Chapter 62
In the System

So I have been working my second job at the school, while of course still working at the grocery store and a strange thing has occurred. I have gained a renewed joy in working at the grocery store. Weird isn’t it? But having a “real” job, or so far the closest to a real job that I have had so far, has proven to me so much more how much I don’t want to grow up. I was thinking about Poof Daddy and how he is probably the closest one to my age and he is still working at the store and what makes the two of us so different? Of course then common sense reentered my mind and I remembered that he hasn’t started college yet and I have a degree and he is still three years younger than me and I’m just pathetically working my high school job. But I like the job; with the exception of my two managers (Gus-Gus and the other I will call Jaq…a little brighter than Gus-Gus but still a mouse). Jaq is a man whore, and I’m not saying this only because I don’t like him, but because he can’t stop himself from touching women, from talking to them, from staring at them. To just let you know, Gus-Gus is also a man-whore. These two are those creepy 30-something year old bachelor’s that you wouldn’t want to be alone in a dark parking lot…actually you just wouldn’t want to be alone with them, ever. Jaq and Gus-Gus are both incompetent in what their jobs require them to do, but Jaq has more responsibility to screw up with. He has one of the most important responsibilities that there is. He does the schedule. And yes, he screws it up. For example: this past Saturday he had almost everyone scheduled to work…we don’t need everyone, we have so many employees so that people can have days off, and take vacations, work different hours of availability, we do not have them so that all of them can come in on a Saturday and stand around. At one point I put myself back from the situation, really I was slacking hanging out at the sampling table eating cookies and joking around with Maps, but I looked at the front end and the customers were vastly out numbered by possibly 10 to 15 employees. The first thing Jaq said when he came is was, “Who wants to be put first on the ‘go home early’ list?” I told him not me because for some freaking reason I only have 16 hours next week and considering that I am supporting myself now and have to pay for things like food and gasoline, I need the money. He asked almost everyone, most of us are working for money, not just because we want to be at a grocery store on a Saturday morning. I almost told him that if he didn’t want to have too many employees then maybe he should work on how he schedules everyone.
Then we had four new people. So not only was everyone working that day, but we had four new people who wouldn’t be given the option to go home early because they needed to get used to working I guess. To add to this Jaq was supposed to give these four newbies a tour of the store; he pulled me off register and had me give them a tour. Have I already mentioned that this manager is the one who had me run the front end about a week ago because he didn’t feel like being up front? He even has me take the schedule to the break room telling me that I am the only one he can trust to do that. What is everyone else going to do with it? Change people’s schedules? Not deliver the goods? Just walk to the break room and put it up, how can people really screw that up? So I had to give the tour…I have never done that before. It was pretty lame, and I’m sure I forgot to tell them a bunch of stuff, but the important stuff got covered. I showed them where the break room was, the mop room, I told them that they would learn the store so we didn’t bother walking up and down the aisles. The best part was when I took them to the bakery and introduced them to the lady I most enjoy working with back there and then we gave them all a cookie. I took them back up front and let them bag and I went back to Maps and her sample table and told her about the tour. During the tour Baby Face came over to say goodbye, he had given in to Jaq’s request for people to go home and so two and half hours after coming in he was leaving. Then the inspector was the next to go. I was bummed because Baby Face and The Inspector are so much fun to work with and they were the first two to go. I had to wait for Poof Daddy and The Warrior to get to work to alleviate my disappointment.
Oh…wasn’t I complaining about something? Oh yeah, so Jaq lets people leave and then we get busy and need them there but no one is there because he has let them go! So Saturday we got slammed at about 2:30 and both Baby Face and The Inspector were supposed to be there until 3. I couldn’t help but get upset at Jaq because of his stupidity we were all working much harder than we should have. I was ringing up orders and bagging them and baggers were coming in barely in time to even take out the orders that the cashiers were bagging. It was just frustrating to me. I ended up staying a little bit after work to help out my fellow employees because they needed more people there. I will give Jaq something though, because of how angry I get at him I work faster to release the tension.
Did I mention that the day started well? I kept trying to get Baby Face to ring up some groceries but he wouldn’t do it. He said that he had thought once about being a cashier but that’s as far as it went. He thought about it one time, then nothing. Finally he came over to ring up a thing of soda and he couldn’t get it because he thought the bar code was on the bottom but it was on the side. So I said, “You’re right, you do suck at this.” And laughed and then told him where the code was and he got it. Then he walked to the end of the register and I asked him if he wanted to ring up the other sodas but he told me no, I told him that they would be easier to ring up but he still refused. He told me that someone needed to bag the order, I told him I would, but I guess it wasn’t the real reason. Also we all had to wear lays because it was Hawaiian Saturday or something like that. I was the only girl with about 6 guys, all wearing lays. It was fantastic. My Hawaiian dream come true.
One of my old teachers came in too, I told her how I am working at the school and she said that she had been thinking about me the other day and about working in the schools in the county. And now I am an employee of the county so she said she would talk to her husband and get back to me. So that should be interesting to see if any thing opens up that way. It really is all about who you know isn’t it?