Obviously that’s a grandiose statement to make. But if you’ve ever been on the receiving end of a screaming customer or found a store toilet overflowing because that’s what happens with bad plumbing, you’re ready for anything. You’ve seen it all. You’ve confronted shoplifters. You’ve forgotten the store alarm’s security code and found yourself on the phone with police, begging them not to come and that you swear you’re a manager. You’ve hidden on a rack of jeans, eating cookies, instead of looking for a size 10 because you just needed a break, damn it. You’ve gone in sick. You’ve gone in crying. You’ve wept while counting down the cash registers as your 17-year-old employees ask what’s wrong. (The answer: the tried-and-true quarter-life crisis.)

You’ve encountered [almost] the full range of human experience; none of which you could trade for the world.

Which I didn’t realise until recently. As a 15 and 16-year-old working in fast food, I complained when I had shifts that interrupted plans with friends, or when my shifts resulted in me coming in still drunk on a Saturday morning. (Please don’t tell my manager.) But those moments also forced me to shut up and deal. My managers didn’t care about my social life. My co-workers didn’t care about how sick I felt. The public certainly didn’t care about me in general. Which started to drive home an important message: That’s life, you better get used to it.

In fact the entirety of working in retail could be summed up with “that's life, you better get used to it.” And not in an Ayn Rand sense, but in a way that forces you to own up to your choices and to realise you’re not the only person who’s alive. I’ve never been particularly great with the notion of “teamwork,” but I did get that if I didn’t help out and take somebody’s shift if they were stuck, nobody was going to do the same for me.

Which I’m embarrassed to say took a few years. After leaving fast food to work at a shoe store (where I learned how good I was at making other people buy things,) I found myself working at (a now-defunct) electronic store where I was put on probation because of how often I was out “sick.” Fortunately, I quit before they fired me, and I found myself as an 18-year-old steakhouse hostess who pined for days spent being yelled at over wrongfully prepared Big Macs.

It’s not that I was a bad hostess. I’m great at saying hello and making small talk and asking how many people need to sit down. I’m good at calculating wait times and was even okay at wearing a blazer with shoulder pads. (And I didn’t call in sick, even when I felt like death.) But I am not good at sexism. I am not good at being on the receiving end of flirty, older men who take 18-year-old friendliness as an invitation to comment on skirt length. And I’m not good at managers who don’t see anything wrong with that (or managers who tell you to lie about wait times, resulting in more than a few table pagers being thrown at you). So by the time I fled the steakhouse for the hardware store across the parking lot, I was prepped. I knew a sense of camaraderie was important, but I knew you also had to look out for yourself. I knew you’d disappoint people if you didn’t show up, and I knew that a boss who makes you apologise to a harasser can go to hell. I figured the next step would be easier.