cliché musings

A Version of a More Accurate Job Posting:

Job Description: Mind-numbing. Soul-destroying. Mentally excruciating. You don’t really care, though. You’re just looking for something to hire you because you’re too young for skilled labor. You need money. We agree to give you some. You thought this place might be nice because you like to shop here. Oh, honey. Providing world-class customer service means abandoning some of your humanity. Did nobody tell you? It never looks that bad from the outside. This job is better when you pretend to be automated, programmed to do and say a select few things, wrapping your soft flesh and the meat of your brain in metal and wiring. You might even get a little confused when you go against the code. Did you really let yourself develop a frustrated tone? To a customer? We never told you to do that. You’ll avoid it from now on. Save it for when you’re talking to a coworker.

Responsibilities: Stand. Scan. Ask the same questions over and over, and don’t you forget a single one. “How are you today? I’m good. Do you have a loyalty card? Oh, a phone number? Go ahead and type it in. Would you like paper or plastic? Do you want your twenty-four pack of beer in a bag? Oh, you do? Quick question, how the fuck am I supposed to do that?” Don’t say that last one. Pull a plastic bag halfway over it and let them figure it out. They’re allowed to bag their own items, but they might stare at you for ten minutes while you do it yourself. You might look up every few seconds to see if they’re still staring. They are. “Oh, don’t put the bread there.” You stop, holding the bread by the plastic twist. You’re about to set it atop boxes of pasta, bottles of salad dressing, and cans of chicken noodle soup. “Put it in a separate bag.” You exhale, and remember to be glad you’re wearing a face mask. You pull open another bag and set the bread in it. You’ll want to be good at it. It feels nice when they’re surprised: “You’re so fast!” Don’t tell them it’s because the sooner they’re out of the line the sooner you can have about two seconds worth of your own thoughts. Just chuckle. “I try,” you say. Sometimes they’ll tell you how nice you are. Sometimes they’ll thank you. Oh, another customer just joined the line. Scratch the time for thoughts. Maybe after this next one.

Pay: $10/hour starting, which technically is decently above the minimum wage, but holy shit, imagine being told, “Hey, come do this shitty job for two hours. Everyone there will make you want to cry and your legs and feet will feel like falling off, but I’ll give you twenty bucks,” and you actually do it. And you don’t even get to keep all twenty! But look at you. You’re still going to do it. As long as your name is written on that schedule each week. Isn’t that sad?

Hours: We won’t schedule you more than 8 hours. Promise. Pinky promise! Why are you looking at us like that? We legally can’t do that. Okay, fine. Sometimes if a cashier calls out you might have to stay an extra hour. Or two. Only if you’re okay with it! But everyone else might be completely fucked over if you don’t. Sometimes a cashier (one of two scheduled for the night) will hide in the bathroom for thirty minutes, come back, and ask to go home, and sometimes that will be right before you’re scheduled to leave, and sometimes as soon as that happens you’ll have customer lines backed up down the aisles, and sometimes you’ll have to spend the next hour checking out groceries so everyone will be the fuck out of the store by closing. The cashier won’t be fired. “Don’t do that again.” They’ll do it again. Sometimes you’ll watch your friend agree to stay an extra three hours, all because someone didn’t show up, you need help closing, and they know how to do all the duties. You’ll realize after that you never felt bad. Just grateful. You don’t know what to do with that information. Oh, and sometimes you don’t get a break. Sound cool?

* * *

I drank a little too much one night, more than what I had eaten over the previous few days. I didn’t wake up with a traditional hangover—I never do—but it left a swirling cloud of dust in my chest, the kind that reached out to the circuits of my arms and legs, stirring up particles and electricity, like part of my soul was stretching my skin and begging to escape. Opening my eyes was uncomfortable. My mouth was evaporated.

I turned over in bed, tugging the blanket around me.

I had a message from him on my phone.

So is there a reason you called me last night when you knew I was sleeping and had to be up for work early?

Fuck.

I step out into the parking lot. It looked busy, with cars pulled into every available spot in front of the store, customers crossing the road with carts piled with bags, packs of alcohol sitting on the bottom rails, college students covered in white and light blue and sunglasses and older, suburban parents who liked to walk through the doors without a mask, like there was no reason to hide their patchy tans, uneven facial hair, and wrinkling mouths. The sun was out, poking rays into my eyes and skin. I felt like I was going to throw up, right onto the asphalt. Maybe I could get out of my eight-hour shift if I did.

I walk through the left entrance. It was the faster way to get to the breakroom, with the least chance of running into him before I could apologize.

He was standing at the self-checkout in front of the doors.

We usually had a thing, a peace sign, when we saw each other and when we left. I rushed past the machines and he turned to look at me. He raised his eyebrows and kept his hands to his side.

I couldn’t see the bottom half of his face, and I never could while at work. But there was something in the way the sides of his eyes didn’t crinkle, the bags underneath them, the strain of crunching his face to widen his eyes as acknowledgement. He was mad.

“I’m so sorry,” I said, when I came back down from the breakroom. I hadn’t punched in yet. I needed to explain myself.

He stared at me and didn’t say anything.

“I was really drunk, and my friend took my phone. I told her not to.”

He said nothing. I glanced behind him, at the customers ringing themselves up, walking around us to get to the open machines. It was always loud. The beeps of scanned items nauseating, conversations throughout the aisles turning into white noise, the registers and machines whirring in the background.

“I know this was a bad time for this to happen.” That finally got a nod, a slow one. “I really wouldn’t have done it.”

(“Please hang up,” I said. Drunk, melding my body in the couch cushion. As loud and demanding as I could ever get. “This is so annoying.”

“It’s not annoying,” she insisted. She held the phone up in front of our faces, and moved it out of the way when I tried to grab it back. “Is it annoying?”

“Kind of,” he said.)

Hey Team! Wanna Know What It’s Like to Work for [Local Grocery Store]?

Benefits: Oh, no no no no no. You’re part-time. Come back to this when you decide to dedicate 40 hours of your week to this place. And then you can pay for part-health-and-dental insurance. It comes out of your own paycheck, you know? But don’t worry, there’s so much more you can look forward to. You get two bonus checks twice a year, how exciting! The CEO is so generous, they’re splitting some of the store’s profit with all of their employees. Just remember, the store gets more profit the more efficient you are, so use less bags and don’t let people steal. That way, you’ll have an extra two dollars every bonus check. But wait, there’s more! 

Friendly Environment: Trust me, one day, you’re going to realize the only reason you walk through those sliding doors four times a week is because of the people. Sounds like something from a fucking family-friendly, holiday, “home is the people you love,” 90-minute straight-to-TV movie? It’ll happen. Maybe it’ll be slow, because you’re a little shy, because you haven’t genuinely tried to make new friends in years, because you’re not sure how to be funny or interesting or even give more energy to a job that leaves you holding back tears at the register, but you’ll see. It’s not like all those other places where you tolerate each other at best. You’ll start working closing shifts, and for two hours your only company will be the second cashier scheduled and the customer service clerk. You’ll see them sit down in the electric shopping carts and laugh about the assistant manager who walks like one of the inflatable arm-flailing tube men and insists that the wine section is blocked to his liking. You’ll learn how to run self-check out, and the guy showing you will ignore all the customers to talk to you about tattoos and moving away to work on a weed farm. That one bagger, who’s been there for years, who could probably make a plastic bag smile and tell him its life story, will come over to bag for customers and end up asking you about school and your writing and how he’s going to buy your book one day. Maybe even months later, you’ll be at a going-away party for one of your friends there, and you’ll play Cards Against Humanity and Pokemon Go, drink and smoke and pretend like you’re not going to cry because he’s become one of your favorite coworkers. Maybe even a year later, you’ll have the perfect opportunity to quit, accepted at an internship that pays more and is offering full-time for the summer, and you’ll decide not to, because there just so happens to be this boy you’ve started getting closer to, and you look forward to the days you get to work together. You tell that internship you’ll work three days a week instead, and tell everyone else it’s because you still need a job in the fall. “We’re like a family,” everyone says. The day you agree is the day you never get to leave.

Career Opportunities: Well, if you really want to. Maybe you can get a promotion. Anything’s better than standing at a register for eight hours. That bagger will tell you. They moved him up earlier this year, to customer service. Now he doesn’t have to clean the bathrooms and when you need a break from customers, you can stand behind the desk and pretend to be analyzing the schedule for breaks and meals. “You’d be great at customer service,” he tells you. “Why haven’t they moved you up yet?” Another clerk says he’d vouch for you. They need more people to close; he’s one of only two closers. I can do that, you think. It’s the only time I can work after school, anyway. There’s a pay raise. More consistent hours. Am I really going to commit to this job for even longer? you think. Yes. For some reason, yes. You tell the boy you’ve been hanging out with everyday. He’s been there for seven years, and he’s moved up to right below assistant manager. “Office Assistant,” he is, with a tumultuous relationship with the customer service manager. On your birthday, he says he talked to the manager. “I said he should start training you. He said he’s going to call you in the next few days.” They need more people, and out of everyone, you’re the best option. You maybe fall a little in love with him that day. 

But you maybe also forget. Forget as much as he’s talked to the manager, fought with him over how to run the front, proven that the store can’t work without him, reminded him he’s been there since he was sixteen, they still won’t move him up to management. You think, they probably see him as too stubborn, too argumentative, too unreliable. He doesn’t know why they don’t take him seriously. He’s twenty-three. Can’t keep getting paid hourly. Can’t have no future in sight. You see how much he tries, at least. He spends a whole day making training sheets, organizing them into binders, placing them at all the registers. The new cashiers need them. Everyone’s frustrated with the customer service manager, who gets other people to handle his conflicts, who messes up the schedules, who won’t fight for pay raises and better hiring to the store manager, and this boy is the only one to stand up to him. And after seven years, he realizes, everyone realizes, he’s probably reached the end of his promotions. What do you do then? You’re only here for money while in college. You’re getting a degree. You don’t plan to stay past graduation. You’ve been here a year. You don’t need this place. He needs this place. 

After clocking in, I replaced his position at self-checkout.

“Can someone please take this over for me?” he asked, to the three of us standing behind the customer service desk—me, the assistant manager and another clerk—holding out the remote. His voice was low, desperate. I knew he was tired. I told him I’d be backing off for the day.

“I’ll do it,” I said.

Self-checkout was easier than being on a register. If we had the remote, the error messages could be cleared on the screen without walking to every machine and talking to the customer. But being on self-checkout usually became a multiple-hour responsibility of standing in one place and dealing with the same problems. ID checks. Produce didn’t scan, type in the number instead. Bags were moved into the cart and the machine started screaming in her robotic voice, “Please, dear God, replace the fucking items removed from the bagging area!”

Try not to be on your phone, they tell you. Don’t sit down. It’s a bad look for customers.

Time went slowly.

I felt dizzy. I tried to stare at the machines, watch the customers check out, but the view wouldn’t focus. Their bodies were blurred, pixelated. The dust was clogging my throat, seeping through to my eyes. And nothing had prepared me for watching him ignore me, watching him walk past the station without saying a word, watching him not meet my eyes from across the store, not flip me off or pretend to shoot himself with a finger gun or wiggle his fingers in a gesture to come over.

I shut my eyes. The prism lights, shining a bland yellow, started to blend into the off-white tiles, the brown bags, the painful green of the shelves. Patches of colors and shapes edging together into a mosaic. The corners of my vision turned transparent, shaky. I gripped the edge of the podium.

Sometimes there were things to look forward to at self-check out. Back when I was just a cashier, I’d hope to be on the register next to someone on self-check out I wanted to talk to. Sometimes he was there, with one earbud in, listening to a song and bopping his head around, shaking his neck-length hair or twirling the strands right above his forehead around his finger. I liked to watch, but looked away before he caught me staring.

I was facing away from my register, hands braced along the ledge of the scale, watching him bounce his shoulders, point a finger and shake it to an inaudible beat, the folds of the mask around his mouth moving in and out.

He looked over at me while he went to help a customer.

I didn’t want to admit that I had a crush. But I wanted his attention more.

“What are you listening to?”

He kept going, silent concert while he touched the screen and cleared the customer.

“G-Eazy,” he said. “If I ever say I fucked your bitch, just know I mean it.”

I laughed, turning back to check out a customer. When I turned back around, he was at the podium, writing something down on receipt paper. I didn’t look away when he glanced up, watched him fold the paper, walk over to the register, and put it down on the counter.

He walked away. I unfolded it. If I ever say I fucked your bitch, just know I mean it. The handwriting was scratchy.

So thankful for masks. I was grinning, pushing my hair behind my ears. I looked over my shoulder, but he was preoccupied again, back facing the register and messing with one of the machines.

I didn’t know that song. But I did know the next best thing. I grabbed a pen and flipped the paper over to the other side.

I never fucked Wayne, I never fucked Drake. On my life man, for fuck’s sake. 

I placed it down on his table. “I had to come up with something else.”

I went back behind the register and watched him unfold it. Then read it. Then start laughing, shoulders shaking, body bent over the podium, eyes crinkling, head raising to look over at me. I start laughing, too.

Later, I’ll notice it.

“Oh my God,” I said, standing in his room, head tilted back. “You kept that?”

On his wall above his bed, a collection of papers and pamphlets tacked into the surface, a collage folding over and under itself: a map of Montana, a birthday card from two sweet older coworkers, a photo of a gray wolf. Underneath a ribbon was the slip of receipt paper, faced on the side with my handwriting.

I had barely been eating. The past few days my stomach was full on brewing storm clouds and dread. I ate one chicken strip from Cook Out and threw it up hours later, in chunky bits that turned from pinkish to red by the time everything exited my throat.

I wanted to talk to him. He hadn’t been talking to me. Not as much anyway. It was a week since we last hung out, almost two since I last spent the night. My attempt at initiating a meet-up was shot down mid-take off, wings bursting into explosive pieces of metal and twirling in trails of smoke down from the sky.

Idk, we can, but I wanna sleep by myself.

I laid in bed, pulled the covers to my chin, and tried not to let myself cry. It was so cold.

I thought about the changes. How he insisted on walking every guest back to their car, how he did that with me when we were just friends, how he stood outside, beside my Ford Focus, at two in the morning spending another fifteen minutes talking to me, how he’d want to look at the stars and find the Dipper, how we peered into the backseat one night, worried we’d find a silhouette laying on the floor, the person responsible for the mysterious tapping on his window. Now, he’d stand on his porch, arms crossed and shoulders hunched, shirtless in a pair of loose shorts and slides, and watch me get in the car, a peace sign as his only goodbye. I’d say nothing and slam my door.

I thought about how I always texted him when I got home. How he used to reply immediately, a “Good,” or “Damn, I was hoping you’d crash,” how we played 21 Questions, how we texted until one of us fell asleep. He didn’t reply anymore. He’d read it sometime in the morning.

I thought about how we spent so much time together in drive thru lines, listening to each other’s music or demanding to change the song, how I took him to Wendy’s while we were both on lunch breaks and he held my hand while we waited, brought it up to his lips and kissed the back of it, how we told a coworker we’d definitely buy her some chicken nuggets and both agreed, no, fuck her, she spent thirty minutes every shift shopping on the clock anyway. I thought about how just the other day he asked me to go to Cook Out but didn’t want to come with, would rather play his video game. I sat in the line for an hour and allowed myself to cry for a good three minutes before wiping the tears away.

I decided, Can we talk about some things? Which then became, Why did you let all this build up? and that became, I don’t want to have another conversation like this again. 

We were good for one day. And then I got drunk.

I pressed down on the mic on my headset. “Can someone watch this for five minutes?”

The bagger just clocking in came to the station. I passed him the remote. “Thank you,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”

Outside, I bolt to the side parking lot, leaning my back against the brick wall. The rock dug into my faded uniform shirt. The sensation felt more normal than anything inside, anything but the plainness and black hole of nothing that exists in corporate, capitalist hell. The air was new. I could breathe. The dizziness stopped, the sun clearing into bright light and the solid black of the pavement, the nausea subsiding back into the crevices of my guts.

I bent my head forward, slid to the ground, and started to cry.

I kept quiet, shoving my arm over my mouth, breathing deep so it didn’t turn into sobs. Tears rolled down my cheeks, into the mask, dampening the material. I didn’t know how long it was. I gave myself only a couple of choked breaths before smearing the tears away, rubbing my eyes and hoping they weren’t a pale red.

“Thanks,” I told the bagger when I step back inside. Voice steady. On the other side of the store, he was at the other self-check out. He was helping a customer. Didn’t notice me come back in. Didn’t give me a thumbs up, a silent question. Didn’t come over to ask.

Notice From HR About Employee Relationships

It happens. Did you know the store manager is only manager because he got moved to a different department, so the company could avoid a conflict of interest between him and his girlfriend? He just got lucky after everyone above him stepped down.

Everyone here’s done it. You see these people more than you see your family, of course it fucking happens. The moderately-attractive girls hired here don’t stay single for long. You’re not going to say you’re moderately-attractive, of course, but you know you got some attention. Your first day here you heard some cashier called you cute. He was fired soon after, for unrelated reasons (putting his own loyalty number into all the orders), and you never got to talk to him, but it stuck with you. You never get noticed like that. You dated that one coworker, Jeff, for five months. It was mostly because you were lonely. You regret a lot of it now. But you don’t regret that it brought you closer to his housemate, another coworker, who you didn’t talk to much before. When you realize you like him, maybe a few weeks after the breakup, after hanging out every night and talking about your past relationships and both feeling angry and betrayed by the person on the other side of the wall, you decide not to say anything. What are people going to think, that you moved on to his friend so quickly? That you’re the local whore of the grocery store? That all goes to shit, anyway, because Jeff tells everyone at work that you’re fucking this guy.

You’re not, until you are, maybe a month later. “I was into you before you and Jeff were even a thing,” he tells you. That would be almost nine months before. You think that’s absolutely fucking insane. You think you’re flattered. You think you want to be with him so badly and don’t care what that’s going to do to your reputation. You think everything about this feels different. The way he makes you laugh, the way he makes you comfortable, the way you’re never bored, the way you always want to be close, to live inside a pocket of his flesh. 

It’ll break your heart when he wants to take a break. There’s too much going on, he says. I’m too stressed out. It’s not going to be forever. The way it hurts feels like forever. You feel like you could have done things differently. Maybe you shouldn’t have made him feel like he had to put in more effort. You don’t even need those things, you’re just insecure. Paranoid. Maybe you should have given him more space. You knew he was going through a lot. Maybe you shouldn’t have made him your entire life. You think about how this job is the reason you’re together and the reason you can’t be all at once.

But you can’t stay away, either. You won’t be dating but you’ll go back to spending the night and touching and wrapping yourself around the other and clinging to him like the Super Glue you know he keeps in his bedside drawer. You don’t know if it’s going to work out. But everyday he asks you to come over is one more piece of a root tugging itself into the ground, expanding and digging through the soil, the possibility that you found the trunk of the person you want to spend forever with.

It’s really okay. If one day you can be together without a job holding you by the seams, well, we’re just happy that you found one another.