Being a teenage girl fresh out of high school, it can be assumed that yes, I have worked in retail. Not just any retail, though, no no. I worked in the very pit of that which was retail. I worked in the retail that was only topped in its shittyness by working in a gas station.
I worked in grocery.
Now, not to say that ALL grocery stores are bad places. I've actually been to some very pleasant grocery stores in my day. But from the ages of 15 to 18, I worked in a discount grocery store called Market Basket. It's basically the Massachusetts/New Hampshire version of Wal-Mart that only sells food and cheap kitty litter. People came from miles around just because "You can't beat the prices!" They could have gone to their local Wal-Mart for the same experience, but who was I to argue? That just goes to show how bizarre these people were.
I saw some strange things in this store that I will discuss from time to time, but the one that can best illustrate the kind of people I had to deal with on a daily basis is the story I am about to tell you now.
It was a Saturday morning, and I had not woken up in time to be able to take my morning shower (gross), and I was feeling a bit ill that day. I was in no mood to be dealing with rude people, but they were there anyway. I was working at one of the last registers, which are the registers that people go to when they buy a lot of food and can't be bothered to walk about 5 yards to find an empty register, and would rather wait behind 4 other people with a lot of food and blame me for it. So I was pretty miffed already. I was peacefully enjoying my disdain for the specimens that I had to deal with when my thoughts were interrupted by the unmistakable voice of angry white trash. Oh good god.
The girl was white, skinny, slutty, and greasy. She was also not happy. She was next in line, so I finished up the order and she was still blabbing angrily. That's when I made the mistake of asking "Good morning, how are you?"
That was when she launched into me. She started screaming at me, then had the audacity to put her flip-flopped toe on the conveyor belt. I don't like feet much as it is, but her big toe was especially nasty. It was wrapped in bloody bandaging. I had no idea why. I didn't want to know.
But I guess she wanted me to know quite badly, because she screamed "LOOK WHAT YOUR CARRIAGE DID TO MY TOE." She continued to scream for a bit, to which I had no response for. How was it my carriage? I was 16, earned minimum wage, and worked a maximum of 10 hours per week. I didn't quite understand how it was my carriage, and I certainly didn't understand why she blamed me or the carriage for the affair. Shouldn't she be blaming the dumbass who drove the carriage over her foot or her toe for being so vulnerable? And besides, what was I supposed to do about it? Was she going to sue me for the $2 it took to bandage her foot? Was I supposed to call management for a written apology? Was I supposed to beg her forgiveness at the white trash shrine up the street?
Overall, I was perplexed, sleepy, sick, and annoyed, and the best I could do is mumble an "I'm sorry" and ask how she was going to pay.
As my parents told me, this is why I'm going to college.
Sunday, July 31, 2011
Thursday, July 28, 2011
The Night I Thought Zombies Were Real
About a year ago, I was friends with a very, very paranoid girl named Ashley. This was the kind of girl who thought that every man who likes boobies likes rape and was scared when we left our door unlocked at 10am. Needless to say, tricking her was very easy, and the reaction was always more severe than you could hope for.
Couple this with the Swine Flu outbreak, and you've got hilarity.
My fondest memory with Ashley was one night when she was sleeping over in the midst of the Swine Flu scare. She had let everyone make her good and terrified of Swine Flu to the point where she thought she, a perfectly healthy teenage girl, could die from it. She and my boyfriend were over at the time that a good friend of ours , Jasmine, sent us a link to a joke article about a fake string of H1N1 called N1Z1. I haven't been able to find the article (I think it was deleted), but it was basically about a string of H1N1 that temporarily reanimated the people that died from the disease, making them extremely violent and dangerous for a couple hours, after which they died for good. In hindsight, there should have been no conceivable way we could have believed it, but I'm a very gullible person and my boyfriend wanted it to be real so badly. He and I both thought "Whatever, it's not like they last for very long. I hope they put videos online!" and actually kind of enjoyed how bizarre it was.
Ashley however, freaked the fuck out. She thought that this was the beginning of the end of the world that the Bible had predicted (she's very religious). She cried and talked to her mother on the phone for hours while my sister comforted her over it. She thought we were all going to die and that the world was going to be engulfed in fiery death. She notified Jasmine about our impending doom, to which Jasmine replied:
"Wait, you guys actually thought that was true?"
This was the moment where it dawned upon us: The article was fake. N1Z1 was fake. The URL started with "bounce with me." The boyfriend met this with mild disappointment, I was indifferent, and Ashley was absolutely enraged. She had been duped, lied to, tricked, the whole nine yards. She had made a fool of herself and as far as she was concerned, we had no reason to believe that it was fake, and Jasmine was a very cruel person for not clarifying this. She had committed a great sin.
And then a half a year later she decided to hate both me and Jasmine and hasn't spoken a word of kindness to either of us since. But that's a story for another day!
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