The New Girl

Tomorrow a new girl starts. I pity her, I really do. Not because this is an awful job (quite the contrary), but because I'm an awful teacher. Y'see, my life leads to two paths right about now, one involves graduate school in an academic field which will result in a teaching job at a university (what else do you do with those degrees?), and the other is climbing the ladder in retail. Perhaps the payoff is bigger if I went the grad school route, but I'm not a good teacher. I don't have patience, and I have a short fuse with stupid people. And I believe that one should only become a teacher if one has the passion and competence for it. Also, I don't want to be a teacher. I don't like it. And I like retail. I could do this infinitely, theoretically. Teaching--probably not.
But anyways, the other reason I feel sorry for her is that she will be bombarded with retail-speak. Our company is particularly notorious for misappropriating the English language for its own ends. She's not being trained, she's being "onboarded." She's not a part of our workforce, she's part of our "Talent." Not having enough people to work the floor is not our problem, but our "opportunity." (At least we didn't invent the word "Shopportunity." I swear I'll swallow a gun next time I hear that spoken aloud.) Not to mention the bajillion acronyms that get tossed around every day: ADS, TPLH, LBOS, QCXRPPP (okay, I made that last one up). Over time this becomes a new language, and we all speak it fluently, and I think we even grow to prefer some of the euphemisms, but...
I don't remember what it was like learning all of these terms, but it would probably have been worse if I learned them all on my first/second day. And I imagine since I won't be able to hold myself back (remember what I said about patience), I'm probably just going to cram the new girl full of all this crap and scare her off. All the better, I say. Because, really--I like my job, and I don't care to share it. Maybe she can go to grad school.