Chapter 40
When You Fall Into a Bottomless Pit You Die of Starvation

Today probably goes down as one of the most sordid days in the history of working at this grocery store. I was working, minding my own business and I was taking a customer’s groceries out to the car and on my way back another car stopped and the window rolled down. Now, this isn’t unusual, it happens quite a bit, people asking for directions or they have a question about something or other. So that is what I was expecting, but this lady was a bit nervous and then proceeded to tell me that there was a condom in the parking lot. She then said she wasn’t sure if that’s what it was but it sure looked like one and she thought I should tell my manager. Tell my manager?! What just pick the manager I am most comfortable with and tell them that there is a condom out in the parking lot? Which is exactly what I did. I got a friend in on it though because I knew I would have trouble telling my manager this. So we both went up to her but we were both laughing about it, me because this is not something I ever expected to have to talk to my manager about and him because I was so nervous and he was making me tell the manager. Turns out that she already knew, someone told her about it yesterday but she never got around to getting it. So I handed her a little plastic bag and told her to get to it! I certainly wasn’t going to do it. If she had picked it up last night then I wouldn’t have had any of the awkward moments of today. So we went out there together and she used a paper towel and the plastic bag I gave her and picked up the used condom from the parking lot. It just makes me uncomfortable; this is the parking lot of my youth! I hung out in this parking lot pretty much every night after work during high school and now someone was prostituting themselves in it!
Then there was a customer today who was freaking out because she thought I man-handled her flowers. “They are very delicate” she kept saying and then points out to me what happens when they are not handled gently on a plant that I barely touched. I knew that I didn’t do it so she was just annoying me. Then she gets an attitude with me and the girl bagging for me because we don’t know how to make a box a half of a box (which is really easy once you are shown but trying to think of it on your own after a couple of hours of work is more difficult). Needless to say this customer walked home with my “most irritating customer of the day” award. But wait, it’s not over. After the continued attitude she tries to elicit sympathy from me, and we know how I am with sympathy. She goofed, and then she said that she just came from the airport so she was a little jet-lagged, and asked me to bear with her. I thought to myself, “You don’t have an attitude because you are jet-lagged, you have attitude because you’re a bitch.” Luckily I didn’t say this aloud but I wonder what she would have done if I had. Maybe when I have another stable job I will take more chances, but for now I am dependent solely on this one.
Other than that work wasn’t all that interesting. I was stuck working mostly with people I didn’t know, barely any of the fun kids from yesterday, and even if there were I wasn’t there much longer after they began coming into work. And there were none of the older people I am used to working with in the mornings. Working 12-7 sucks, it’s like the bottomless pit of boredom and no one is throwing down a lunch-able or a juice box.