So tonight I get chewed out by one of the parents at the job.

She’d been having issues with paying the bill for as long as I’ve worked there, and this is the second time in less than a week that she’s blown up. The problem is the database that is being used(why a database? why not pencil and paper? because technology makes things easier, duh!) and she doesn’t understand it, employees working there for more than a year don’t understand it, and that just makes it more irritating when she needs an explanation of why money is owed.

So she unloads on the nearest representative of the business.

This happens, in almost every job I work at. This isn’t going to be a “Oh God, why does this happen to me” post, however. I do enough of that weeping into my beer.

No, it’s instances like these that help me understand a small part of why I need to either teach or own a business. That way I can take responsibility. As it stood tonight, I couldn’t say much. The best I could do was to say “Look, I understand your problem. this is irritating, but the most I can do is say once you’re paid up tonight, you’re paid up until the next time your child is brought in”(which was more or less true(and for the 2 or 3 bucks that she may hav owed extra, the boss could take out of my check)), and I told her I’d tell the boss exactly that.

But in instances like that, or when patients have to wait at a hospital, or when customers can’t understand why their pictures didn’t turn out exactly like they should have…all of these I’d have no problem with if I had anything to do with formulating the situation in the first place. But my hands are tied by the situation that I’m working in. I have no power.

I can make things better, if I’m given enough responsibility to make things wrong in the first place. That’s what teaching offers, that’s what owning your own business offers…the chance to own up to problems and say “yes, I made them this way” and then either stick to your guns or make things right.

But a problem pops up that I can’t FIX or had nothing to do with CREATING, and my hands are tied by both? That just irritates the living shit out of me.

I can’t offer a working solution to a problem that I didn’t have anything to do with in the first place, and which I don’t have the power to change in the future.

I’ll take responsibility for any failures that I’ve made, but don’t make me take it for things that I’m not given the ability to fix.