I’m sooooo tired of hundreds of people asking me every day the same questions:
- why is the store closing?
- its always so busy, is business that bad?
- are they transferring you all?
- where are you going to work?
- What are you going to do?
- where am I going to get my groceries?
- why don’t they have anything in the flyer?
- these prices aren’t so good why aren’t they less?
- what’s going to open up here afterwards?
So, I’ve decided to have some fun.
When someone asks what store is going to open up in our place, I’ve been telling them, “Blockbuster.” The reactions from customers are priceless. “What?? What a waste of space!”
When they ask why we are closing, I make things up. If another employee is standing nearby, I blame them for something.
When they ask where I’m going to work, I say making movies. Sometimes ill think of a movie plot and describe it as if that’s what’s going to happen. Think Zack and Miri make a porno.
One customer asked, “what are you going to do?” And I couldn’t resist the porn answer. So I said, “oh, I’m going to be an actress.”
“Really?!” He exclaimed. “Do you need a costar?”
“Oh, I don’t think you’d be interested in acting in THESE kind of movies….” And then I winked.
“Art films?” He asked.
“….yea. ‘art’ films.”
Well at least I’m having fun at their expense.
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The jun
Ah yes, after the long, agonizing winter and many days of rain, today is beautiful. Which sucks for me, a bus rider. Time to bring your babies out for a bus ride, so I can listen to them scream the entire trip, and nearly fall as I try to climb over four baby carriages barely folded and sticking out so that there is literally no where to place my feet.
Even better, I am currently stuck at a bus stop with a wonderful Spanish mother and her A.L.F.s (annoying little fuckers). The two of them are using water bottles and garbage to throw at each other (near me). They are infuriatingly obnoxious and even threw the fucking bottles in the street, nearly hitting cars.
I can’t understand why you can’t buy the little fuckers an actual toy, even if it came from the dollar store, as your excuse could be money. I also can’t imagine letting a child play with garbage. You don’t know where it has been, what germs or diseases are on it. And then the thing is going to do what all children eventually do- touch their faces/stick their fingers in their mouths. So now their germ covered appendages near their germ absorbing faces, and lots of fun stuff can come from that. Great parenting.
Also, the fact that your spawn nearly caused a car accident doesn’t seem to phase you one bit. Hell, it isn’t your car! So what if someone gets hit by a flying bottle of water, swerves the car into someone else, and causes a tweleve car pile up. Who cares?
I was quickly becoming infuriated with the situation and had to move far away just to attempt to calm down. Interestingly enough, I ended up meeting a man who works at a scrap yard, and we talked for the remainder of the wait and the bus ride. Turns out his girlfriend’s parents are good friends with Weird Al and there’s a picture of her as a baby in Weird Al’s arms. Fascinating.
I hate my job. But I’ve stayed this long because I love my managers and they’ve treated me like their daughter these past three years. Well, that and because I haven’t put enough effort into finding a better job. Clearly, I was sucked into the I-have-a-job-I-need-to-pay-bills-I’m-too-tired-to-look sort of mind frame. Now it’s come back to kick me in the ass.
My store is shutting down, closing, kaput. It was announced on Feb. 15th, and every day since then has been absolute torture. Aside from the immediate panic I felt at knowing I have so many bills and no source of income, each day at work is its own personal hell.
The customers who come to the deli like to talk. All of them do. The regular customers I see every day/week, and the ones I have never seen before all like to chatter. Since the closing announcement, every conversation is the same:
Is the store really closing?
- Yes.
When is the last day?
- April 15th.
Oh that’s TERRRIIIBBLLLEEE. Do you know where you are going? What are you going to do? Are they transferring you? What’s going to happen to you all?
- I have no idea.
You don’t know? They should transfer you. You should work at the other store.
- Yes, some people will be transferred. I’m probably not going to be.
What are you going to do? Are you working anywhere else?
Do that many people really have no tact? The above conversation happens literally about every five minutes at work. No, I HAVE NO FUCKING CLUE where I am going to work, what I am going to do to pay my bills. It’s none of your freaking business, however. Because, you see, I understand people are getting transferred. But it’s based on seniority in the company, and as this company has not promoted to or hired any full timers in years, part time employees are on the bottom of that list. And as I have only worked here for two and a half years, it is highly unlikely that I will be transferred to a different location. Even if I was sent somewhere else, would I really want to continue working for a company that can’t tell it’s asshole from it’s mouth? The company is very poorly run, from my standpoint as a measly, unimportant part timer. It isn’t even worth the headache to deal with their bullshit anymore. Why continue to work for a bankrupt company that continuously has you on the edge of your seat, wondering if you are going to lose your job????
Fuck it. I’m just tired of explaining eighty times a day that I will not have a job, and nobody currently knows who is being transferred and to where. It’s none of your business, anyway. You’re a fucking customer. Your job is not on the line. Stop being nosy. Buy your groceries here, or buy them at the different locations. The employees at that store are not your friends, not your family, and not your personal gossip grind. Don’t you think it’s hard enough knowing you’ve just lost your job and having to deal with the stress of the situation without having hundreds of strangers reiterate the fact that you’re unemployed and broke???? How would each of you feel if you had to be reminded by complete strangers that you lost your job? It’s stressful and painful.
I’m just trying to take each day as it comes, be silly and happy for any reason at all. Anything to keep from falling into the mind numbing depression that is waiting for me.
My body is so stressed that I haven’t even gotten my period. I have had the same cold for two weeks now, because my immune system is stressed out. I don’t know how I’m going to pay my bills, don’t know if i can find another job, if I will end up working at Wendy’s, just to buy food. I’ve never lost a job before, always quit and had another. I’ve never been on unemployment, but as I am only technically a part time employee, and the last few weeks I’ve been scheduled about 20 hours, I can’t imagine the government is going to give me more than 100 dollars a week. That’s half of what I have been making. And what’s awful is I bust my ass at work and get rewarded with less than enough to survive with.
Sean came up to me the other day and asked if I could give him a copy of the book I wrote about him. I was confused, then he reminded me that I always used to write down his stupid quotes and he was convinced I was compiling a book. Since I will never see him again, maybe I should just link him to my website. What do you think?
The other day a customer came to the counter, said, “is this the deli?” and then proceeded to look at everything for ten minutes. A coworker ended up helping her. She ordered “Two slices of yellow american, Land O Lakes.” Then, she asked how much the store cheese was ($2 cheaper.) So she said she didn’t want the first two slices she ordered, and left them with us. She got TWO slices of the sale cheese.
I can’t imagine how the price matters when you’re ordering something that weighs less than .08.
I met my best friend on MySpace. We had A LOT of good times on the internet for quite a few years. Friends came and went, boys came and went, and it was all documented neatly on our MySpace profiles. Our comment lists were crowded with inside jokes that we have long forgotten, our photos had photo captions underneath them, our blogs were pure genius, and we became temporary queens of html design.
But slowly MySpace became more about ADs and “music” and “comedy” and there was so much shit crowding the page that you could barely find the little box to log in. Less and less our friends used MySpace. Less and less we cared. We hated Facebook at first, but we learned to live with it. We lost our super awesome web design skills and part of our creativity with that. We learned to write in status updates and not in blogs, and thus our friendship was now in short hand and not in obscure detail. We grew up, and abandoned our little myspace pages, the thing that brought two girls who lived 5 blocks away into incredible friendship.
We said we wouldn’t delete them, just leave them be for old times’ sake. But unfortunately for me, I have my phone that links all my social network sites together, so they can all be updated and maintained from one little screen. It’s because of this that I realized I’d better just dump that shit called my__. I’m constantly getting emails and messages about how some douche bag added me to their friend list or wrote me a letter. Like I give a shit. So I tried to log in, and save pictures I wasn’t sure I had on my hard drive(from 2004-2009) and also any blogs I might have that were amusing.
I could barely log in, and once I did, I couldn’t find anything. It’s not just because the site has changed and I’m not used to it, it’s because it’s design is SHIT. I would love to know what kind of ACID they were dropping as they sat their at their little PCs designing the interface. It sucks ass. First, there’s about 70 moving, dancing, noisy ads on every screen. Second, there’s this annoying black background that cuts the screen into a tiny square. Your eye is automatically drawn to the darker, more interesting color, so I can barely focus on the tiny space that IS myspace (after i’ve distinguished AD from website) Third, they added a LIKE button to everything. As in, I can SHARE all of my myshit crap with my facebox friends. Isn’t that rather redundant?
I’m tired of logically going on about this. Basically, “MY____” is CRAP. I’m in the process of ATTEMPTING to save old pics, etc, so that I can just delete that shit and just remember it for what it was.
Oh yea, and the REAL reason I was posting this blog was because I’m constantly getting shitty emails that you can barely read through all of the spelling errors, and invitations from douche mongers and bands I’m never going to listen to. Here is but two examples, before I sent them to Deleted Heaven with the rest of the turd mud.
I sort of have an anxiety disorder. I don’t often have panic attacks, but I do have them. So the stress of this day sent me off into the wonderful world of panic.
Here’s what happened.
The store is trying to save money, so they always cut the schedule. Sunday is overtime, so they cut the manager off the schedule and just had me and one other person there for six hours, then we’d leave and two other people would come in. Fine, except for the fact that it was
1. a Sunday, the busiest morning of the deli week
2. the day after Christmas, when the store was closed
3. the morning of a HUGE THREATENING SNOW STORM.
So the two of us were stuck there literally the entire day on the counter with an obnoxiously long line of snow panicked customers. We didn’t have time to do the salads or rotisserie chickens. We barely had time to put the garbage bags in the pails. It was just an endless, exhausting line.
At 12pm, Sean started his shift. He’s a deli/seafood person, filling in for the deli if needed. There’s no reason he couldn’t have helped us out for at least a few minutes. But no. He decided to walk around the counter, lean on the glass, and give me a dirty look. He crossed his arms, looked angry, and walked around aimlessly. I was tired, annoyed, and stressed out trying to actually get work done between customers. It slowed down a little bit, so my coworker went to put some chickens in the oven, and I tried to clean up a little. Sean stood in Seafood and just STARED at me with his arms crossed. Menacingly watching me work. Do you realize how unsettling it is to have someone just stare at you? Like a lion stalking it’s prey. A wild dog debating attack. A rapist about to pounce on a lone woman in a dark alley.
So I turned to him and yelled “STOP STARING AT ME.” He just started screaming and cursing at me. “You can’t fucking tell me what to do, you’re not my fucking boss. i’ll fucking stand here if i fucking feel like it. it’s sunday, I’m getting paid time and a half and I’ll stare at you if I want to.” Great. I don’t even get time and a half yet on Sundays and this douche bag does, but doesn’t even work.
I left it alone and stewed in my anger.
About a half an hour later both my coworker and I, having not looked at or said anything to Sean since, were busy helping customers. Out of nowhere Sean gets the Seafood hose and starts spraying the Deli floor. I understand the departments are connected and yes, sometimes they might accidentally get our floor wet when cleaning up after cleaning fish. Except Sean was blatantly standing there, staring at us, and spraying under all of our slicers, making the whole floor a wet, slippery mess. I just looked at him, tried to hurry with my customer, and planned on murdering him with a fish scaler. My coworker firmly told him to stop, attempting nicely, then graduating to “grow up” when our customers were staring dumbfounded at the six foot tall black man attacking us with a hose and cursing at us.
Sean flipped out, screaming. “You’re not my fucking boss. You can’t tell me what to do, I’m the fucking boss. I’ll do whatever the fuck I wanna do. You have a fucking problem with me call a fucking manager. They can fucking send me home. i’ll do whatever the fuck i want, I don’t care.”
So the manager was called. He came back there, started pointing his fingers at us, saying he could hear us all around the corner. My coworker stood up for me and said I hadn’t said anything at all, which was true, I was getting anxious. But he wanted his story heard, so he kept trying to explain what happened, what Sean was doing, but the manager kept interrupting him saying he was the boss, he was going to say what he had to say first. Sean said he was “fucking going outside” and took his coat off and left. Great. Asshole gets a break an hour and half after he gets there and I don’t get one all day. Awesome. Anyway, it turned into a screaming match and I just was so tired and stressed out and angry at the injustice of Sean, that I started to have a panic attack.
I clocked out and went to the bathroom to try and calm down. Could barely breathe though. I heard Sean come around and he started bragging to other young workers what had happened, how he was standing up for himself and how no one was gonna tell him what to do. Meanwhile I couldn’t breathe, and nobody cared. Lucky me. An hour later when I calmed down, I went back to get my coat. Sean was still there. He didn’t get sent home or anything. Later in the week maybe? No. No suspension or firing or anything at all. All he did was SCREAM AND CURSE at other employees in front of customers for no reason. All he did was spray the whole floor so it was wet and slippery and create unsafe working conditions. And get paid time and a half for doing it.
Meanwhile we had worked six hours without a break, barely managing to get anything done because with the snow storm coming everyone rushed to the store and stopped at the deli. So i busted my ass for half the pay and he just gets to do whatever the fuck he wants? Awesome.
It’s just reinforcing his douche baggery. He thinks he can do whatever he wants, and he can, because he doesn’t get punished for shit. Which of course, is unfair to people who actually care about their jobs and do their work. Shithead gets paid to do nothing and act like a five year old.
That annoying bouffant lady I hate always orders low salt products. But also wants just what is on sale. I know she’s gonna ask if every single thing is low salt.
Customer – What swiss is on sale?
Me – Domestic Swiss. It does NOT come in a light version.
Customer – It’s not low salt?
Me – no.
Customer – Do you have a low salt one?
Me – Yes, but it’s not on sale. It’s 7.99.
Customer – It’s not on sale?
Me – no.
Customer – But it’s low salt?
me – yes.
customer – okay give me a dollar of it.
Another customer asked what we have that is low salt. The answer was – Ham, Turkey, Swiss, American, Muenster, and bologna.
Customer – Okay, then I’ll take the low salt chicken.
me – i dont have low salt chicken. I have ham, turkey, bologna, american, swiss, and muenster.
customer- Yea, i’ll take the low salt chicken.
me – there is no low salt chicken.
customer – oh i thought you said there was chicken.
me – i have chicken, it’s not low salt.
customer – you don’t have a low salt one?
me – no.
sigh.
