OMGJeremy

Jeremy’s Greatest Retail Hits: Ten Years of Sadness

So in case you don’t know, I spent the majority of the last ten years working the sheer Hell that is retail. If you have worked in retail, then you already know how bad it is. It is a pit of awful, where you can literally watch yourself age years beyond what you are with each passing customer. It is a test of patience that few people can stomach for more than a few weeks. If you have not worked in retail, then I firmly believe you should be forced to work at least six months in a store just so you can understand how bad things can get. I understand all too well. And I will thank the gods every day that I am no longer forced to work in it.

While I could sit here for ages and tell you the many horrors that have happened to me over the years, I’m just going to focus on a list of what I consider the Jeremy’s Greatest Retail Hits. These moments tend to go above and beyond what many would consider the worst of retail, and will forever be burned into my mind until I get old enough to develop a disease that makes me forget them. So let’s see what we got here…

Ace Hardware:

So how the Hell did I end up at Ace Hardware? I still to this day don’t really know. I was young, and my Dad figured it was time I got my ass a job. So he decided to put in the good word to the manager at a local Ace Hardware, and sure enough, I was selling tools and all other manner of crap I have no clue about. The job was okay, but I was young and didn’t give a damn about trying. Also hardware interests me about as much as a stamp collection does (not much, if you weren’t sure), and everyone I worked with was my senior by at least thirty years at the youngest. I lasted about 5-6 months I think, when I finally lost my mind and got on a bus to Florida. Here are a few of the more memorable moments from my tenure at Ace.

 

Old Man Craps Himself

As mentioned above, most everyone I worked with was old enough to be my Grandpa. One man though, was pushing 75 or so. You wouldn’t know it listening to him, with his constant talk of sleeping around with prostitutes and drug usage. He also looked EXACTLY like Colonel Sanders from KFC, which made things even more awkward. I have not since been able to order a bucket of chicken without thinking about his disgusting old man prostitute stories. Like the one time he had to use a bucket of butter and a spoon just so he could “open the gates” on one particularly nasty prostitute. I want to throw up just as much now as when I originally heard it.

At any rate, no matter how much he talked, he was still old. And being old brings a lot of things, not the least being incontinent. At one point this poor old man found himself with a large black man that was taking a particularly long time to figure out which bolts he needed. I was standing a few aisles back when I suddenly heard a faint whimper come over the walkie.

“Help…”

I looked up and really didn’t think much of it. A minute later a more urgent “Help” came across, and I bolted to where he was to only be met with an enraged black man, and a puddle of old man shit all over the floor. The black man looked over at me and hollered, and I quote:

“THIS OLD MAN DONE SHIT ON ME. AND HIS OWN DAMN SELF”

I stood stone-faced and horrified. I had no idea how to respond. The stench alone was overpowering. Just then a man I worked with came up fifty feet or so away. He stopped dead in his tracks, whipped out his walkie and proclaimed “JESUS MIKEY’S DONE SHIT ALL OVER HIMSELF AGAIN.” I then said I was going to go get some towels. I did not. I just stood in the stockroom and wondered where my life had taken me to get to this point.

 

Ol’ Piss Leg

This Ace Hardware where I worked was thoroughly located in the ghetto. I’m not talking shit, either. Hell, I grew up five blocks away. I only mention it to give you an idea of the kind of folk that we dealt with on a regular basis. I even wrote this thing about it waaaay back when I worked there. Anyway, our stockroom door lead out into an alley frequented by more than a few homeless people. We never much bothered them, and occasionally threw scraps at them if they wandered too close to us while we were taking stuff to the dumpster. One day I was tasked with going out there to put some cement away. So I grabbed my bags of spine-crushing cement, and had to push the door open with my leg, which I did so quite suddenly.

That’s about the time I felt a warm stream of something going down my leg.

 

I turned my head over to see a homeless man looking at me with the fear of God in his eyes, since he knew just as well as I did that the moment that I figured out that he had just pissed on my leg, I was probably going to kill him with a bag of cement. He quickly began apologizing saying he was “Just pissin’ on ‘dis wall” while I replied with a stare that may have well been the closest anyone has ever come to looking like a consternated Kermit the Frog in real life. Right then the man who announced Mikey’s shitpants in the previous story, came up behind me and loudly asked “DID THAT HOMELESS GUY JUST PISS ON YOUR LEG?” As much as I tried to deny it, I was then referred to by him the rest of the time I worked there as “Piss Leg.” The days I would go in and he was there, I was met with a hearty “Here comes OL’ PISS LEG.”

It’s okay though. He had a stroke a few years later. I am sure he has had more than a few of his own doing since then.

 

Big Lots:

You know, working at Big Lots wasn’t so bad. You could basically just do whatever you want and no one really cared. The customers generally ranged anywhere from white trash to homeless, so really any sort of service short of punching them in the eye was appreciated. Eventually I got moved over to the furniture section, which was really fun. I got to build cheap furniture from other countries with instructions like “Put the shine horse into the diagonal,” and no one really bothered me. Everyone was really cool to work with, too, even if they all had their problems. Well, except one of them….

 

Nonstop Old Woman Molestation

I think everyone has worked with an old dirty man or woman at some point in their lives. It’s just a common law that has to be fulfilled at some point in everyone’s career. Not only did I have to work with the aforementioned old man at Ace, but I had to work with a couple at Big lots as well. One was a guy that worked in furniture with me who had the dirtiest mustache I have ever witnessed outside of a soup kitchen. He delighted in telling me daily in graphic detail about how he liked to “eat ‘dat puzzy.” He made sure to say it in that way every time too, just to make sure that whatever appetite I had for the rest of the week was long gone. Overall though, he was OK. He never bothered me too much, and I always enjoyed watching other employees writhe with discomfort and disgust when he was telling them his latest about ‘dat puzzy.

My problem came from the woman that worked the service desk. She was roughly 60 years old, and already looking like she was decomposing. Her face had wrinkled and stretched to dangerous depths, and would flap around like an old piece of hanging baloney. She was also a chain smoker, which didn’t help anything, least of all her voice. She sounded about like what one of those cheap voice changer toys would sound like when you tried your best to make your voice sound like a monster. Basically every word came out like it had been put through a sandblaster, and then run over miles of pointy rocks just for good measure. It was not uncommon for children to become visibly frightened when she announced something across the store speakers. She was also the dirtiest old woman I have ever known, and she had her sights set on me.

There wasn’t a day that I didn’t go in without being greeted with this woman giving me the most alluring stare she could manage through her cataract infested eyes. When I’d pass, she’d reach out her skeleton hand and try to touch me, but I was usually running by that point. Some nights I would suddenly hear “JEREHHHME COME TO UH FRONT” blasting across the store speakers, like some sort of demon breaking through the Earth’s crust to summon me. I would reluctantly go up front where I would then be held hostage while she told me stories about how guys liked to suck on her foot because she could make it vibrate when she “got goin’.” It took me a good two years to want to have sex again from that mental image alone.

Eventually it got bad enough that I had to inform a manager. I’m not sure what was said, but that woman never said another damn word to me. Apparently it got around the store that she was saying I was a stuck up prick. That was just fine with me. I can only handle so much terror.

 

Goodwill:

Goodwill is an awful place to work. Well, where I worked anyway. I should have known right away, since the original guy they hired walked out on his first day, and I was the backup plan. I’m a bit thicker skinned, though. So it takes a good chunk of horse shit to really get to me. Basically what I was hired to do was be that guy that sits in the back, and go through all the crap that people offload to the store. And make no mistake about it, I was closer to a garbage man than anything else. Since most people apparently think Goodwill is just a more convenient garbage dump. People would throw out bags full of rotted clothes filled with bugs, old molded toys, and things that smelled so bad that we actually had to evacuate the stockroom once from the odor. And yes, it was my job to go through it all. Fun right? And that’s not even why I walked out. That reason can be found below.

 

Let’s Go Mad With Power, Shall We?

Before I start, I want to state that this is a completely true story. Not that any of the others on here aren’t, because they all are. But for some reason, when people hear this one, they always refuse to believe I’m not making up some tall tale of employee woe. I assure you that this is quite true, and it is by far the worst I have ever been treated in a job by anyone. I think most people refuse to believe it because this is an example of what should NEVER happen in any workplace. Namely employee abuse. And I apologize if this one isn’t quite as humorous as the others, but I think it needs to be told.

So anyway, I was doing my job of being Goodwill’s very own garbage digger, and for reasons I will never quite understand, one of the newly appointed assistant manager girls decided to absolutely hate me. I have no clue why. I had worked there for like two days and largely kept to myself. I did my job well enough and didn’t complain. But I guess doing so got me on the wrong end of the shit stick with this girl (who btw, was a total of 19 years old and acted every bit like it on a daily basis). So one day after I come back from lunch, she meets me in the warehouse with a packet of toothbrushes. She hands them to me and points to the customer bathroom and tells me to “Get to it.” I give her a cock-eyed dog look, and she tells me that it’s time for me to clean the restroom with the tools she has supplied.

Now before I go on, I should mention that if I wasn’t young and stupid, I would have tossed those toothbrushes right back at her, and told her to shove them up her cunt, and walked out. But I didn’t. I didn’t understand what was happening. I thought I was being a good employee. So I took those damn toothbrushes and scrubbed that shitter good. Little did I know that she was just getting started.

Over the next six hours, she had me clean the tops of shelves that hadn’t been cleaned for years, clean up the trash that had accumulated underneath the semis that deliver our stuff (this included months old rotted clothes and baby diapers that had all but turned to sludge), go into the woods behind the store and pick up old paper and dog shit (yes, seriously), and even crawl down into our water drain to pull out the trash in it. And yes, I did all of it while concerned coworkers looked on in bewilderment. According to them, no one had ever been made to do such. And at some point about the time I was soaking wet in a stinking drain hole, it dawned on me that JUST MAYBE I was being singled out. I know, I wasn’t too quick with things. But I kept refusing to believe that I was being shit on for no reason.

Even though I did all of the above, I finally broke doing something as simple as sweeping the store floor. This was part of our normal closing things, and I thought that maybe I had made it through the shit storm at this point. I finished up my sweeping, headed to the back to put the broom up, came back out, and there she was. She then told me that the floor wasn’t clean enough, and that I had to do it again. Now I’ve swept some damn floors before, and I know when things look fine, and this floor looked as good as its twenty year-old tiles would allow it to look. Regardless, I went and got that broom, and I swept that damn floor all over again. I went to put up my broom, and there she was again. Apparently I still had not done a fine enough job, and it was time to sweep that floor again.

It’s at this point though, that I finally snapped.

I pulled that giant ass broom off the floor and threw it straight at that bitch, told her she could do it her damn self, and I walked out of that place for good. She got it good too. The broom twisted a bit in midair, and she got the majority of everything that been on that dust mop for likely years all over herself in a cloud of dirt.

It did not make me feel much better about things.

I know now that this was a clear case of employee abuse, and if you ever find yourself in such spot, do yourself a favor and recognize it before it gets worse. Or tell someone that has the power to do something about it. You should never have to work somewhere where you feel like you are being singled out, or that someone is making your life miserable. It’s not worth it. Especially for minimum wage retail shit.

 

Factory Card and Party:

Here’s another place that I’m not entirely sure why I ended up working there. I strolled in one day on a whim, put in an app, and was immediately asked to do an interview. Overall, it wasn’t an awful place by any stretch of the imagination. It could mainly be considered an old people store, as it was full of weird collectible trinkets that only old people would ever care about. Like little glass rabbits jumping through a hoop made out of corn or something. We also had aisles full of cheap cards (greeting, birthday, etc) that would be occupied for hours by old women buying 70+ or more at a time. I also had to do a lot of balloon bouquets. I was sadly quite good at them, too. It was a weird, weird place.

 

Paint The Bathroom With Shit

Like I said above, we worked with a lot of older people. There were even days when the local old folks home would bring a bus full of them for their monthly “outing.” They would come barging in with all the force of a cow falling over to die, and then spend the next twenty minutes trying to get to the card aisle on the far side of the store. One particular day I had an older woman come and ask me if she could be taken to the bathroom. Well, not really. Not like we actually helped them through the process. See, we were one of those stores that stupidly have the customer bathroom back in the stockroom. So we had to go back there and sit at a desk while people did their business. I never much minded, since it was like a sort of break. Especially the older women, since it could well take them half an hour just to pull their knickerbockers back on. Or whatever old people wear these days. So I happily escorted this woman back to the bathroom, sat down, and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

Forty minutes pass, and I began to worry that the worst had happened, and the old woman had somehow managed to die in the damn shitter. Just before I called my boss back to check, the old woman opened the door, and came out just as she went in. I thought nothing of it, and proceeded to escort her out.

A few minutes later after I had gone back to work on the floor, my manager comes running down the aisle at me with the whitest face I have ever seen on a black woman. She gets up to me and whispers the most angry “GET TO THE BACK RIGHT NOW” I have ever heard outside of doing something stupid in church as a kid. I quickly follow behind her where she then points to the bathroom and asks me “What happened?!” I shrug and say not much as far as I knew. The old woman had said nothing to me, and walked out as if everything was fine. I walk to the door expecting to at worst see a pair of granny panties with a few extra skidmarks laying in the floor. Everyone knows how women can overreact to a slightly dirty bathroom. But what I saw when I opened that door would have made any man faint. Quite literally shit smeared from the floor to the ceiling. Shit smeared across the hand dryer, and even inside. The mirror itself looked like something straight out of Hellraiser. And then right there in that damn sink, there were those granny panties. With a full load right on top. I look over at my boss, who at that point had begun crying. I think she was well aware that no one else was going to clean it up, and I was fully prepared to quit right there on the spot if the order was even lightly uttered.

From there on out, that bathroom became an employee only bathroom.

 

Pregnant Woman Puke Fountain

Valentines Day was by far the most dreaded holiday at Factory Card. Especially the day before. This was about the time that everyone in the city forgot to get their significant other a damn thing for it, so the store was completely flooded with people all day. We also went all out for it as well, having aisles full of stupid Valentines trinkets and candy. Especially the candy. An entire four aisles dedicated to every pink and red candy you could imagine. It was like a single woman’s worst nightmare.

A pregnant woman, though. That’s a different story.

A pregnant woman and her husband had wandered in at some point, and of course this woman was blasting through the candy like a dope fiend looking for a dick to suck. She had such a hard on for that candy that she was actually eating it right there in the store, and saving the empty packages to ring up when she left. I was trying to keep an eye on her after I saw her put down the fourth box of peanut butter chocolate hearts, but at some point lost her shortly after. In that time, she apparently picked up a box of large-ish pink marshmallow hearts. Sort of like Peeps I guess. Just pink, and way larger than the one Peep I eat per year and am instantly fine about not eating another Peep until next Easter. As are most people I know. This woman though, tore through that six pack. But it’s at this point that she hit her wall.

I was standing beside the registers about ten feet away when I see a fountain of pink goo come bursting out of the aisle ahead. And I don’t mean just a little. This was full on explosive vomit you would expect from a College kegger around 3AM. It apparently came on so suddenly that she had no time to even bend over. Basically everything this woman had just eaten came out in a five foot radius of pure explosive awfulness. And of course, being that we were way busy at the time, other customers in that area got to take home their very own puke memorabilia. I’m guessing nothing in that aisle looked too appetizing to anyone after it was regurgitated onto them. For me personally though, I was glad someone finally did what I had wanted to do every Valentines Day before and after that.

______________________________

In the end, I was lucky enough to escape the retail trap into a much, much better profession. I can’t tell you how much working somewhere that you enjoy can change your perspective on life, and what you think about yourself. I don’t go into work every day hating myself. I don’t drink at night to forget what happened during the day. I don’t sit around and stress about bills, hours, inept management, or much of anything really. These days, I find myself living things up a bit, making up for all those years I never could. And I also can’t help but feel sorry for those people that I had to leave behind that are still stuck in retail. I did my time, though. And I guess in the end I’m better for it. You do tend to learn a lot of great job skills in retail that most other professions can’t even come close to that should be used to your advantage to get into something better. And I think that’s about the best experience you can have in retail while you’re there.

No matter how many old men shit themselves.

Good riddance.