Customer service is an unpaid degree in reading people. You’ll use it in every room you ever walk into.

Standing across a counter from strangers all day teaches things no class covers: how anger usually arrives dressed as something else, how tone lands before words do, how to keep your own temperature steady while someone loses theirs. The work is often thankless and badly paid, and it still hands you a skill that transfers into every job you will ever have. You are learning people under pressure, which is when people are most legible.

If you are in that kind of job now, collect deliberately. At the end of a shift, name one thing you noticed about how a person operated. Those notes outlast the job.