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For 2 months during the summer this photo was taken, I worked full-time at a grocery store! It was a goal of mine for quite a while to experience working a job that isn’t just software engineering, where I sit in the same desk in front of the same computer screen and talk to the same people every day¹, and so when I finally had an off-term from school, I was super stoked to try new things.

The experience was…not that good.

There was this pervasive fear of the manager and quite a lot of disrespect being thrown around on a daily basis. Seems like some people were used to it but I didn’t really have any real reason to be there apart from “shits and giggles” so I quit not too long into it. I liked a lot of the other people there who I worked with though! I rarely speak Chinese outside of my own family, but I was working at an Asian grocery store, so that gave me a lot of opportunities to learn how to speak more like I’m not just talking to my Mom and Dad.