How To Be Less Karen
By: Leslie Kleinberg Zacks
Tags: Parenting, Humor, Self Improvement, Life, Self

My volunteer job involved getting up early. It was a cause my daughter cared about as well, so she planned to tag along. We were scheduled to staff an information table in a cavernous gym alongside a hundred other good causes and pass out information brochures all day. This was not my first rodeo and I knew that to stand out, we’d need balloons.

I totally forgot about this commitment until the day before. I’d been traveling all week and was irritated when I realized that Saturday wasn’t going to be a pajama day. But there was no getting out of it, so I leapt into action and phoned in the order for balloons before shutting down my laptop on Friday afternoon.

“What time would you like to pick those up?” asked the young woman in the grocery store floral department I reached just before five o’clock. She was completely undaunted by my fussy order of oddly specific balloon/string color combinations, so I decided she must be ok with me being a little demanding.

“Is 8:15 too early?” I asked, knowing it wasn’t, and only phrasing it in the form of a question to seem somewhat flexible. Which I wasn’t. I needed my fucking balloons at 8:15 the next morning and not a second later.

(Eek. Shut up, Karen)

She said that was fine. I thanked her and hung up.

The next morning, my husband handed me a travel mug of sweet magic coffee and wished me well on my day of do-goodery. Moments later, I was awash with jittery energy and cattle-prodding my bleary-eyed, unfed daughter out of the house.

“We can grab something to eat when we pick up the balloons at the grocery store,” I promised her. It was a grocery store, after all. There would certainly be options. Once I pulled into the parking lot, she was half-asleep again and groggily asked if she could just wait in the car. I figured I could handle balloons and an executive decision regarding breakfast, and I left her to doze. A quick glance at my watch indicated that I was nailing it schedule-wise, so I briskly trotted across the parking lot with caffeine-fueled confidence.

Here’s the thing about 24 brightly colored helium balloons: you can see, from a great distance, when they are not there. The moment I passed through the sliding glass doors I spotted the flower department and immediately hoped that there was an invisible storage area somewhere that might be concealing mine. That hope was the only thing keeping me from shrieking “WHAT???!!!” with ice-pick hysteria, alarming a few early-morning shoppers in the nearby produce section.

“Are you Leslie?” the very mom-like woman behind the counter asked me, carefully sorting through various slips of paper behind the counter. Her name tag read “Sue.” She’d seen me coming and had watched the color drain from my face as I approached her tidy counter. I nodded mutely and she immediately found my order.

“This says that pickup is for 8:15 pm. This evening,” Sue explained, holding up my order, prepared for my reaction. She made it perfectly clear that she wasn’t the child-bride who’d taken my order the previous afternoon. But, like competent moms everywhere, she quickly moved on into solution-mode. “I can have them ready in fifteen minutes,” she added quickly and calmly, offering the best and only solution available to me.

But I wasn’t interested in a solution. I was only interested in my thinly veiled rage and the best way to exhibit it without getting arrested.

“No thank you,” I snapped without additional comment. I turned and marched out the way I came, certain that my un-Karen hair-flip implied “I’ll take my business elsewhere” and would elicit shame. But there was nowhere else to take it.

That shame I’d toyed with whipped around like a boomerang as I stood in the grocery store breezeway, biting my lip indecisively. Neither coming nor going, I shifted my weight from foot to foot causing the sliding glass doors to open and close unhelpfully in confusion as I considered my options. There really was only one.

I have experience with swallowing pride and walking back bad behavior. I’ve done that a few times, so I assumed the posture of someone with a shred of self-awareness and walked back to the flower department. Sue was already working on my oddly specific balloon order, assuming I’d calm down and come back. We exchanged brief looks.

“I’m sorry- I’m such an asshole. Thanks for helping me,” mine said.

“Yes. You are. But that’s ok. I get it. I’ll get this taken care of,” hers said back.

In an impressive display of balloon-inflating prowess, Sue handed me two astonishingly beautiful bundles in record time, staying true to my exacting instructions regarding colors. She attached them both to weights, which I hadn’t requested, but gratefully accepted as an undeserved peace offering for my inconvenience. Sue, I decided, was a customer service genius who had taken a pin to my fury and popped it like one of the balloons floating above my head. I had the good grace to spew my gratitude, along with some pitiful apologies, all over her tidy and cheerful corner of the grocery store before I left. She was lovely and very kindly told me to have a nice day.

Back in the minivan, which was now overflowing with balloons trying desperately to escape, my daughter opened her eyes and noted the time.

“That took a while,” she said. She asked if I got her food, and I threw her a suspiciously wrinkled white paper bag with a half-eaten bagel inside. While Sue was filling balloons, I’d tried to make myself scarce and wandered into the bakery section and grabbed her one. Still grappling with my shame, I stress-ate half of it before paying.

I explained the mix-up with the balloon order and, before driving away looking like the clown-car we’d suddenly become, I grabbed my phone and retrieved the number to the store. My daughter munched on her unsatisfying breakfast and said nothing as I navigated the automated answering service before finally reaching the store manager.

“Hello!” I said with cheerful mania to a busy-sounding man on the phone. “I just left your store and I’d like to share a little feedback!” I sensed the manager brace for what was certainly one of several conversations with Karens expected that day.

I explained that there had been a serious error with my balloon order, but that “Sue” had emerged as the best kind of magician that day, and that I was incredibly grateful. Refusing to let him talk, I went on to emphatically insist… insist!… as though he was actually trying to argue with me… that he had both a flower department hero and a very satisfied customer on his hands. I demanded he drop everything that moment and go thank her for her service. I mean for fuckssake it was absolutely the least I could do under the circumstances.

The manager thanked me for the feedback, clearly surprised that this was the nature of my call and promised to let Sue know. He was a little unsure how to respond to my aggressive and demanding positivity, but he noticeably decided to simply accept it without question, and did nothing to prolong our conversation.

“Are you ok?” my daughter asked after I hung up. I peeled out of the parking lot and sped down the road toward our destination, trying to make up for lost time.

“I’m great! Why?” I asked, feeling proud of my sudden new resolution to quit being such an asshole. For once in my life, my nature had yielded before disaster.

“That call was slightly off-brand for you,” she said, explaining nothing more. She’s witnessed my dicey behavior for years — long before the world decided to victimize every woman named Karen. She’s taken careful notes on how to stick up for herself, but she’s also resolved never to be horrible to people who are just trying to do their jobs.

“Are you proud of me?” I asked her, really hoping for the first time as a parent that she was, and that she’d reward me by saying so. I’m a Gen X woman and while we’re all busy acting like and overcoming our inner Karens, we’re also total suckers for positive reinforcement. Especially from Gen Z.

“Yes, mom,” she said, using her own mom-voice. “But more importantly, are you proud of you?” she asked, both mocking and mimicking things I might have said in the past.

Yes, I thought. I fucking am.