6th of November: Catching up.

So, I kind of missed the 6th of November. 

I had to work, and it was so stressful that I've blocked the entire day out.  I'm beginning to hate Christmas.  A lot.  People seriously walk in, and don't look for their own stuff, they just grab a catalogue and point and grunt at us.  They might as well just make a list and let us shop for them.  It would be a whole lot more efficient than them pointing at stuff, and we have to run all over the store because they're idiots who can't use their own eyes.  But this is more relevant to today, because I was on the floor (walking around helping people find stuff).  Yesterday, I was on registers, and my god, it was the worst day ever.

We have this deal where if you spend over $100, you get a $10 gift card.  This doesn't seem too stressful, but you have to write down all these details, and stamp the receipt.  There's a bunch of other promotional stuff going too.  I"ll give you an idea of what happened with most customers yesterday.

*Customer walks up and dumps their shit*
Me: Hi, how are you?
*awkward silence as I put through their items*
Me:  Since you bought over $40 of Dora stuff, you also get a free trolley bag.
*Customer grunts*
Me:  You also spent over $75, so would you like one of these plush polar bears for an extra $5?
*Customer grunts*
Me:  Would you like to go into the runnig to win a $1000 shopping spree?  Just fill out your details and I'll enter you on the register.
*Customer grunts*
Me:  *enters email address*
Me:  Ok, that's $405096849.  Since your total was over $100, you get a free $10 gift card.  
*Customer pays*
*I frantically write down transaction numbers and total costs, tick boxes, stamp and highlight receipts, and tell the customer how to use the EFTPOS machine because they're retarded*
Me:  Here's your receipt and gift card, if you go to the website that I highlighted down the bottom, you can fill out a survey about the store and get a $5 voucher. Have a nice day!
*Customer grunts, looks at their receipt, and goes straight to refund counter to grunt about being overcharged*

So yeah.  Registers suck when it's busy.  When it's not busy, it's boring as shit.

Floor is pretty much the same.  Boring for the majority of the time, but when it's busy, there's people everywhere coming at you.  Not cool.

When I woke up this morning, I had a massive headache, which was a continuation of the night before (no alcohol was involved).  I took some painkillers, then went to work.  I felt pretty good, until about 20 minutes in, when I had a really bitchy customer.  I was running around all over the store for her, and when I was helping her with easels, she dropped one on me.  On my head.  Bitch.

After that, I made an unbeliveable amount of dumb mistakes.  As I said on Facebook, I need to dye my hair blonde to match my actions today.  

Well, I'm finished work, finally.  Now I have to revise for my psychology exam tomorrow afternoon.

 Since I'm seriously far behind on my word count (not really, but I want to stay ahead)  I may as well revise by teaching my readers what I've learned in the last few weeks.  It's kind of interesting.  I've found that psychology is mostly giving names to things that you understand, but don't have a name for.

Currently, I'm on the week 6 lecture: Socical Psychology.

Soical psychology is the study of how the thoughts, feelings and behaviours of individuals are influenced by the actual, implied or imagined prescence of others.  According to Gordon Allport.

Fundamental Attribution Error is the general tendency to wrongly attribute people's behaviour to internal dispositons, while underestimating the effects of social and environmental errors.  An example of this is when someone bumps into youand knocks you over, and they hurry past without apologising.  The fundamental attribution error is when we assume this guy is a complete asshole who doesn't care about other people, etc.  We assume it's part of his internal disposition, or personality, when he could be rushing off to help an injured person, or stop someone from stealing, or he may have to be somewhere very urgently.  But ususally, people ignore the environmental factors, and assume he's an asshole.

Asch's Studies of Conformity:  The participant is in a room with other people (who are actors, pretending to be participants).  They get shown pictures with 3 lines on it, labelled A, B and C.  They are asked which one is shortest.  It is no question about which is the shortest, but the actors all say the wrong answer and seem very confident about it.  The participant gets confused, and may stare at the image, wondering whether he isn't seeing something.  Eventually, he agrees with the rest of the people by saying the obviously wrong answer.  It shows that people will go with majority influence, rather than their own perceptions.  What's interesting though, is that if one of the actors is told to be defiant and go against the group, then participant will almost always side with the defiant actor.

Milgram's Studies of Obediance:  This is a pretty famous one, used to justify the actions of soldiers in war, Nazis in particular.  A participant is placed in a room with an authoritative person, who says they are connected to Yale University or somewhere of similar prestige.  The participant is told that they are to ask another participant (who is an actor, located in a different room, but still able to be heard) questions.  If the other person answers incorrectly, the participant is to administer electric shocks, increasing in voltage as more incorrect answers are given.  Every time an electric shock is given (not really, but the participant thinks so) the actor screams, and pleads them to stop.  Guess what?  The participants didn’t stop, even when the shocks were supposedly lethal.  A few (maybe 1 in 100 or so) got upset and refused to continue, but not a single one tried to check on the person that they thought they were shocking.  This study is sometimes used to justify people’s actions in a war-scenario, where people are told to kill under orders of their superiors.  They don’t kill because they’re terrible people, but because of the authority figures standing over them, demanding they continue.

Bystander Intervention:  The more bystanders around witnessing an event, the less likely a person is to interfere. Everyone assumes “oh, someone else will take care of it”.  This can potentially be very dangerous.  I’ve seen videos on Youtube testing this out, where a child actor is told to scream and cry when another actor attempts to “kidnap” the child.  Most people didn’t do anything, especially women.  They looked uncomfortable, but looked the other way and hurried off.  A few men stopped to help the little girl out, and the situation was immediately explained to them by the experimenters.  The best response by far was the massive gang of black guys who went to beat the shit out of the acting kidnapper until the experimenters ran out trying to stop them from killing the poor actor. 

Now that I think about it, a lot of these things make sense.  Even if you read it and think “I wouldn’t do this.  I would never electrocute someone to death, and I would intervene if I saw a child being kidnapped”.  But the truth is, you probably have already been in this sort of situation, and you HAVEN’T helped.  I know that I’d like to be able to say that I wouldn’t do this, but I would, because I have.

 In school, or even in any social situation, if someone is being excluded from a group, you would rather stay in favour of the group’s leader (or in the experiment’s example, the authority figure) rather than try to help the  person being excluded (or given electric shocks).  This is natural, because humans are far more concerned with preserving their own well-being and social standing, rather than risk it for someone else.

In the bystander intervention example, I’ve recently been in this situation as a bystander.  I was in a little café thing at uni, just having lunch.  A special needs boy came in, with his carer.  The boy was walking along behind the carer, before he started acting strange.  He eventually collapsed, and started having a seizure in the middle of the café.  The carer was there, helping him.  The girl that worked there came out, and wasn’t sure what to do, she got the boy a glass of water, and just sort of hovered around anxiously.   I sat there thinking about bystander intervention statistics, and thinking about why I should or shouldn’t help.  I decided that if I did try to help, I would probably get in the way because I didn’t know the slightest thing about seizures, and I would just be in the way.  Even though I knew I was just conforming to previous studies, I didn’t help because I thought, as I’m sure many participants thought, that “someone else will take care of it”.  Anyway, the kid was fine within a few minutes, and he walked off with his carer to have lunch somewhere.

Well, that’s all of Week 6 for you.    I’ll spare you all the rest.

Word count =  12,796.