 |
| That's me! |
So for me, leaving college was a shock which I think finds its closest point of comparison in birth:
There you are, just developing along. Everything about your environment (although you don’t realize it yet) is all warm and gooey and super conducive to growth. You don’t cherish it as much as accept it as the normal state of things. All systems are in place for a “natural” biological/intellectual development. Feeding tube: check, academic advisor: check, amniotic fluid: splash, discussion-oriented peer group keeps you engaged even outside of class: totes good to go!
So then one day, just as you’ve reached this critical stage in your development, the walls contract and send you head first out of the vagina! Wow. What a ride. You sit there all sticky and cold and cry for a second while your eyes adjust before you attempt to crawl back inside. But, as it turns out, the administration has already deactivated your key card, denying you re-entry to their magnificent incubator of minds. So, you cry a bit more in that sticky puddle of leftover academic afterbirth, and then gradually, by degrees, begin the process of adjusting to the fact that your well-developed facilities have just been rendered completely useless in the blinding light of the “real world.” College had not prepared me for what came after, and yet, I’m not sure I necessarily think it should have...
IN ANY CASE, I moved to San Francisco and started the job search with some friends. Blah-di-blah. Recession, recession. Two months of solid caffeine, cover letters, and crying before my bank account was just about tapped. I stopped applying for jobs with titles like “PR Associate” or “Junior Analyst”, and started furiously churning out cover letters for ones more to the tune of “Data Entry Clerk” or “Night Cashier.”
After sending out 50 or so solicitations for employment and seriously bombing in the handful of first-round interviews I actually got, one cover letter finally captured the attention of recruiters at my friendly neighborhood Safeway store. I got a call—they wanted me there later that day to fill out hiring paperwork. And just like that, this man-foetus was on his way to kindergarten!
***
We sat in mismatched chairs, huddled in a second-story supply closet, which purposed also as the surveillance studio and administrative headquarters for the store. We had all been instructed to arrive in uniform and, knowing this, I still received quite a jolt of existential Wattage from the abundance of too-big white dress shirts half-untucked from black thrift store Dungarees, and from the realization that my clothes matched theirs.
This was the same room where I had been interviewed for the position a few days earlier. The interview had consisted of a few rapid-fire questions followed by a drug screening:
“Describe any previous relevant work experience.”
“I worked at a convenience store at my college. I used a cash register to manage cash transactions and gained experience providing customer service.”
“How would you define good customer service?”
“When a customer leaves feeling better than they did when they walked in the door, that’s good customer service.”
“Great, open your mouth—I need to swab your cheek.”
***
Our safety instructor entered the dank surveillance studio/supply closet a few minutes late for our 2:15 meeting. She had driven down from corporate in Marin, she explained. There had been traffic on the bridge. The first thing she did after settling onto her sad metal stool (which put her a full head above the humble Dungarees) was to compliment us on how nice we looked in our old, newly-acquired clothing.
“Well, don’t you look like a sharp bunch today!”
She had a warm, maternal manner, yet it was understood that we weren’t to respond unless explicitly asked a question. There was an appealing familiarity about being talked to like this—a regression to grade school roles which was mandatory, yet not altogether unwanted. We were down on our luck, needed work badly. And she was going to usher us out of the bitter, electric frost of obsolescence with her sticky-sweet voice and familiar gradeschool paradigms. It didn’t matter so much that we were, for the most part, adults. We were relieved to have someone to obey.
The safety training took the form of vaguely instructive anecdotes (packaged as confidential eye-witness accounts from her THREE DECADES (gasp) with Safeway grocery stores), each followed by series of leading follow-up questions, to which we obediently responded in unison. The story I remember:
“Ok guys, another Ingredient For Life® here at Safeway stores is: following safety-related instructions and taking all necessary safety precautions. Now, what does that mean? That means that if we work in the stockroom and use a box cutter, we leave the blade on the shortest setting and retract it completely when we’re done. It means we bend from the knees if we pick something up off the ground. It means we use safety gloves when slicing meat in the deli and oven mitts when baking bread in the bakery. Now, speaking of the bakery, let me just let you in on a little something that happened a few years back at a store near Seattle. A woman had just started working as a baker. She was a single mother of two children, and it was nearing the end of her shift. She was in a rush to finish up so she could get home and be with those kids, but something had spilled in the oven that day, leaving a big, crusty mess. Now, instead of following safety precautions and going at it with a scraping tool, she thought she'd save herself a little time by mixing together two cleaning agents to burn the thing off. Big mistake. Turns out, when those two chemicals are mixed together, they produce toxic fumes. The oven exploded with said fumes, she inhaled them, and in a couple of seconds, they burned her face, chest, and 90% of her lungs. Our insurance is still covering her medical bills, but to this day, she can’t talk, can’t see, can’t get up out of bed, and will never breath another breathe without the assistance of a machine."
Her voice became more implicit and confidential, as if to say that this next part was intended just for us non-burn-victims who could follow the safety precautions.
“Now, do you think she can very well care for those children now that she’s all burned like that?”
She gestured to prompt our unison response.
All Dungarees: “No.”
“No, that’s right, she can’t.”
I couldn’t decide which was more horrifying: the story, or finding myself among the ranks of a uniformed schoolchild army, affirming on cue that we were in fact much more responsible and able to follow instructions than the silly burn victim from the story. Probably the story was more horrifying. But still...
***
My first days as a checker were spent in a state of perpetual, scalding terror. One facet of a grocery store checker’s role in society that you probably don’t really understand unless you’ve ever been lucky enough to spend some time actually doing it is their capacity as receptacles for angry people’s angriness, hurried people’s hurriedness, and nervous people’s nervousness. And let me just stress the word receptacle. You’re literally getting paid to ingest the worst in people. And the thing is, they totally know it. It’s part of the arrangement. It’s part of the ritual of going to the grocery store in the United States. If you’ve had a bad day, you can shit all over the poor asshole who’s bagging up your Haagen Dazs, especially if your coupon doesn’t go through the first time. Also, there should definitely always be this sort manic wave of anxiety that infects you and then every subsequent person in line if anything should interrupt the steady processing of transactions. If the receipt paper runs out, be sure to let out a deep sigh full of consternation and stress and cast significant looks in your neighbors’ directions as if to say, “What and idiot! And you wonder why he’s working at Safeway.” If the problem persists, the internal monologue continues (producing appropriate corresponding facial expressions and postures):
“I can’t believe this! I just can’t. How could this happen? Will we ever be able to leave this place? And what about my purchases? What will happen to them if I’m not rung up? Who will look after them? I can’t possibly care for them in this environment with no kitchen or refrigerator. How will I put them away if I haven’t left the store yet? Who’s going to put them away if I’m here and they’re also still here and we haven’t left yet because we haven’t been rung up yet?!? Ok good, it’s fixed.”
Two more things you might not understand:
1) Checking groceries is a serious athletic endeavor. Standing and lifting and shifting heavy objects all day is exhausting at best, assuming that you don’t get injured. That pudgy older woman on the other side of the conveyer belt can probably bench press your weight.
2) When you talk to hundreds of people per hour for days and days on end in these clipped little regimented interactions, you start to lose track not only of who you are in a conversational setting, but also of whom or what it is that you’re conversing with. By the end of an hour or two, the people begin to run together into this meaningless sludge of faces and bagging preferences. “Sure.” “Absolutely.” “No problem.” “Nope, I’m not Russian.” “Thank you.” “Do you have your club card?” Next time you think you’ve really brightened up a checker’s day, take a moment to realize that they probably can’t distinguish you from the thick smear of faces and insincere pleasantries that is perpetually churning past their field of vision and making them feel more and more confused about who or what they are. Often, the nicest thing you can do for them is to pass through the line quietly.
***
Ok, so there was all that stuff—maybe not the best experience in the world. But for cereal, after getting past the uniform and being talked to like a first grader, after improving my core strength and learning to shoulder the strange responsibility of helping people quell the extraordinary terror they occasionally experience when held up in grocery store lines, there was some really interesting stuff to observe.
In a modern society, the grocery store cuts across vast swaths of the population like few other venues do. Coming straight from a comparatively small, homogeneous college population, working at Safeway granted me the opportunity to conduct a survey of people and grocery preferences with an enormous (granted, geographically-determined) sample. Just a few customers stand out in particular from the above-referenced facial smear:
-The red-nosed alcoholic who would come at 11am on weekdays to buy a couple of handles of cheap vodka and a box of hot pockets. He never looked me in the eyes.
-The insane (but somehow wealthy) heavyset younger woman who brought her own bags and would come through the checkout line always between two carts, both laden with expensive groceries. I would have guessed she was always just about to throw an elaborate dinner party if it weren’t for her utter lack of social grace. It was like talking to a hyperactive seven-year-old with a credit card. (Maybe these were just incredibly awkward dinner parties?)
-The kind-seeming Russian woman in her mid-30s who, among other things, always bought a four-pack of wine juice boxes, and took her time paying.
And then there were my co-workers. Each of them embodied a unique strategy for coping with an unpleasant situation for prolonged periods of time. Some of them reached out, became friends with their regulars, searched continually for yet-undiscovered permutations of small talk. Others retracted, gave up, said “ok” a lot, avoided eye contact, wore dark sweatpants and ate directly out of cans of Chunky Cambell’s Soup. Some of them treated checking groceries like a game, tried to rise to the top of the printout listing each checker's checking speed in Items Per Minute. The trick was to log out of your terminal between customers so you had less down time. Results were posted weekly in the dank little staff lounge next to the refrigerated meat at the back of the store.
These people were extremely kind to me as the newbie who was always furiously flipping through the laminated PLU code book trying to find the code for fucking persimmons (what the FUCK is a persimmons?), which they had all had memorized for years. “4427.” They had this sort of easy regard for each other that comes from years of being stuck together in the same place. They were quick to accept me into this family. I do the majority of my shopping elsewhere now, but do see them occasionally when I go back for alcohol or incidentals on the weekends. Sometimes, in flashes from the opposite side of the check stand, when they ask me what I’m doing now, I think I understand just for a second what is meant by the word privilege.
***
Ok, saving the most surreal for last, I want to leave you with the time I got the night shift. Now I don’t know how I came to be scheduled for what I later discovered was the most coveted timeslot on the checker schedule, but I’m glad it happened at least once while I was there. I arrived at the store at 3am in my apron and tie. The two sliding doors at the entryway were open just enough to let one person slip in or out. I slipped in. Most of the lights were off in the store and there was a deep, dull machine hum that I didn’t quite remember hearing during the daylight hours. A cleaning crew was waiting at an empty checkout terminal, coffees in hand. They spoke to each other softly in Spanish. The head of the crew was talking to the new guy, explaining that the gig wasn’t so bad after his first day on the job. (I think it was his first day.) I walked up to them and starting ringing them up for their coffees. Where had they gotten the coffee? I didn’t ask. They filed out into the dark. It was just me and the hum. The only considerable light source in the store seemed to be coming from directly above the checkstand I had just started using. It wasn’t the regular fluorescent lighting but some sort of emergency backup lighting. It glowed. With the rest of the lights off and the dull hum everpresent, the store took on an almost cavernous quality. The ceilings seemed vaulted, the place seemed to breathe and echo. I probably saw 4 people between the hours of 3am and 5am. Each one came out of the darkness holding a single item, paid for it, and vanished with no explanation. These were spectres, I realized. And I was holding vigil for them. I understood later when my co-workers told me this was the “seniority shift.”
-Jenkins
