Except these ones: The conveyor belt that runs between the cashier and the courtesy clerk position on the checkstands at Safeway is 309.8cm long. (outside radius) Taking 16 seconds to complete a circuit, it travels at 193.625 cm/second, or .69 km/h.
Two very disturbing events have occured this week as Safeway. For those of you think that this represents a notable downturn in the number of disturbing events, I'll clarify: Today I'll be writing about two specific disturbing events, because they represent a greater level of disturbingness (or disturbosity, if you prefer) than the typical Safeway event. WIth that caveat in place, I'll get right into the meat of the issues, taking care to note that if there was a quota on using forms of the word "disturb" in a piece of writing, I would have already reached it.
By the way, both events involve workplace violations of the legal sort. Hence the title.
Event number 1: We have a cashier at the store who recently transferred from another Safeway. Now, I certainly understand the urge to fit in at a new workplace, the desire to ingratiate one's self into the lives of one's new co-workers. But what I can't understand is people who just shoot their fucking mouths off about every damn thing and assume that their auidience is going to be receptive, just because they're captive. This new cashier, who'll I'll call Swaty (because that is his name) decided last weeked to share a story with those people unfortunate enough to be sharing the breakroom with him. The story was about a cashier at Swaty's previous store who had done Swaty a terrible offence by speaking to him in a reasonable and polite fashion in the course of being a helpful and security-minded Safeway employee. I'll relate the story here, as closely as I can:
"It was my second day at Crowfoot [the previous store in question] and I was looking for something behind the customer service desk when this cashier called Alex comes up to me and asks if I need help finding anything"
Not a great story, but the way Swaty told it was the noticible bit. His tone of voice was the tone I would more typically associate with a Jew speaking about his experiences with Joseph Mengele during the war. He was obviously disgusted that some guy had offered to help him. "So," I said, "A cashier who saw a total stranger rifling through drawers and cupboards at the customer service desk attempted to discern if you had any right or reason to be doing so and offered to help you out? God, what an asshole he was. How dare he. Your pride may never fully recover." Of course, I was fully aware of what Swaty's real problem with the situation was, because I knew the cashier at Crowfoot that he was speaking about. Swaty made his motives clear to the entire room as well when he called the cashier a "faggot".
The cashier in question is homosexual, just so you know. But I see no call for that kind of derogatory term to be bandied about in a public place. I''ve always felt that if you want to be a complete and total ignorant, hateful fucking jack-ass, you can do it at home. I told Swaty as much, and his ever-so-charming approach was to continue using the word as much as possible and challenging me about my objection to it.
So I stabbed the fucker with a paring knife.
No, I didn't. That would be wrong. Fun, but wrong. But I did file a sexual-harrasment complaint against him. Do you know what Safeway, in it's attempt to seem like a caring and concerned employer for the new millenium, does to people when they get that kind of complaint filed against them? I do. And soon Swaty will. It's not fun.
Event numero dos!: Calgary is a city that prides itself on going to whatever lengths are nessecary to keep rust off of it's citizenry's cars. So even though it snows all the damn time here, there is never any salt put on the roads. Instead, we use gravel. Appoximately 98,000 metric tonnes per snowfall. We throw it everywhere; on the roads, in parking lots, in people's driveways, on sidewalks, anywhere that's not quite filthy enough.
This gives automobiles excellent traction, ensuring that all of the maniacs with cars don't have to be deterred from endangering human life with their non-existant winter-driving skills. This of course means that the gravel can be exposed to the pulverizing effects of a million car tires, until all the gravel has been reduced to a fine grit, easily borne on great gusts of Calgary's famed wind, in lovely brown belches of dirty air, right into my FUCKING EYE!. This actually happened, this weekend, in the parking lot at Safeway.
Opthomologists recommend that if you beleive yourself to have foriegn particulates in your eye, you should try and keep it open, as squeezing your eyes shut or even blinking can grind the material into your eye further and cause lens damage. The part of my brain not occupied with thinking "FUCK FUCK FUCK! I'VE GOT DUST IN MY FUCKING EYE! FUCKING GOD-DAMNED FUCKETY FUCK FUCK!" over and over again managed to remember this handy tidbit, and so I rushed into the store holding my eye open with my fingers, lunged around customers and fellow employees towards the utility room where the eye-wash bottle is kept. Even with the visual impairment caused by the DUST IN MY FUCKING EYE SLOWING BLINDING ME, I was able to determine that the eye-wash bottle was right there where it was supposed to be, with the only thing standing between me and it's use was the small, minor, irrelevant detail that it was empty. My profanity-riddled interior monologue was coming dangerously close to becoming a very loud and very public performance peice, so I tore the bottle off the wall and moved to the sink, intending to fill the bottle. I quickly discovered a bevy of safety features included in the bottle's design - doubtlessly intended to protect our eye-wash bottles from dusty-eyed Russians in the event of a resurgence in international communism - namely that the caps are screwed on clockwise, even though every other bottle on the planet is designed for counter-clockwise cap-placement, and are screwed on almost, but not quite, tightly enough for molecules of the bottle and cap to undergo nuclear fusion.
Circumventing these first obsticles, I was pleased to note that God still hates me when then the various tubes that hang inside and outside the bottle to facilitate the squeezing and flushing processes just fell everywhere when I actually got the bottle un-capped. So I re-assembled the damn thing, still holding my eye open with my hand, and filled it with water. I eventually got to flush my eye out, but not before the dust on it's surface had spawned life and a minature civilization had developed far enough to begin wondering about the possibility of life on other eyes.
Naturally, I began to think that maybe employee health and safety is not a big priority at Safeway. Given some of the tasks I'm asked to perform in the course of my courtesy-clerking, I have to assume it's not as big a priority as say, making sure there is no extra scotch tape stuck to the customer service desk. So I was faced with a diffcult decision: Do I burn the store down and kill everyone inside, or I do I just go home and desperately hope that I'll be able to see properly in the morning?
I left, but only because I couldn't see well enough to find any matches.
Ever wonder why fish look so stupidly bewilered? Why they live out their little fishy lives wearing an expression that can only be connected to thoughts of the "gulp swim wiggle swim gulp" variety? Fish aren't stupid, exactly (though they aren't the brightest bulb on the evolutionary Christmas tree), they just have an extremely short memory. This may be bad news to those of you who are expecting to ever get back your copy of "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" from the guppy you lent it to.
Some sciencey-type guys with far too much time on their hands have discovered that the average, household-variety pet fish has a three second memory span. The thought process of said average fish, therefore, when placed in a small fishbowl with a little castle ornament, is thus:
"Hey look, a castle!"
And three seconds later:
"Hey look, a castle!"
"Why" you ask? Well, really I'm just assuming that you're asking why about the fish-memory thing, not in some cosmic or existential sense. Ian might be able to help you with that, but I really just planned to talk about fish. Ahem. Anyway, like most blatantly obvious biological problems, the answer is Evolution. You see, three seconds is the perfect length of time for a fish's short term memory; 3 seconds is enough time for a fish to decide that it's hungry and eat something, enough time to swim about and glub a little, and if the unfortunate fish suffers from premature ejaculation, it won't really matter, because his fish-girlfriend will only remember the last three seconds of sex anyway, which are, as far as she knows, the best she's ever had.
That, and a fish with a slightly longer short-term memory might have a thought process like this:
"Hey look, a castle!
Hey look..... Oh my God that's the same castle I've been swimming in circles in a tiny bowl for my entire life and I'm gonna die here and my life has no meaning and Hey look, a castle!"
So to prevent fish from having soul-shattering epiphanies ten times a minute, and to prevent female fish from reminding the male fish of the time they got drunk and puked on her favourite sweater, or the fact that they left the toilet seat up last week, Evolution has provided them with puny-ass short term memory. Keep the mystery in fish relationships, and keep them from rebelling their cruel oppressors. Great, right?
Long story short, the brain of one of our co-workers has evidently been transplanted with that of a fish. Seriously, he has a memory like a retarded eel, like a sieve, like a goldfish who rides the short bus to goldfish elementary school. And the rest of his mental "abilities" aren't particularly stunning either. From annoying, inappropriate banter (with both customers and employees) to subjecting us to his own lacklustre wit, which is about as funny as watching SNL when you're not drunk or stoned, Fishman runs the gammut of irritation. I've learned to fear the distinct light that comes to his eyes when both neurons fire at once, as it is the harbinger of another painful and abortive attempt at what we humans call humuor. It hurts me inside.
Ian, inspired by a slow night at work and a lonely-looking label maker, has provided us with little catch phrases affixed to our nametags. Mine says, "Fraudulent Novelty" (see the latest post on www.ianwallace.com); Ian's says "Scapegoat par Excellance", Joe's clever subtitle reads "My name is Joe", and Adam seemed particularly fond of his "Your Girlfriend Thinks I'm Hot".
The conversation with Fishman went thus: Ian: Here Fishman, put this on your nametag. Fishman: "Hey look, a castle!" What does this have to do with anything? Ian: Have you ever read Don Qixote? Fishman: ...No. Ian: Well, you should. Fishman: OK! Thanks! (Hehe... Castle...)
So, thanks to a clever bit of suberfuge (Don Qixote has nothing to do with the phrase "Hey look, a castle!", but Fishman was gullible enough to think it did. Shame on you if you missed that. Go wax your scales.) there is now a miniature object of ridicule attached to Fishman's nametag. He is now doomed to be the butt of an in-joke that will, with any luck, outlive its intended subject. The poor bugger probably thinks we're laughing at his "jokes" whenever he's around.
Kinda makes you wonder why they call fish "brain food", doesn't it?
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