At a till. Bagging groceries. An average day. Until the cashier starts talking to the customer. Or at least, attempting to.
It's not that the cashier in question suffers from an inability to speak, but english - it is painfully obvious - is not Marianna's first language, and her incessant Polish-pidgin ramblings in combination with her total inability to shut the fuck up make it hard to believe that anyone can bear it for more than thirty seconds at a stretch. In point of fact, we can't bear it. I bravely throw myself on the grenade of Marianna's broken tirades in the hopes that I will be able to expedite the poor, trapped customers' departure from the store, and spare them as much of this mockery of the english language as I possibly can. The pitiable customers, imprisoned before Marianna's babblings, exchange looks of disgust and discomfort with me, and I do my best to look apologetic, while silently willing this imbecilic cashier to please, for the love of everything that can reasonably be said to exist, CLOSE HER GODDAMNED MOUTH. I wince at one of Marianna's more insensitive and possibly offensive comments, and the phrase "indecipherable castrating whore", thanks to Tycho's inimitable writing, drifts lazily to mind. Again and again. I try to pick up the pace of my work, attempting to load the poor customer's purchases back into their cart in record time, but I've been thwarted. Marianna has become more emphatic than usual, and in lieu of actually ringing through this particular customer's purchases, she is punctuating her broken english by madly waving about the asparagus that she should be scanning. Having had enough of this torturous ordeal, I remorsefully slink away. This unfortunate customer will have to fend for herself.
My heart sinks as I realize just how limited are my options for intelligible, stimulating conversation. To my left stands Josephine. Constantly complaining to customers and co-workers alike about her various ailments, the time frame of her shifts, the fact that she's tired, the imagined injustice of another two hours of work, and anything else that happens across her "mind", Josephine's Spanish-accented pidgin complaints are almost as incessant as Marianna's inane chatter. Seemingly born without the concept of an inner monologue, she says whatever occurs to her, regardless of relevance, taste, or the comfort of anyone around her. Really, if you, as a customer were bringing your purchases to a till, preparing to pay, and the first thing you heard from your cashier was one of: "I'm tired", "I'm thirsty", "My throat hurts", how would you feel? "I'm so sorry that I impinged upon you, y'know, asking you to do your FUCKING JOB and all." "I'm sorry you feel so down, why don't I do my shopping at a time MORE CONVENIENT FOR YOU?" Josephine also has the most fucking annoying habit of snagging a handful of my bulk candy without asking, and after I've paid for it, whenever I come through her till, so fuck her. If another poor sot feels like enduring her idiocy long enough to pack her customers' groceries, good for them. But it's not gonna be me.
Working at the (in this case) inappropriately named Customer Service desk is Martin. A terminally happy import from Hong Kong, Martin bastardizes the english language just as much as the other two, and has a substantially creepy habit of giggling like a little girl while he does so. I don't really want to rag on Martin, because I think he's a great guy - especially since we occasionally get customers who speak ONLY Cantonese, and it's always good to have someone around who can resolve a situation like that. My only problem with Martin is that his greying hair and seniority with the company belie the length of time he's been in Canada - and he obviously hasn't taken the time or effort to better his language skills. I don't know any second languages particularly well, but you can bet your left nut that if I ever live in a foreign country, I'll do my damnedest to master their language within eighteen months. It's just common courtesy, the way I see it.
Unable to bear any more, I walk, head hung low, to the break room. Martin pages me - or at least I think he does - over the intercom, but I can't really tell, so I keep walking. Feels more like trudging, though. Besides, I can always tell him that I couldn't understand the page if he tries to chew me out later. I wonder as I walk - where do these people get off bastardizing my versatile, my phenomenal, my artistic and expressive language? At other times in my life, I have been fortunate enough to have met some very intelligent people - people who have come to this country and made a concerted effort to learn well the language of the realm. After surmounting its initial difficulties, many of them speak and read english as well as I do, now. So what right do these pidgin-speakers feel they have to maintain this level of mediocre linguistic proficiency for years, and sometimes decades after coming to Canada? Even the people who work at this store have done so for years - Martin, Marianna and Josephine have spent the better part of a century between them in this country, and their jobs involve speaking to fluent Canadians, both co-workers and customers, virtually every minute of every day. I cannot conceive of how one can be so immersed for so long, and remain so PISS POOR at the simple necessity of intelligible speech. My beautiful language - the language passed down to me in faith by Chaucer, to Shakespeare, to Milton and Wilde and Frost, to Ashbery, to Djuna Barnes and Christian Bok, now rests in the hands of these people. People who are hardly able to conjugate, or properly pluralize words. It makes me want to cry.
Ian has brought it to my attention that, due to my unapologetic slackass-ing, the entire frontpage of Stocker Mentality consists of his posts. This will not stand. Two reasons for my absence from the aether are the trips I've taken this summer, one with my band, down to Illinois, and another with Ian, to Vancouver. Another reason I could list involves being too busy working to actually bitch about work, and the fact that I've been **SHAMELESS PLUG** working on something new and special for the Monkey Alliance **SHAMELESS PLUG**. Interestingly enough, our trip to Vancouver, via the bedsore-inducing Greyhound Busline, involved a stopover or two at local BC Safeway stores.
Maybe I'm just biased against my store, but walking through the clean, smooth-sliding doors of a Safeway in Vernon felt a little like stepping through the airlock of some glossy, sleek spacecraft which just happened to be filled with food. From the welcome coolness of the air, to the gleaming white floor, to the friendly staff who not only took the time to converse with two curious out-of-towners, but actually seemed to enjoy being at work at 10 am, the place seemed the ideal to which all Safeway stores aspire. Fresh, hot croissants in hand, Ian and I departed this mecca of supermarket superiority, pondering the differences we had seen.
Everyone at our store, save a half-dozen sadists, presses through their shift with at least some degree of resentment for what feels like wasted time. The cleanliness of the place definitely leaves something to be desired - the crudely masked smell of rot and filth emanating from the area around the loading dock is repugnant at best, even if you've gotten used to it. Mop water is left to fester in unwashed buckets, sometimes for weeks at a time. Breaks taken are too frequent and lengthy. The entire store can seem to sink into a squalid yellow hue at times, mocking the pristine blue-white aura of our British Columbian counterpart. I am at a loss to say whether the sheer laziness or poor training are at fault for our lack of initiative, and lack of overall commercial hygiene, but I do know this - we have a lot more fun.
Management is our great adversary - they are the ones who demand that work be done, who require us to be bright and cheerful and have a spring in our step, even if it means actually grafting springs to the soles of our feet. Finding a way - any way - to circumvent their requirements of us is a minor victory. Damaged merchandise finds its way to the break room for us to use as we see fit. Courtesy clerks can shirk their responsibilities for hours at a time to take a little bit of the load off of our overworked grocery staff. Bringing in carts from the parking lot is often an excuse for lengthy personal conversations between Courtesy Clerks, as Ian and I can proudly attest. On late night shifts, I've debugged computers, caught up with friends, and even played one end of a game of Starcraft thanks to Safeway's free and abundant phone system. And if, in the midst of this, the store falls into disrepair, so be it. Our customers remain jovial and bright, for the most part, and our employees get to relax a little, knowing that the sun doesn't rise and set depending on whether or not someone took the time to scrub every square inch of every checkstand. Besides, the store has that nice lived-in look now.
That's right folks; the secret to happiness is lowered expectations.
I came back into the store tonight after being outside for a few minutes. At one of the checkouts, I see four bags packed with groceries. At the front end of the till is another customer just beginning to unload his cart, so I know these four bags aren't his. I look quizzically at the cashier and she says, "She just left".
As I'm asking for a little clarification on the whole customer-leaving issue, this woman comes from the direction of the far doors, pushing an empty cart, and stops at the till. She looks right at me, who wasn't even there when she bought her groceries, and says "I assumed you were going to put them in the cart for me".
"Not having been here at the time, I was sadly unaware that you wanted me to, ma'am.", I offer diplomatically. So I load her cart and send her on her way.
But seriously, how inattentive can you be? First she doesn't notice as she leaves the checkout that there are four full bags still sitting there. Then she doesn't notice that she is pushing an empty cart until she gets outside, then she doesn't notice that the person she's picked to chastise wasn't even around when she walked off. I think that's pretty damn funny, don't you?
It's hot here in Calgary. Most normal people aren't shocked by this, because it's summer, dontcha know? But apparently this little meteorological tidbit managed to escape at least one fellow and caught him completely off-guard tonight.
He comes up to the store's Customer Service desk this evening while I'm keeping an eye on it for the supervising cashier. He asks if we have any fans. I choke back my scornful laughter and politely tell him we're sold out. "They're in your flier this week", he says, gruffly.
Now, I've adopted a new policy at Safeway. If you're not giving me any reason to like you, I reply only to questions. You want to spit a sentence in my face, I will stare at you until I die, or the end of my shift. Only a rising pitch at the end will warrant a response from me. Naturally, this customer is unfamiliar with my policy, so he waits a few seconds before he guesses it's still his turn. "Why don't you have any? Shouldn't you have them in stock if they're in the flier?"
My criteria met, I reply: "Sir, we don't have any because they were all purchased and we have yet to receive more. I suspect the cause is the weather. It's been rather warm these past few weeks, sir."
"But they're in the flier."
I smile politely. This is mostly to cover the maniacal grin threatening to split my face as the silence extends.
"When do you expect to get more?" he finally asks, in a manner suggesting that I bought all the fans myself in order to piss him off. Ironically, this is not too far from the truth; my mother bought 5 of them.
"I'm afraid I'm not certain, sir." Readers will please note my polite tone at this point. "Stores have been having trouble keeping them in stock. I suspect our warehouse merchandisers failed to anticipate the call for fans this month..."
"I'm not interesting in hearing about your handicaps.", he interrupts. I glance at his forehead, looking for a small v-shaped scar beneath his hairline. The reason for this odd reaction that I have a small v-shaped scar beneath my hairline. His reaction is so similar to what I would have said in his place that I briefly wonder if this man is me from the future. Sadly, there is no scar, so I abandon my theory. I also abandon my new policy, replying despite his failure to phrase his gripe in the form of a question.
"Ah", I begin. "I'll cut right to the heart of the matter then, sir. I'm sorry we are out of stock on the fans. That apology was the only remuneration Safeway intends to offer in this situation, and you are welcome to check back at anytime for new stock. Now in order to prevent this upset in customer service from evolving from an isolated incident into an epidemic, I will take my leave of you and tend to my other customers. Good evening."
I turned on my heel and began bagging on the closest till. My desperate urge was to turn around and watch the man's reaction, but I resisted. I can only imagine him shaking in silent umbrage and walking meekly away. He would have had a better shot trying that with me if he was Future-Ian.
While actually on-shift at Safeway, I try my best to be a bastion of civility and service. This website is my outlet, so I certainly can't blame it's readers for considering me an uncouth loudmouth hooligan - I merely wish to point out that I'm really not; not at work, anyway. And when circumstances spin out of control, and I just can't take it anymore, I try to vent my frustration at one of my underling clerks, a foreigner employee who can't understand me or a particularly deserving customer. Rarely do I dare vent upwards to my superiors, since my unique style of venting is often categorized as belligerence, incitement to riot, and/or verbal assault.
I'd like to discuss a rare and recent departure from this norm.
It's 8:30 at night, and I've been working since 5. My supervisor is Brenda, who is generally angry because it took her ten years to leave an abusive marriage and thinks this entitles her to an easier go of life than everyone else gets. But I digress. My first and only attempt to communicate with Brenda this evening was a "Hello" as I began my shift. Met with stony silence, I resolved to avoid her for the rest of the night. So 8:30 arrives and with it, Nick. He's doing a little personal shopping. It's been a few days since I've seen my dear buddy, so I decide to take my break 15 minutes early and chat outside the store. Nick buys me a Snickers bar, I announce my departure to the cashier manning the customer service, and we head out. Unfortunately, the only other Courtesy Clerk on shift is Curtis, who decides to join our little tête-a-tête outside the store.
We chat, and I absent-mindedly free the cap liner from my bottle of Coke. I win a free bottle, so I'm pretty psyched. It's not a lot, but I like to savour the simple pleasures. After about five minutes, Brenda - justifiably upset at the total absence of servant boys inside the store - marches outside with Art, the grocery supervisor. "Who's on break?", she demands. 3 fingers, one mine, one Nick's and one Curtis's, point at me. "Your break is at 9. You're taking it early?" Her tone is in some odd place between questioning and informing.
"Mmhmm, obviously." I reply, savouring the warm pleasure of being unimpeachably in the right.
"And does this break include the 15 minutes you spent walking around the store doing nothing?", she sneers. I'm tempted to ask which 15 minutes she's referring to, since there have been so very many. But in all honesty, I had been actually working right before my break, and for most of the evening. My hackles raise, but I am still polite.
"Brenda, I was doing returns, like I was asked."
"Oh, no you weren't". Her certainly is ferocious, and quite offensive.
"Brenda, if you can't be bothered to pay attention to what I'm doing, I'd suggest you not speak on the topic at all. I know what I was doing." My reply is still calm and measured. I'm actually not angry yet.
Brenda begins to walk away "I..." Her retort is lost to the ages, because all of a sudden I'm angry. I'm so sick of working diligently and effectively at my actual job and being harassed and accused because I don't perform everyone else's duties perfectly when they are fobbed off on me. I'm perfectly justified in taking a break 15 minutes early, this night or any other.
"Go to hell, Brenda."
It hangs there for a moment that is somehow neither short nor long. Nick, Curtis and Noella, the audience of this production, look a little shocked, possibly more amused. Brenda and Art slowly turn to me and both begin to speak at once. I catch Art saying "You'd better watch your attitude, son" and retort:
"My name is Ian, and I'm not your son." Behind him, Brenda is talking about me going home. I'm being sent home. I'm already completely calm again.
As Brenda and Art storm inside, laughter erupts. Curtis has crept back inside, proving himself the wiser of we two, but Nick and Noella are still present and effusing their disbelief and delight at my unveiled insubordination. To Nick, I say the only thing that comes to mind.
"Give me a ride home?"
So I get home, 2 hours early. In time to watch a little TV, chill out on the couch and talk to my girlfriend before she goes to bed. Lost wages: -$17. Free Coke & Sinkers: $2. Saying what I meant, when I meant it: Priceless.
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.
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