I'm alive

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This was my schedule (on Thanksgiving, it was actually 5PM to 3AM, my superior copied the wrong person's clock for that day).

Doing this job, it really makes me glad that I'm one of those people that puts stuff back in the store where I got it. Every night, we always put back "stray" merchandise, put everything where it belongs that for one reason or another, is not where it belongs.

You really get a sense of how obnoxious people are, even in this job where you don't interact with the customers. And also the day crew who handle unwanted stock too.

On Thanksgiving it was a real grind, even though I had 11 hours that day, my break was still 15 minutes and a 30 minute lunch. They opened at 6am on Thanksgiving day, and already, 50 people came in as my shift from Wednesday ended. It was the first time I had to interact with "consumers", especially since the store will stay open for 72 hours straight, on top of my normal and special shift on Thanksgiving. Since I had work at 5, I had to go to bed as soon as I got home. The first half wasn't so bad, they had me bring in carts when I punched in. Nearly all the carts were on the lot at the start of my shift, so I had to learn on my own the intricacies of rolling in huge trains of carts. I don't know how many carts we had, I can say we had at least 100 feet or more of them if we had them all stacked into each other.

About an hour into my shift, most people were finished with their meals at home, so that's when they really started to pour in. I was in the middle of a random job, putting sales flags on toys for Black Friday, and then over the intercom, they called me to do carts again. We were running dry on carts at the front of the store, but there were so many carts in use, that there were only five or so unused carts out on the lot, after that, it took about two hours for that number of carts to free up again. It was actually nice in a sense, I had free reign to stay out of the grinder of the store inside for two hours and just wander around the lot.

I went back in on my own discretion, since it was probably as far as I can stretch that excuse now, and did the sticker thing from two hours ago again, and one of the managers came along and told me to pull the green stickers from the Thanksgiving sale that's supposed to end at 7pm. Apparently, everyone but me was too busy to pull the dead sales, that was an hour overdue. That's when I got everyone in a five foot radius roll up to me to ask me everything. It's a lot worse especially, since I checked out an RMU when my shift started, that's the laser gun you see store people use to zap up prices and shelf coordinates. Everyone wanted to know how much the shit in their cart cost. It's nice in a sense though, just the tiny amount of power you're allowed being a lowly shelf elf that maintains the store in the unwaking hours. More than once, I had to bullshit about shit I just didn't have a clue about, like "oh, we don't have that color, if it's out here, it's all we got now". There were some who thought that "the back" was this magical place like at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark that had every buyable shit in existence, so I had to say that I'll go check, and run off for a while, then come back and say that's all we have.

Because that's literally all we actually had, when Thanksgiving was coming up, we did actually empty most of the backstock onto the store floor, you could play football back there. So, a whole night of moms asking where all the Minecraft swords later, people were starting to thin out, and my legs were degenerating from all the standing, the running, the lifting, and the scanning. Time to time, I went out for carts, and encountered another obnoxious thing people do in stores that I don't do, they leave their fucking carts every damn where. On all the concrete islands, on the black top, even on the OTHER parking lot that borders the Walmart lot. We even somehow ended up with a Walmart cart in our store. So, here I am, actually running around the lot, with a heavy RMU on my belt digging into my hip because of all things, they don't give you an actual holster for it, and I'm making this train of carts all over the lot, hauling heavy eight-foot trains of them back in the store. It actually gets more hectic here when more people leave, because as soon as you bring the damn things back, they all get taken, and a new batch ends up on the lot after that.

Some fuckers park right next to the cart corrals where you're supposed to put them, and just leave them in the vague vicinity of them, some even, while I'm standing there, SHOVE the damn things in the opposite direction, rolling it near to the edge of the lot. From the front of the store. After I got a sense of how all over the place these carts were, on a hunch, I ran to the back of the store, where our truck bay was, and there were even carts there somehow, I would much rather believe it was some Pixar kind of bullshit, and that they resumed sentience while no one was looking, and had a grand fucking adventure for whatever reason that beckoned them to the back, and here I come in, the unaware (but I'm secretly on to their game because this is what I want to believe instead of people being shit heads) un-deus ex machina force of conflict in the rising action of the film that sets their epic Pixar adventure back by pulling them back into the store and making the movie longer about half an hour more.

After who knows how long I've spent on this Sisyphean toil of the wheeled baskets of burden, I'm starting to lose my grip on the situation, now somehow, it's like the carts decided to come alive despite my perception focused on them, and they do odd things like speed up and roll away from me. Of course, it's really because I'm burnt fucking out dealing with the sales animals in the store and having to be on my feet for 7 hours, which is now getting longer than the time I have to stay on my feet in my normal shift, and now, on top of that, there's constant strenuous labor involved with this cart shit. Now at this point, while I'm corralling the ungodly number of three carts at a time, I lose control of the train, and the carts at the front start to un-gattai from their super form, as we crest the small incline on part of the parking lot. I had to let go of the first cart, and run after the two that are now rolling towards someone's car. I just catch them, and then the cart I had to release to catch the other two, crashes right into my fucking heel so hard that it flips upside down and almost lands on me. It would've trapped me under it like those rabbit traps you see in cartoons with the stick, the string, and the bait.

So I'm hopping up and down on a sorely fatigued leg, while my other feels like it's been shattered to pieces, and for the next hour, I limp around gathering carts until it's finally midnight when I can take my lunch break. You'll never lust after half an hour of sitting down and doing nothing like you will doing the soul sucking job of retail. I would've did carts all the way til midnight, but now, of all things, it's starting to rain. OF all fucking things, that's exactly how I started this job, it rained the day I went to orientation, and came back home to a fucking shitstorm that forced me to actually hitch hike home. So, I decided, fuck this shit, and went back in the store. I'm panting and sweating balls, and limping, all I had to do is survive an hour and I can finally punch out for my lunch. That hour seemed much longer than physically possible, directing people where the bathroom was, where the departments was, where a certain thing on the ad they put out was, and finally, it was midnight. Somehow, by the grace of the retail universe or something, the powers that be deemed my suffering to be sufficient in their grand scheme, and it was like I had a mystical barrier around me that made me invisible to consumer and managerial forces alike. I limped towards the clock-in computer and punched out for my thirty, and then plopped down and shuddered in my tortured coil in the cheap beaten up breakroom chair. Just three more hours to go, and I'm home free...To come back there again at 10pm to 6am...

But after that, it's a glorious three day weekend, which unfortunately, seemed to have gone by too soon.

I had my usual homecoming ritual of just laying in bed in my underwear and watch youtube and catch up with friends on Saturday morning. I also had to run up my schedule for the Toonami stream later that day, and record the archive for the ones that miss the stream and the ones that only see it with a lag. During my well deserved rest, Jim Sterling did a dedication to all of us that work in retail during the holidays, and I honestly got choked up and cried a bit.