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"Your job is easy," said the rich guy in the suit.

"You guys don't even know what work is."

Yeah, I've had customers say that to me. Customers who've heard me and fellow grocery store scrubs commiserating over our schedules and workload and such.

I killed them all. I followed them out to the parking lot, threw my car into overdrive, and mowed them right into the buggy corral at seventy miles per hour. Only in my mind, unfortunately.

If you want a good idea of what a cashier's shift physically involves, try curling light handweights sideways for about six hours straight with a fifteen minute break in the middle.

When you've gotten a good idea of what that's like, now imagine that those six hours could have been spent working towards mounting deadlines on final projects, a gallery exhibition, a number of final reports, and required volunteer time... all of it a prerequisite to graduation. Read that again. Now think about how motivated you'll be to do this after your six hour sweat session.

The people who say this are not salt miners. They aren't lumberjacks, Egyptian slaves, or people who dig wells into granite with plastic garden spades for a living. Were they so, I would concede. No, the people who say this always wear suits. If your job involves the use of a chair and you actually feel justified in declaring that someone who stands in one place and remains in constant motion and doesn't get weekends has it easier than you, then you are a class-act shit-head.

I say that unapologetically. I say it directly. I'm not joking, and I'm not even being metaphorical. I believe that you actually have a large, steaming pile where your gray matter should be. I believe that when you die, you will die painfully and you will go to a specialized hell in which everything that you touch becomes a sock monkey. Everything that you attempt to wear, everything that you attempt to eat... all sock monkeys as soon as your skin makes contact. Even the air around you will be a constant flow of linen and thread, and you will suffer for all of eternity as you grasp for a breath that never passes your lips while stitched faces with black button eyes will taunt your naked, starved despair.

The "real world" doesn't scare me. Forty hours a week at more than seven dollars an hour with no homework sounds like a vacation as far as I'm concerned. Hell, having a weekend off would be a vacation for me. Maybe I'm wrong, but I've never heard any compelling evidence to the contrary.

Compel me.

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Kill 'em all
Submitted by Mike417 on Thu, 10/28/2004 - 17:22.

Holy shit..and someone told me I "should paint" for a release. I humbly bow before you. You rock.

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They've died a thousand deaths in fantasy.
Submitted by Candall on Thu, 10/28/2004 - 18:13.

Painting is good. Any artistic endeavor is good as long as you can do it on your own terms. When you're told to "express yourself 'X' amount by 'Y' date," it gets stressful.

As for me... I don't rock at all. I'm barely keeping it together right now, but I do appreciate that you said so. Thanks.

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Another name-tagged monkey once again feels your pain.
Submitted by ServiceWithaFak... on Thu, 10/28/2004 - 20:37.

I get that quite a bit too. "How hard can taking food to tables really be?" I'd love to see some of my customers carrying 30+ pound trays of food balanced on one shoulder without spilling everything, making salads, keeping track of drink refills and double-checking orders to make sure nothing is wrong, all while keeping mental notes of what everyone is drinking and where they are in the course of their meals...with a big-ass smile. Hell, let 'em do it in their suits and ties and the women in their prada heels. I'm sure I'd laugh my ass off just watching them TRY to do my job.

The unfortunate thing is that I've got the "no homework" part; the "real world" just has yet to invite me in. Anything is welcome after the hell called work I put myself through now.

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The work chain.
Submitted by Candall on Mon, 11/01/2004 - 15:11.

Your job is definitely one of those which I would call "harder."

Wouldn't it be great if the working world had a natural heirarchy that wasn't controlled by those at the top? Wouldn't it be great if [i]everybody[/i] had to start out with a shit job and work their ways to the top via a controlled system of promotion? The total population of top management would all be in their eighties, and would have been through so much bullshit in their lives that they'd actually feel [i]bad[/i] about instigating worthless policies that restrict their employees' freedom.

Too bad that'll never happen, eh?

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I've said that a thousand times.
Submitted by ServiceWithaFak... on Tue, 11/02/2004 - 03:19.

Unfortunately, most of the people that frequent our places of business have no idea what the "real world" looks like to the majority of the population.

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prada
Submitted by gemoco on Mon, 11/01/2004 - 19:33.

do people who wear prada actually eat in the place you work?

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Oh yes they do.
Submitted by ServiceWithaFak... on Tue, 11/02/2004 - 03:17.

They probably bought it by selling crack. And they order wine they know nothing about, are extremely picky about everything, and act like their shit smells like potpourri. They don't tip worth anything. Welcome to ghettoville, Ohio.

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I go to work in a dress shirt
Submitted by papershuffler on Fri, 10/29/2004 - 02:52.

I go to work in a dress shirt and tie everyday from 8 to 5. I sit in an ergonomic, comfortable chair all day. I don’t work weekends. Still, my job sucks beyond all reason.

I was a cashier at a grocery store in high school. Even though I battle to maintain my sanity at my current job, I will NEVER be a cashier again. Never.

Your suited customer is a moron.

P.S. Just for the record, you’re not too fond of sock monkeys right? :)

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Sock Monkey Mayhem
Submitted by Candall on Mon, 11/01/2004 - 14:49.

I have nothing against sock monkeys as they are, but I'm loathe to think of an existence in which I share their sole company.

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ah... memories...
Submitted by Uhnonomuss on Fri, 10/29/2004 - 08:22.

Once upon a time several years ago, I worked in a grocery store deli. There were always departmental squabbles.

The bakery dept thought they had the hardest job, because they had to be there at some ungodly hour PRIOR to the 6am start of the deli shift.

The meat dept thought we were idiots because we didn't really WORK as hard as they did handling all the big slabs of stuff.

The produce dept always seemed the happiest. All the good stuff IS in the back, trust me.

I guess the point I'm slowly coming to, is that no matter who you are, even in the SAME environment... someone always thinks that they have it worse than anyone else.

What always infuriated me the most, was the idiots who decided that they needed FRESHLY sliced deli meat at 10pm. When we closed. After everything was cleaned and sanitized. They drag their happy asses to the store to demand your services... not only PAST the end of your shift, but in accordance with their twisted plan. The sad part is... if they only knew what happened in the back of the deli... particularly close to 10pm, they might choose the prepackaged meat conveniently located nearby.

Oh... but "it doesn't taste the same". It's meat. In plastic. What do you think the meat I'm slicing is packaged in? Allow me to hum the Jeopardy tune while you figure it out, Einstein. Yeah. Plastic.
Big meat wrapped in plastic, or little meat wrapped in plastic. Nothing about running it through a slicer in front of you is going to make it taste different. You'll pay a nice hefty price for the pleasure of eating it, however.

I think, grocery stores bring out the worst in people... all people. I personally believe it may have something to do with the muzak that is piped in. How many times can you listen to the Carpenters' greatest hits before somebody gets hurt?

I wonder what they played in grocery stores when the Carpenters were famous... wait, were they EVER famous?

I do feel for you, Candall... I truly do.

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Ahh, music.
Submitted by Anonymous on Mon, 11/01/2004 - 14:46.

Oh, what I'd do for The Carpenters. Anything. The radio in my store is set at [i]just[/i] the right volume so that it can't be heard past the front of the registers. As a result, of course, the only thing we cashiers can hear is the constant coming and going of customers and the asinine conversations that follow.

We don't really have a problem with morale amongst ourselves at the particular hell in which I work. Most of us focus our aggressions on the (mis)management and the customers.

Especially the customers. Here's a little story about customer behavior which is almost as annoying as the "deli meat" trick: [i]Every{/i] night... when it's about three minutes before I'm supposed to start counting down my register for the day and go home... some random ugly woman-shaped slug appears at the register with a buggy slammed full of items which include (but are not limited to) forty bags of potato chips, eight cases of soda, two cubes of beer, three cartons of cigarettes, eight [b]thousand[/b] bottles of baby food, and a partridge in a fucking pear tree. I cannot kill enough of these women. Their numbers [i]do not[/i] decrease. It probably has some connection to the amount of baby food they're purchasing.

I'll make it a personal mission to keep trying, though.

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try to upsell more beer and c
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Sat, 11/27/2004 - 22:32.

try to upsell more beer and cigarettes. That should do the trick.

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