I'm not good at coping with problems. My usual plan of action is just to ignore it until it goes away by itself, which isn't really helpful or effective in any way and usually just makes the situation worse. I also have no intermediate moods. Either I'm okay, or I'm melting the fuck down. There is very little between the two. Most of the time I manage to stay calm when I'm stressed out but when that fails, I degenerate more or less immediately into a complete psychological clusterfuck--consequently, I have pretty much the same level of frustrated anxiety and emotional tumult whether a problem is a minor one or a really serious one. Getting stuck at red lights when I'm late for work causes me to go utterly apeshit in the same way losing $500 to a dummy card-reader that stole my checking account information does.
Obviously this presents some problems. It means, chiefly, that I completely lose control of myself from trivial problems and it doesn't matter where I am or what I'm supposed to be doing at the time. I can usually sense one of these episodes coming on and can forestall it or curtail it completely by removing myself from the situation, but sometimes I can't do that.
Like today at work.
Old Navy likes to pretend to be all hip and fun and is known for terrible puns and cheesy alliterations in their ad campaigns. Sometimes we have to wear stupid t-shirts supplied by the company but since I've worked there it hasn't been any worse than that. The most aggressively stressful time I've had there was during the weeks leading up to Giftmas, during which the store was open until midnight and we had to spend an hour after closing up putting everything to rights again after seemingly every single solitary person on the eastern seaboard came in and messed shit up. Those weeks I wasn't getting home until 1.30 or two in the morning. But even that I could deal with.
I could not deal with the DJ.
There's a big jeans sale going on right now but not any more than any other sale they've done, but for some reason this one was a Big Fucking Deal because they thought it would be awesome and fun to hire a fucking DJ to play music in the front of the store. Don't ask me why, it makes no sense to me and frankly it made me completely lose my shit.
Now, I can deal with background noise. I'm good at filtering out noise I don't want to hear. I don't have a problem with the store's normal background soundtrack playing. But the DJ was playing music I hated at such a high volume with such enhanced bass that I'm pretty sure it rearranged most of my internal organs. I hate this. I hate loud music. I seriously fucking hate it. Mostly I hate it because I see it as extremely rude--not everyone likes it, and a lot of people are like me and really intensely dislike it, and it's a real asshole move to force other people to endure something that drives them to violent homicidal urges.
There wasn't a corner of the store safe from the din and it was played so loudly, and right near all the tills, that you had to shout to have a conversation with someone two feet away. Customers didn't complain to the management but expressed annoyance with it and I felt the need to apologize even though it wasn't anything to do with me--I just felt so incredibly embarrassed at the actions of an ostensibly sensible business. It just... wasn't fun. It wasn't cute. It wasn't hip. It was annoying, uncomfortable, extremely disruptive, and made me so frustrated that I was trapped in an enclosed space with it that I started getting physically achy. I don't know that this happens to other people but when I get really intense negative emotions, after a certain level there's no more discomfort my brain can produce psychologically or emotionally, so it moves on to making me physically in pain.
Also important here is that I am fairly profoundly deaf. I haven't passed a hearing test in years. I suffered constant ear infections as a kid that scarred my eardrums and damaged my hearing. I think I'm about as deaf as you legally can be without being required to have a hearing aid. On a normal day I still miss about a third of everything said around me, which is embarrassing and frustrating at the same time. When I'm listening to two things at once--say, someone is talking while the TV is on or I'm trying to listen to two conversations at the same time--my hearing loss gets worse. I only hear half of anything and I don't hear it very well. I hate it so much but there really isn't much I can do about it. I just try and make sure I don't have my sense of hearing multitasking often.
Today's DJ and his horrible, awful loud music rendered me essentially completely deaf. I couldn't hear myself think or panic or pick out a damn word anyone said to me that was spoken in anything less than a very loud yell. I couldn't hear the phone ring or my walkie-talkie.
Being trapped in an uncomfortable environment full of noise I hated and couldn't filter out that was aggravating a disability that I'm embarrassed to have and struggle to cope with anyway kind of set me on a straight track to a total emotional meltdown.
I could. Not. Stand it.
Worse still, for a while it looked like all the employees were going to be forced to get up and fucking dance or something. They were talking about the 'Macarena', which I had to do (along with the 'Electric Slide') about a zillion times a year every year in gym class until I could finally stop fucking taking gym in tenth grade. I hate dancing, mostly because I can't do it and when I can't do something being forced to attempt it is abjectly humiliating. And humiliation is something I fear worse than death. I would seriously rather be dead than embarrassed and that is absolutely not an exaggeration. So, yeah, I thought we might have to dance and I was prepared to be forced to leave my job over it because there was no way in hell I was going to do that.
(It bears mentioning that a digital camera was going to be involved and the pictures/videos were going on Facebook. Fuck no, don't even...)
Fortunately, there was no dancing, but I was sneered and scoffed at for being a killjoy because I was so completely miserable the entire time the DJ was there. I was on the verge of tears anyway and could barely contain myself while my withered little grey husk of a brain began to deflate on me like a punctured balloon. After about two hours of this I was getting ready to go to my manager and tell her that either the DJ was going to have to go home or I was going home because I couldn't work with all that horrible din and I was getting dangerously close to cracking the fuck up.
But he finally left a little after 4pm.
Blessed silence descended.
Everyone else who is working tomorrow is super happy about the DJ being back. I seem to be the only person alive who doesn't see this as anything but obnoxious.
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