Wednesday 21 January 2009

Making the Best of a Bad Situation

I was directed to this article this morning about how a French checkout girl called Anna Sam has gone on to write a best seller based on her eight years experience working behind a till in a supermarket. This has been pulled together from the blog that Anna Sam has been keeping as a vent for various frustrations provided by the nature of the job and above all else the customers. If you speak French, the blog can be read here.

The article makes for an interesting read, and I wouldn’t mind reading the book. This is a fantastic example of someone making the best of a bad situation and finding an escape route to bigger and more exciting things. There’s nothing wrong with being a checkout worker, we all need them and the queues wouldn’t move very fast without them, but there is something a lot more exciting about what Anna Sam has managed to achieve.

If everyone kept and published a record of their daily lives, there would be a huge amount of poorly written and boring text out there, but there would also be the occasional shining example of a genuinely interesting, amusing and maybe enlightening piece of literature. If you’re bored, or depressed about your situation, why not write about it and see if it can transform into something interesting?


Additional Notes:
Reading about the content of her book, this confirms a suspicion that I’ve had for a long time that the checkout workers at my local supermarket are judging me based on the things that I buy. Seeing as the supermarket is so close, I use it as my own personal fridge, because if I buy things in bulk, I am the proverbial squirrel that can’t remember where he’s buried his winter supplies and I forget I have food whilst it slowly rots in the fridge. As a result, the combinations of food that I buy are by their very nature quite odd. A bunch of bananas, a bag of rice and branston pickle, for example, raises silent questions as to exactly what it is I’m planning to cook. There’s also the more direct judgment when I bring a crate of beer and a packet of super noodles and nothing else to the check out to be confronted with the chatty one who asks “oh, is you’re girlfriend away tonight?”

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