If you know me personally, you’ve probably heard me ramble about this topic before. If you don’t, sit down and stay awhile. I’m about to ramble.
More and more I’m considering writing a book very different from my other projects. Not fantasy, not sci-fi. Not even fiction. I’m thinking of writing my memoirs. Sort of. You see, I’m only 21 years old. I’ll be 22 in February. Since I was 14, I’ve probably worked a number of jobs equal to my age. Okay, that’s an exaggeration, but it’s not a big one. I held two jobs for a fairly long time, but in between those jobs I had this little issue where I refused to work somewhere that didn’t make me happy. I never had life-ending financial problems on the way, though there were periods where things looked pretty grim. At that age, working a job that didn’t bring me some joy simply wasn’t worth it.
Almost every one of those jobs fell into three categories: Retail, Customer Service, or Fast Food. I was management in those three categories for quite awhile, but let’s be honest here. In those three industries, management does all of the same crap the grunts do, except more of it along with some paperwork. Throughout all of these jobs, there was one constant: The people were interesting. Legitimately interesting. Coworkers, bosses, my bosses’ bosses, they all have stories, and there’s something about working these jobs that makes you want to share those stories. It’s a survival tactic, I think. You hate what you do, so you use those around you as a distraction.
These jobs are also, by nature, filled with complete and utter stupidity. Again this includes coworkers, but extends so far beyond that. Customers are filled with stupidity. You find yourself doing utterly stupid things. Inanimate objects absorb the stupidity by proxy and when you mix all of that together you start to appreciate the world for how god damn stupid it is. Eventually, it’s not the poor work conditions that wear you down. It’s not the long hours for little pay. It’s not the grim realizations that your career is going to go nowhere. No, what wears you down is the utter stupidity of everything. You begin to weigh events in terms of their idiocy. Sure, today sucked, but it was riddled with less stupid than the day prior.
This stupidity? This horrible, horrible stupidity that poisons the heart and soul of every retail, fast food, and customer service worker in the world? It makes for great stories. Within the last few years I’ve settled on regurgitating this saying at every opportunity, because I like to think I live by it: Life is a story. If a day goes by and you don’t get a story out of it, it is a wasted day.
This isn’t to say you should go out and do something crazy and obnoxious every day just so you can giggle and tell your friends, but just think about your day. Normal, average days. Things happen. Things are said. You see things. These are stories. These jobs were full of stories, and I think they’re stories worth telling.
When I was 20, I took a seasonal job at a gardening-slash-gift shop, the appropriately named Stein’s Gardens and Gifts. It was a massive gardening store, but it also had a section of the store dedicated to baubles and trinkets to decorate your house, as well as things like mirriors and picture frames. Seasonal for this place wasn’t the Christmas season. We had no Black Friday to worry about. At this place, seasonal is Spring and leading into Summer.
My job was as a simple stockboy. I hauled around bags of this, sacks of that. Soil, bird feed, fertilizer… pretty much anything that came in a bag. I also dealt with more than my fair share of pots (clay or otherwise), garden hoses, garden hose racks, fencing, solid concrete pools and fountains the size of a small car. I would move them around, stock the shelves up, get lost in the stockroom, unload the weekly trucks, all of that sort of thing.
As a stocker, the tool most precious to me was my price gun. You know, those things with the roll of stickers, you set the price and mark the product? Without it, I was nothing. I was reduced to ‘nothing’ more than you might think. You see, we had a team of five morning shift stockers, and we busted our asses every single day during gardening season, because people are vicious if they don’t get the kind of soil or bricks they want for whatever overly ambitious project they’re working on. The problem was the fact that we only had four pricing guns between us, and the next team of five started their shifts before ours let out.
Five men, four guns. Manageable. Ten men, four guns. Not happening. At the beginning of the season, we formed something of a truce. We would finish our work first while they simply cleaned up the floor or the stockroom or somesuch, and we would hand over the guns as soon as our shift ended. This truce lasted until the night manager began letting them off early if they finished their share of the work early.
Within days the evening stockers began a war. The price guns belonged to them, and only them. We were forced into a ritual known as The Hunt. One day we came into work and the guns were not where they normally were, sitting just inside the stockroom door on the shelf with the other various tools. They were gone. In a panic, four of us spread out throughout the store while one of us stayed behind prepping our workspace for extra efficiency when we found them.
We had the option of asking the old women who worked in flower arrangement to borrow a few of theirs, but those women scared the hell out of us. Asking them for a favor is like walking up to a pack of witches and asking if you can take a swim in their cauldron. Their simultaneous cackles haunt me even now, a couple of years since I first heard it.
The one that stayed behind found one first, hidden deep within the hollow core of a stack of coiled garden hoses. The guns weren’t missing or misplaced. They were hidden. The night crew, our supposed partners and coworkers, had thrown us into the fire. They knew that without those guns, our only option was to ask the coven a favor. They knew what we would have to do, and still they betrayed us. The Hunt was on.
Each day the hunt was a little longer, a little more absurd. We would eventually find all of our pricing guns, but they were never in the same place twice. It became downright cerebral after a few weeks. We would walk the stockroom, looking for ladders in places they shouldn’t be, boxes slightly out of place, footprints on the wall from someone climbing to the top of some shelving. One day we had to climb the side of the warehouse to retrieve a gun from the rafters, close enough to the tin roof that we could feel the heat from the sun outside bearing down on us.
The Hunt had to stop. We let them hide their pricing guns. We found them, and we started working a little harder, a little faster. We worked until the sweat of our brow stung our eyes and blood flowed from our fingertips so we could finish our work just an hour or two early, before the night crew arrived. We turned the tables. We hid the guns and we left early. It was their turn to hunt. It was their turn to be at the mercy of the coven.
We were all laid off two weeks later.
Recent Comments