My first job after my first degree was as a Convenience store clerk. This was slightly disappointing for me. However years of being a lazy spoiled brat made me have little confidence in my ability to get anything not given to me. As such I took the first job I was offered.

As a result I made minimum wage and had fights with people looking to take a shit. 

Customers would ask to use our bathroom and I had to lie and tell them there wasn’t one. One man came close to assaulting me in utter frustration at my inhumane nature, ready to beat the shit out of me in the desire to be granted the right to take a piss in our building. A part of me enjoyed watching him squirm. 

There is something about a shitty job that makes you hate your customers. After a long day spent in the exact same conversation it was pleasant to see someone get so irrationally pissed. I wasn’t telling him to have a nice day. We weren’t dealing with the variations on this same conversation where people tried to show their good guy nature by engaging the poor clerk in a twenty second heart to heart.  He didn’t comment on the weather or ask me how my day had been or make mention of how rude the last customer had been. He just wanted to beat my face in and I respected him for it.

A problem in this world is that businesses hire workers who have absolutely no stake in what they are selling, so that angry customer, that crazy motherfucker has absolutely no chance of meeting the person responsible for pissing him off. It is sort of like Columbine. Poor nobodies get killed because assholes bullied these kids into madness.

 Remember this when you yell at a waitress about how long it’s taking for the food to be prepared. Do they look like a cook? Go fuck yourself. Remember this when are you are on the phone with a customer sales representative. The person on the other end of the line didn’t cause your problem. They’re poor assholes just like you, getting fucked for a living and pretending they like it.

They should make a law that says one day of the month millionaires have to do their employees jobs. For one week a year they should have to live off the measly toilet paper they give to their employees and call a living. I want the President of Aliant to tell me why my bill keeps going up and why I have to buy a six-year plan to get a fucking phone that actually works.

This same principle applies to my charitable contributions. I give ten bucks to Amnesty International every month. Makes me feel better that someone is writing letters to assholes to make them stop being assholes. However I would pay more if they had a program that let me kick a rapist in the face, or have a few minutes alone with the men that make child soldiers. My point is that you can never get back at the people you want to. You always end up fucking over the little people.

The convenience store I happened to work for was a subsidiary of a larger corporation. The owner of this particular store was a middle aged woman who’d spent years as a Clerk to earn her chance to be a Franchisee. After selling a million Slim Jims they offered her the chance to own her own store. “Owning” one of these stores meant that she paid between 3 and 5 thousand dollars to get a small percentage of the lotto and the profits from one of the machines (the pop, the ice machine, etcera)

In return she could be called in at any time and losses from theft came out of her end. They kept the profits and she kept the losses. She worked tirelessly for the company and this was her reward. The job wore out her tired features.  She didn’t sleep if a shift couldn’t get covered, she often lost money because stoner assholes came in and shoplifted ketchup chips and bubble gum. She wore her employee name tag like a Purple Heart, a soldier in the fight to keep the good people of the world in smokes, lottery tickets and food that had absolutely no nutritional value.  Back in the day you would call her the salt of the earth. To me she was the nightmare of what I might become when I grow up. 

I was a newbie surrounded by convenience store veterans.  Almost everyone I worked with was white, an exceptional thing in the world of convenience stores. I am from Halifax, Nova Scotia and we are so racist we give even our shitty jobs to white people.

Most of them were in their late thirties some as old as 50. You’ve probably worked for people just like at least once in your life. Their skill at counting cigarette packs, lottery and bingo tickets sold are legendary achievements that you cannot even hope to equal let alone understand. These lifers fuss over small details, take pride in their perfectly arrayed chocolate bar racks and remind you with tired patience of how long they have worked this job and everything they have seen while doing it, offering the consolation that someday you’ll get it. You puke a little in your mouth and hope their wrong.

Almost all of my shifts were with the craziest woman who worked there. This special lady was a conversation continuer. By which I mean each customer that entered the store would be engaged in the same conversation she had with the previous person, the same conversation we had when no one else was there. For example: Person A walks in.
 “Have you seen It’s Pat? It’s a funny movie, my boyfriend watched. I still don’t know if Pat is a man or a woman.”  Person A pays for their smokes and leaves. Person B buys lottery and condoms. “Going for a meeting with your girlfriend?  Is it a guy or a girl? You ever see It’s Pat? I don’t know if the actor was a guy or a girl.” During our six hour shifts there very few moments where there was silence.  Her monologues began on day one and repeated themselves by day 3.

Her boyfriend became our God, the almighty reference point.  If I had pizza I would find out if her boyfriend liked pizza and what type he most enjoyed.  If I went to the bathroom when I returned I would learn about her boyfriend’s constipation. All music needed his stamp of approval. Customers young and old learned the gospel of the book of boyfriend.

After three months I hated her boyfriend. I quit without giving my two weeks notice.  The owner looked at me as if I was a traitor to the team, a quitter in a world of quitters. She told me that I would never be as good a clerk as the woman who I worked with.

Years after I quit it came out what my coworker was doing.  She wasn’t just annoying or manic…she was Keyser Soze. She was constantly talking to distract customers and coworkers from the fact that she was voiding their orders and pocketing their cash.  Thousands of dollars went missing. 

A part of me admires that raving psychopath, speculating on the question of whether her boyfriend was even real or just some far-fetched invention of her evil brain. Only my musings are always interrupted when I think about who actually had to pay for the shortfall caused by Ms. Soze’s thefts. The profits went to the corporation; the problems stuck with their number one employee, a poor woman who wore her nametag like a purple heart.

A couple weeks ago I entered the store I used to work at and everyone had been fired. All the lifers were out on their ass, competing with kids for jobs as greeters at Walmart.

After years of being robbed at gunpoint and facing the betrayal of her best employee, my boss began locking the doors earlier and earlier. I guess she got scared. Profits went down. The corporation kicked her to the curb. 

Things have changed since my days as a clerk.

Fireworks were on sale. Pakistanis worked the counter. It’s strange that in this economic depression progress can be measured by this little development. Racist Halifax was willing to give its shit jobs to minorities. In the age of Obama, this is what represented change in my hometown.

I don’t work in a convenience store anymore. When I go back to get some late night chocolate for a movie night with my girlfriend I think about those days and remind myself I have moved forward. I still have no idea where I am going but I have a good idea of where I’ll never go back.

I’d rather be unsatisfied and searching for something better than give up on the idea of being satisfied at all. Friends, be happy that you’re dissatisfied with where you’re working.  Being OK with shitty situations only means you stay in them.

See those lifers didn’t get a retirement plan. They lived a life so small they thought they were safe. Who would ever fire them from a job no one else wanted anyway? But life doesn’t work like that.  In faceless corporations the people who fire you don’t know your name. 

Being small, being in a place no one else would want to be, doesn’t guarantee that you get to stay there. It doesn’t mean you are safe, it just means you are vulnerable. The meek get crushed with the brave.

I want to get crushed doing something I can respect myself for in the morning. 

Come back soon.  

The nudist colony is angry, worried I will post pictures on this blog of their members. 

I suspect that my job hunt will be worth reading about.