Krapsakas

In Estonian, there is an expression: “Kõik mis hiilgab pole kuld,” which means “Everything that shines isn’t gold.” 

More than 10 years ago, I urgently needed a new job because I had just left one for health reasons.

At that time, a local grocery store with a prestigious reputation in the city where I lived was looking for a cashier. This store is known all over Estonia for its prestigious reputation.
I was a frequent customer in this store because the goods were different than in other grocery store chains. More local ingredients and the prices were also very good.
Almost always, when I visited the store, the other customers were normal people.
At least, I never remembered that there had been any really crappy customers there before I applied for the job.

I applied for the job and got the job.

I stayed there for exactly two weeks.
Why?
More than half of the clientele were heavy drinkers and drug addicts.
One tried to attack me across the cash register (because I refused to sell alcohol to a drunk person. Estonian law actually prohibits it). 
Others allowed me to beat me up after work because I counted a few cents in red coins (0.01 €, 0.02€, 0.05€ cents) incorrectly, so two customers who were friends couldn’t buy their vodka and cigarettes. It was the busiest time of the day, lunchtime, when there were a lot of customers and there was no time to count several times the 12-13 €, most of which were in red coins.

And if you think that one incident shouldn’t make such a big deal, then you haven’t met gypsies who are full of holy anger. Their anger doesn’t dissipate that quickly. 
This word spread among their group.
Which eventually led to me being called very nasty words by their gypsy friends and promised to beat me up in the evening after work. And this happened for several days in a row.
The thing ended up being that I didn’t dare go home alone in the evenings after work, because these gypsy homes were located on the street next to my workplace.
My partner at the time would meet me at work every evening.

The peak of the peaks was when one evening, an hour before the store closed, a tall man under the influence of drugs came into the store.
He walked to the liquor shelf, stuffed 2 x 0.7 L of vodka into both sleeves of his jacket, and started marching out the door. Without paying.
I and the other cashier then had to get the bottles out from the dirty and watery(?) sleeves of this man’s jacket, who was completely high on drugs. 

We didn’t have a security guard and we also didn’t have a panic button to call for emergency help.
There was some kind of panic button-like thing on a keychain, but that signal didn’t go to the security company (if I remember correctly).
Anyway, most of the time that keychain was also lost somewhere or put away so far away that you couldn’t find it in a hurry.

I remember that we got a bottle of vodka from him after a lot of scuffling.
A middle-aged man stood in front of the front door and wouldn’t let the man out.
These were sliding doors that opened wide.
After much struggle, we finally got both bottles out of that man’s jacket.
The shift supervisor ran to us once and then ran to the back room to get the key to the front door, but by the time she started to close the front door, the drunk man had managed to slip out between the doors at the last moment.

This whole circus was the last straw in my patience.
I went and gave my resignation to the manager.
I still remember the manager’s words. We didn’t really see each other much, which is why I was surprised to hear those words: “Agnes! You’re an intelligent girl. You don’t belong here”. She said and meant it with good intentions. 

Thanks to my insistence, at least these employees got a real panic button installed on the cash registers a few weeks after I left.

Beautiful apartment building

What actually prompted me to write this post..

There is a nice apartment building on my main walking route. It is in a location that is next to other houses on one side, but on the other hand, there is quite a lot of privacy.
The apartments themselves also seem pleasantly bright.

I have walked by it dozens and dozens of times and dreamed to myself that “If only I lived there”.
It was one of my dream homes for a long time.

However, in the last month or two, I have started to notice a certain contingent of people who go to smoke while sitting on a bench next to this house (on the public road).
At first, I didn’t pay too much attention to it.
Until last week, my eyes repeatedly caught sight of certain people.
These were obviously people who were drinking excessively.

And then I started thinking about who I had seen walking by this building.
There were probably only 1-3 families with small children there.
The rest were all people with questionable behavior.

And then it dawned on me again that “Wow! All that shines is not gold!”.

I thought all the time that this was a fancy apartment building. Because I WANTED to think so. I had convinced myself of it so much.
Although I had been seeing strangely unkempt and sloppy curtains on the windows of several apartments for months. And there were other, so to speak, strange things that people don’t usually have or that people don’t usually do. I can’t describe it any better.
In short, you realized when you looked at it that something was wrong, like in the big picture.

And then I started remembering stories about police calls in this fancy apartment building district. A little -Bing-Bing- sound went through my head :D.

So much for a gorgeous apartment building that I would like to live in myself.

Why did I bring these examples

Often we think that someone else’s life is more beautiful.
Be it based on social media. Their car or their clothes.

But we never know what’s really going on behind the scenes.

Do people really live in this house, or is there a constant fight?
Is the person really happy or is she/ he only smiling when taking pictures?
Is the thing shining on the ground really a fancy ring or a piece of glass?

Edit: I would add that I did not notice any extremes in either of the examples above at the times when I was in them.
When I went to the store, there was no suspicious crowd there. And if I did notice someone strange over time, it was not enough to draw any conclusions.
It was exactly the same with this apartment building.
I usually walked past it during the day, when there were few people there. However, if I accidentally changed the time when I passed by the house, I started to see a completely different picture.
Functioning alcoholics (older people without children), as well as parents who were leaving the house or just returning there, or parents who were on the playground next to the house with their child.
So, by looking at a topic through only one glance, we cannot see the whole picture.

Think before you judge something. Maybe it’s not as shiny and valuable as it seems at first glance.

With love,
Krapsakas Agnes