taken a camera to another store as an inter-store transfer for a friend that I lived with. He had a customer looking for a camera and my store had it. I was going to pick him up that night so I wrote out the paperwork, showed the people I was closing with what I was doing and carried it directly to his store and he called the customer and she came and picked it up. Great customer service right. Nope. I was accused of stealing this point and shoot camera. Now not only was me stealing something that would never happen. I was certainly not going to steal a point and shoot camera when I had a very expensive slr camera that I loved. The loss prevention person that was a former New York cop took me to the break room and asked me what happened and I told the truth but it didn't matter what I said. He wanted me to say I had the camera. He told me it would be ok which it never would have been. He asked me to write down what happened and I did. They asked my friend at the same time the same questions. Our stories matched. He was so efficient the customer had returned a defective camera in exchange for the one I brought him but he had already done the damages and sent them back to the warehouse. So they kept me in the break room until they were able to find the tote with the camera in it and reach the customer to verify. When I walked out of the room I said something about you aren't going to apologize for accusing me of stealing. He said, no. I replied, I will tell every person I come in contact with what has happened and I did. As a company they had thought I was a loud mouth kid and this is the perfect situation for that loud mouth to tell others how even doing the right thing you can be accused and fired for it if you can't prove it. Well I will never forget the afternoon that that same loss prevention person came up to me a few weeks later and said please stop talking about what happened. I said I will not. He didn't apologize but he did say he was wrong. I said I would like to believe your ways will change but they won't.
That is just one example of being done wrong and me standing up for myself and shouting from the top of the mountain tops to make sure it doesn't happen to someone else. Today when there is a problem at work I am more likely to give my opinion to one of the supervisors. I said the other day I wish someone would ask my opinion. He was surprised that I would want to share my opinion. Unfortunately my last job was with a person that had to be right and he didn't care the price he paid for it. At one point I would have told him why he was wrong and he would listen but it got to where he didn't care he wanted it his way. So I have become much more passive in these situations. I let the rules change and go with the fact that they will change again. I don't feel companies have their employees best interest in mind just the bottom line. So I will quietly wait until someone asks or things change again.
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