Do you want a super easy and cost-effective birth control? Well all you have to do is apply to work at a big box toy store. While some might think its fun to work with a bunch of toys, its not anything close to a playdate. The lunch room furniture was not made of lego and we didn’t have an endless supply of candy. It wasn’t all rainbows and unicorns all the time, thats for sure.
I was hired as a seasonal employee to work through Christmas. This is basically the worst time for any person who works in retail. The store hired lots of us to manage the insanity that is Christmas-shopping-parents. Since it was such a large group of new recruits, we didn’t have a lot of training. We had to rotate in each training exercise, so we didn’t get enough hands on experience. 
With very little training or confidence I was on the floor with huge lines full of impatient shoppers, who have been at the mall all day and still need to buy gifts for two other cousins and that one weird Uncle you have. It was a mad house in there.
Not only did I have to learn the POS system and all the information customers would ask about, I also had to learn a sales pitch for a warranty program they offered. Depending on how well you did with selling warranty, the bosses would then determine if they wanted to hire you full-time when peak was over. So, when I started working there that was something that I really wanted to do well on. I used to sell warranty when I worked at a tech store, so I thought I would be selling warranty for gaming systems, games, instruments, and other big items. Well… I thought wrong. This was a warranty on all toys. Every item in that store had some type of warranty. Every item except maybe candy. But because I didn’t work in the electronics section, I never really saw big ticket items at my till. I mean, how was I supposed to sell warranty on cheap ass toys? Like “Excuse me miss, do you wanna buy warranty on a fucking Barbie?” Because literally you can. Pretty much everyone turned me down. It was stupid AF to buy a warranty on a toy where its cheap enough just to replace it if necessary. I even cringed every time I saw that warranty window pop up on my computer. I felt bad for everyone I had to give a sales pitch to. Sorry for your 30 seconds that I wasted!
I tried to use the music that played in the store as a way to make the time go by. I started noticing that I was pretty familiar with all of the songs. It was a perfect playlist for me while wasting time at my register. Every shift I had, I noticed I was hearing a lot of the same songs. Like dang, I knew the radio was repetitive but not this repetitive. By the third shift, I shared my thoughts with a coworker who informed me that its the same playlist for a long long time. When December hit it was Christmas music all the time. I had never hated Christmas so much in my life before. But hey, at least I can recite all the words to every Christmas song in existence ever!
Ever since Frozen came out, Frozen toys are high in demand. Of course all the kids at my store lived for that fucking snowman. Disney put the Frozen characters on pretty much every item that the toy store sells. There is a Frozen version of anything and everything. Don’t even ask me how many times I’ve heard ‘Let it Go.’ We really need to let that go people!
Once we closed, kicked out our final customers and closed up the registers, we had to organize the aisles. Everyone in the store, regardless of their position had to stay until this process was finished. Now, it may sound easy to quickly organize the store with all those people. But it is actually a brutal process. Imagine a very loud, obnoxious child in a toy store. They are on a sugar high and 
are so excited to look at all the toys. What do you think they do to our lovely displays that we organize the night before? Of course, they destroy any type of organization that existed. They pick up toys, throw them down in random places, knock down a bunch of product, leave products in wrong sections and overall just make a huge ass mess. If you take into account the size of my store, which is a massive store, and the amount of work it is to pick up every single item in the store and align them on the shelves neatly, you can imagine that its pretty terrible.
Another gross thing about working at this particular toy store was the washrooms. The washrooms the staff used were the public washrooms in our store, which was open to anyone who walked in plus their nasty kids. The washrooms were left so disgusting by the time the store closed where most of the time I just didn’t use theirs at all. This may be TMI, but like the sights I have seen were horrendous.
Bonus Story! I was cashing out this mom who was with her toddler daughter. I had a decent size line of people building up behind her. I’m scanning through a few of the small puzzles that the mom placed on the counter, just doing my normal routine. Then the final item of their purchase was this play grocery shop cart. The little girl was standing right in front of me, giving me a crazy death stare, with a tight grip on this cart. I needed to grab the item because the scanner wouldn’t reach all the 
way to the ground where the girl was. So I bent down to her, reached my hand out for the small plastic shopping cart, and then… had a young toddler scream in my face. Just like a chihuahua, she looked small and cute at first but once you made her mad she became evil. She hated that I tried to take this precious thing from her. I kept looking for help from the mother but literally she didn’t say anything until the daughter started to make a scene. She then dealt with her kid and passed me the cart to scan. I cashed them out and continued with the rest of my line. Kids, what a joy.
If you work at a toy store, good for you! You are a very strong person.
– Jordan
Follow me on Instagram: @jordancaroe
Watch me on Youtube: JordanCaroe
ere supposed to all come together in the school gym and perform a choreographed number spontaneously. Newsflash kids, that sadly doesn’t happen. I remember teaching all of the girls in my class the choreography to “We’re All in this Together” during lunch recess. And I do admit while playing a softball game I was singing “I Don’t Dance” in my head. I pulled out some of my moves when I played outfield. I wasn’t very good so the coach put me on the field in the place where least balls go to. More time to live out my fantasy of dancing with Ryan and Chad.
ved him or hated him, Justin’s side swoop hair and high-pitched voice went straight to my heart. The song that made him famous, 
Claire’s is a store I’m sure many of us girls are familiar with. It was the store you always hit up while you were walking around the mall with your friends and your mom shopped in a different store. But yet, we still felt totally cool and mature as we went shopping “by ourselves.” For many girls it was the place to get your ears pierced. For me it was the place where you could buy tons of squishy bright earrings that were shaped as various animals and desserts. Did I need an 8 pack of cupcake earrings in lots of fun colours? Hell yes I did. I still go in there occasionally just to breathe in all that nostalgia and cheap- ass-products-marked-up to-ridiculous-prices smell.
When I made my MSN account, my life became school… then hours of messenger. We all made stupid email names that we regretted as we got older, had the short “sup” and “nothing much” conversations, and customized your page with different colours and emoticons. Fun story, I was talking to a boy I really liked from school on msn. As I asked him “whats up” he responded with “nm jc”. In my head I was thinking “OMG, he just gave me the nickname JC. He must really like me.” (My initials are JC) I went on with the conversation for a while, sending cute messages until my best friend logged in. I messaged her instantly as I was so excited to update her on my progress with my crush. I shared my good news that he had been using a cute nickname for me, my best friend sadly informed me that “jc” was ‘just chilling’ in text talk. In that moment I learned that this boy may not like me back and also that I wasn’t cool and trendy as I thought.
me want to wear colour coordinated Juicy couture tracksuits with my squad. The empowering songs, fun fashion and sassy dance moves aren’t the only great parts of this movie. It also tackles more serious issues like different economic backgrounds, identity, race and the negative sides of the entertainment indsutry. Their song 
movie came out. This is when my parents made Disney a lot richer. I alone probably helped their box office numbers significantly. I needed to see Lizzie and Gordo travel to Rome on the big screen multiple times. The Lizzie McGuire movie taught me class trips are an awesome place to meet your doppelgänger, impersonate them during a performance in front of thousands and be swooned by a handsome random man you meet. 
I found out this is not exactly true on my trip to New York with school. I did not perform at Radio City Music Hall as my long lost identical twin. That sucks. However, I did learn to not always trust a handsome face and most importantly learnt what dreams are made of!
I got my very first phone in grade five when I started walking home from school. It was a small pink Virgin Mobile flip phone that I absolutely adored. While it would be cool to have my flip phone back, I think I will stick with our phones now. I do not miss the way you had to double or triple click for other letters while texting. I could never reach the number of texts I send a day now with those buttons. Other kids had the phones with the slide out keyboard. But the one thing I had over them is that I could always look important when I ended a call on my flip.
unny videos. Then at recess we would all share what we watched and come home with a list of things to go look for on Youtube. Now a days you can easily share things with just a tap of a button. In under a minute your friend can be watching what you just watched via text or the various social media apps. I hate to sound like those mad hipsters but we are the ones who organically used Youtube to share things with our friends. Kids will never know the struggle now if they can just pull out their new iPhone from their pocket at recess.
This is the first one I got. It uses an upside down Treble Clef and a Bass Clef to create this pretty heart. I had always thought, if I was to get a tattoo this is what I would want. Flash forward to last summer, my mother came to me with an idea of getting tattoos together. We went back and forth with hundreds of ideas and I came across this one. I remembered this design from my thoughts years before and I knew it was the one. It represents the two of us coming together to make the heart. It also represents how music connected us. I started getting really into music as a kid and she was my biggest supporter. I LOVE the location of this tattoo. My mom got hers behind her neck, but its still the same design and shading.
inspiration for this tattoo. I wanted to show my support, passion and love through this tattoo. Finger tattoos do fade and this one specifically gave me a lot of trouble. I had to get it touched up two times before it was done perfectly. This should be expected if you are looking into finger tattoos as they fade the quickest and everyones skin will react differently to the ink.
The storyline and the characters related to me and I have never stopped being obsessed with it. The quote comes from one of the most known, and most inspiring song from Wicked, ‘Defying Gravity’. It is basically a saying to stand out, beat the odds, and be you. I love this tattoo so much, and I love that its on the outside of my arm so everyone can see it 🙂
Jordan Caroe 