I'm Supposed to Be Writing Something Else...
but it’s not coming. So, instead I thought I might tell you about my job. I work here, and as far as I can remember I signed no non-disclosure agreements when I started working for them, so I’m pretty sure I’m allowed to tell you whatever I want, as long as I don’t start, y’know, publishing the sales figures each night.
I mentioned in the last post that this is the most money I’ve ever made. I didn’t say that this isn’t saying much, but that should have been implied by the fact that it’s minimum wage. Just, as teens, our parents never really pushed us to get jobs. Chelly and I worked gigs with the tech crew when they came up. Beth worked at the horse barn in the summers sometimes, ‘cause animals are her life. Chelly baby-sat occasionally, ‘cause babies were her life. I didn’t get my first “real job” until the summer after my first year in college, and I was a counselor at a summer camp, so “real” is debatable. Granted, it was a gifted camp, and a lot of the work was school-like, but still. I marked math homework papers one semester mostly just for the resume line. And then I joined Peace Corps. I’d done work when it had seemed like fun. So, my experience with 9-to-5 was a trifle limited…
But, as it happens, I never work 9-to-5 anyway. I never work the same hours two days in a row. I never work the same hours two weeks in a row. On Thursdays the schedule for the next week is put out in a binder in the staff room and everyone scrounges up bits of paper to copy their hours onto. I’m actually surprised people don’t mess up their hours more often, given some of the things people find to write on.
I have a time card and a name badge and a set quota of credits I’m supposed to solicit in a given number of work hours, which is fast becoming my least favourite part of the deal. My least favourite part for most of the first month was the Christmas carols they played on loop. I almost quit because of them. I will forever be more gracious to retail employees during the holiday knowing that they have to put up with *the* most cheesy, awful, repetitive carols ever, while handling the rush of commercialized Christmas. Thankfully, they went back to their regularly scheduled programming on Boxing Day. Mostly I work on the floor. I help out on the registers if there’s a sudden rush of customers and they need more lines open, but the majority of my time I spend picking stuff up and putting stuff away. It’s a surprisingly good work out, actually. An 8-hour shift means 8 hours of fast walking, hauling arm loads of jeans, squatting to grab the fallen sweaters, rising to tip-toes to return the stuff that hangs on the wall. (collectively those last two are referred to as doing overs-and-unders) (actually, I have a whole new vocabulary of somewhat inexplicable terms like that. Running 500s means bringing back stuff that’s been returned to customer service, while doing Recovery is putting back the stuff left in the fitting room*. Folding Down means just get everything back on the hangers or on the shelves, while doing Rack Integrity means taking the time to make sure the stuff gets put on the hanger or shelf it’s supposed to be on.** The 27 is the manager in charge of the registers and the E3 is the manager in charge of the floor.)
*Recovery is generally annoying. There’s a line from Thief of Time when Lobsang is first working with Lu-Tze and he says “and I don’t think I’m learning anything, really, except that people are pretty messy and inconsiderate” which plays through my mind on a regular basis. Honestly. If you must try on 18 different pairs of jeans in your quest for the perfect silhouette, I guess I kind of understand. But must you really leave them all on the floor? Inside out? And must you really and truly steal the hangars? Seriously: *why* would anyone steal the hangars?? This week I came back to the juniors fitting room after doing a recovery lap and found a room totally trashed, and as I picked it up, I discovered that the occupants of the room had also probably been trashed: empty bottle of rum, under the inside-out hangar-less jeans-on-the-floor. Maybe that’s why they steal the hangars.
**I’m good at Rack Integrity; Folding Down drives my OCD tendencies crazy.
It’s a vastly different world. The people are different, the way responsibility is handled is different, there’s absolutely no sense of ownership in the work. There’s a vague sense of pride in a properly folded wall of denim, but it takes about 3 customers on quests to pull it to pieces again. There’s always something to do, but a lot of it feels a little pointless, and - and this is the weirdest part for me - no one really cares if you’re doing it, as long as no one notices that you’re *not* doing it. I mean, I guess the managers begin to notice, after a while, that so-and-so doesn’t get much done, but generally speaking no one cares if it takes me 10 minutes or half an hour to get a section done. I’ve never worked anywhere that was so not results-focused. This goes way against the grain for me. It goes even farther against the grain that, on days like Wednesday, when there’s an ice storm going on and there’s *no one* in the store, there are still 8 of us assigned to the floor, hunting desperately for things to fold and organize so that we don’t end the night in an asylum. I mean, I understand, no ones’ going to forgo the pay check, just because there’s nothing to do tonight, but on a business wide level… it makes no sense.
I’ve also never worked a job I didn’t totally and completely love every second of.
It’s not that I hate it. I had my 30-day talk with the manager this week, and she asked if I was happy. I told her… meh. It’s exactly what I thought it was going to be: mindless and boring. I’m handling it about as well as I thought I would: going slowly nuts and growing ever more excited for the real job that might be coming. It’s just… something to pass the time.