blow down the house

The big, bad wolf comes tomorrow. We'll call her J. She's the district (retail) manager for RH's both near and far. What this means is, we'll have to iron our aprons (I do anyway), and pretty much prance around like robots until she shows up. Then, we smile until our faces crack, until our eyes turn back in our heads.

She's not that bad. But T, our retail manager, gets all jittery before J comes, jittery like she's skipped a day's worth of coffee, jittery like she needs crack.

"T," I say in my best, caring voice. "You're shaking."

T turns to me and her eyes bug out. "J's COMING TOMORROW."

"Yes, but you're shaking."

"WE COULD ALL LOSE OUR JOBS."

"Are you cold? Want me to get you a dusty, clearance corner shawl to wear? That might help with the chills."

"SHE'S COMING AND...WHY IS THAT BUTTERFLY DISPLAY CROOKED? FIX IT! AND WE NEED THOSE CLOTHES STRAIGHT ON THE HANGERS! AND I'M HUNGRY! FOOOOOD!" She roars and barks and moans, and I stand there patiently, waiting until she calms down. Then I say:

"So...you should probably eat some chocolate cake and then when your blood sugar levels spike back up, we'll continue this lovely conversation."

Ha. I don't say that. But she doesn't listen when she's jittery. She just flaps her gums and runs around like a huntman without a horse.

J is the head honcho and whatever spews from her mouth, we all get to hear about it the following day from T. J says we need this display to move here, so move it! J says we look scraggly and haggard in our uniforms, so perk up! J says...

And then we feed T some chocolate cake and all is better. It's really as simple as that. If your manager can be manipulated with food, take full advantage. The rants are less time-consuming and futile.

Needless to say, I'll bring a brownie with me tomorrow. Just in case.

TMI

The thing about working in a small enclosed environment is that you learn, very quickly, about everyone's lives. Whether you want to or not, you learn about so-and-so's divorce and how she's been dating around ever since, but vows to never marry again. You learn about child custody battles and how the court is a no-good-stinking-rotten-son-of-a-gun. You learn that the small crush you had on the host when you first started is invalid because he's actually a minor. So you now avert your eyes everytime he walks into work.

You tend to learn a whole lot about things you never wanted to know.

This past Thursday, I lost all respect for my manager, T. I mean, the respect that I lost was a very thin line to begin with..but regardless, there's none left after this past truck day. We three retail girls, and T, always unload the truck every Thursday morning. We crank up the music in the stock room and belt out lyrics to trashy songs just loud enough that we might be heard by the outside shopping world. We don't care.

But then, as we are stacking boxes higher than most of us can reach and become swiftly enclosed in cardboard squares, as we work our box cutters through tape, secrets come out.

T (as always) starts the conversation by asking us uncomfortably personal questions. She is our manager and seems to be interested only in hearing us spill our guts until we are left wracked and heaving from personal discomfort. The one woman, N, has no problem telling us about how she and her second husband have this agreement called a "Hall Pass". Am I the only one on the planet who does not know what this means? Or maybe it's just a married couple's term? T is all over it.

Apparently, if a couple agrees on a hall pass, they are allowing each of them to sleep with one person without the other one knowing about it. So...N informed us about her little one night pass and how her husband knows nothing about it. T asked if N's husband has used his pass yet. N replies that she doesn't want to know anything about it.

T then goes on to describe what she would do to this 23 year old she's been "crushing on" if her husband would allow her a hall pass.

Okay, cougar.

Obviously, the users of these passes let their morals fly out the window. N just says that she gets bored with her husband after a while.

I try not to act shocked. As I cut through my stash of boxes, my cheeks burn and I know I'm being eerily silent. T will want me to add to the conversation. I will myself to keep silent because who knows what will come spewing out this time? The situation is already uncomfortable enough without me adding my awkward two-cents to a subject I don't know (and don't want) to know anything about.

So I do what I do. I avert my eyes, will my cheeks to stop burning (for some inexplicable reason?), and re-direct the conversation.

"So, J, are we going to eat that cake before the fruit flies get it, or what?"

YES. SAVED BY T's BIRTHDAY! Someone made her a cake that morning. Not only did I get to lean on the cake for an excuse to exit complete awkwardness, but I also got to SHOVE MY MOUTH FULL OF IT!

Saved by food, once again.

The Lying Game

Although I rarely get to engage in intellectual conversations with guests or co-workers while working on the retail floor, I do get to engage in selling tactics that allow my creative juices to flow. Namely, lying.

It's simple. At least that's what T says. Aeriale, she says with a straight face, you're only telling white lies. I mean, they don't even count as lies. And then she goes on to tell me about how her husband cheated on her last week. She's one-of-a-kind, that T.

So, I try my hand at it and find that it comes too easily for comfort. I start small. I walk over to the lady with the spit-bubble boy on her hip as she browses the nostalgic lotions and creams. Smiling wide, I tell her that my grandma used to use this stuff as a kid (truth), and that she comes into RH all the time to see what's new because she swears by her childhood pain liniment and doesn't use new age meds at all! So, see, this stuff really works!

The woman smiles back and burps the baby that has moved up her shoulder and picks up some white cream that, supposedly, my grandmother still uses because she's basically a hippie who has sworn off modern medicine.

Start small, lie big.

T watches the whole shindig and gives me a Barbie -nod. I mean, I'm no liar, but I am a fiction writer...which is kind of the same thing, you know? Speaking lies for selling tactics versus writing lies for entertainment. Close enough.

After the first couple of lies, it seems that every encounter calls for an elaborate story about how my own mother grew up on a farm in Kentucky, shooting wild game with a bow and arrow, growing her own asparagus and winning first place in the annual Baskerville County Asparagus Festival! Where, you ask, is Baskerville, KY? Well, how about I get you a basket to fill up with crap you don't need and don't want, and I'll tell you about the time my grandfather blew up a dog just to feed the family for three days!

Half the guests at RH think my family is the most hillbilly, most fascinating unit since the creepy people down the road got caught for filming porn in their place of employment. The other half of the RH guests are buying nostalgic candy and cutesy salt and pepper shakers and sock monkeys for kids they don't have because of the word vomit that keeps coming out of my mouth.

Let's be realistic here, though. Sales aren't that good. And I'm not that good of a liar. People just believe anything. Honestly.

And it's kind of fun to tell people about the time myself and two buddies hitchhiked our way out of the Egyptian desert with a van full of Pakistanis and a greasy-haired monkey of a driver with bleeding hands and a wish for all of us to come back to his hut and be concubines.

TRUE STORY.

Nudity.

Remember being little and wanting to dress up as a cowboy or princess or maybe you were the kind of kid who thought clothes were overrated and preferred running around naked? I was the latter, of course. Except I did not like to go barefoot. I always had to have shoes on, always. I was not the kind of kid who liked to dress up.

Princess dresses were for girls, and I was not a girl - I was a TOMBOY. I liked to play hard outside and climb trees in the woods and ride my bike until the sun went down. This, I think, is a lost kind of childhood. Today's kids are glued to phones and computers and game systems. It's just sad.

But I digress. I don't like to dress up. Knowing this, I applied for my retail position at RH because I knew it meant stocking shelves, and unloading the truck, and greeting guests with a plastered smile for long periods of time. Manageable stuff. Until S told us, one fine day, that if we were truly going to make our sales quota every day, we should probably WEAR THE CLOTHES WE SELL AROUND THE STORE.

Wait, this is a joke right? A joke, haha? Um.

So, I did what every good employee should do and I listened to my manager EVEN THOUGH SHE HAD NO IDEA WHAT SHE WAS TALKING ABOUT. She told me to wear the heavy, ugly shawls around the store and pretend I was a model.

Uh, S, SINCE WHEN DID WE ALL SIGN UP TO BE MODELS? All I want to do is ask people how their food was and leave them in peace. I don't want to prance or waltz around the store wearing a heavy, gaudy shawl that DRAGS ON THE FLOOR SINCE I'M SHORT. I don't think people will buy shawls from a girl who drags the shawls around the store and collects dustballs. It's just unsanitary. We also wore scarves and hats, as if snow were blowing in from the air vents. One minute I was cold, the next I was having a mid-life crisis and hot flashes. Good grief.

The kicker, though, was what we had to wear recently. Our new anal manager, T, decided we would all look cute if we traded our brown name-ridden aprons, for JUNE CLEAVER HOUSEWIFE APRONS, while, of course, we sampled apple crisp and apple butter to increasingly hungry guests. There are several issues I have with wearing these 1950s flowery things.

First of all, I don't want to be seen as or referred to as a HOUSEWIFE. If you know me at all, you know that this term is slightly more offending then being called a MOTHER. I've just barely come to terms with the fact that I drive a SOCCER MOM VAN. Second of all, these aprons are ugly. I would rather wear my normal brown and try to blend in with the crowd. Third of all, have I mentioned they are housewife-y?

Needless to say, I think we could really meet our daily merchandise quota if we all walked around naked. I'm going to drop this idea into the suggestions box, see what happens at the next meeting.

Babies.

Where there are toys, there will be children. And where there are toys and children, there will be a perpetual mess. You're thinking, way to state the obvious, Aeriale. You sure are a smart cookie! Yes, I know. But I just had to throw that out there, in case you don't go into stores. Or go into kid sections. Or whatever.

Training is over. The training managers have all gone back to their respective southern states to eat grits and gush over the mountains and rain of Pennsylvania. We are stuck with the district managers, and a few adrift managers who like to come and go as they please. The retail manager we had until the end of December was certainly one to gush over. She liked to keep the stockroom a complete and utter mess, serenade us with Adele late at night, and her black hair always looked windblown, like she just waltzed out of a tornado every morning. We'll call her S.

S played favorites, like many tornado-y managers like to do. She would keep us in our respective zones (1, 2, or 3) and even though she wore bright red heels to work every day, she managed to hawkeye us without our knowing. She was a sneaky one, that S.

One day, S decides to keep me in the toy section of our store. I may have mentioned that I liked playing with slinkies...or driving the stunt RC car, on occasion. I never mentioned that I liked kids. But hey, you do what you have to do sometimes. I played along.

It was fun for a week, playing with slinkies and letting the hairy jumbo spider loose so I could scare little children (wahaha!), and driving the RC car around my section as if I raced for NASCAR. For a week, it was fun. And then it wasn't anymore. Kids whine. They beg and whine and drool and scream. And there was nothing I could do about it but smile politely at them and their parents and act as if I'm on Cloud 9 back in my toy section.

My favorite part was when the parents assumed that I liked their children. Moms think that all people should like their children. It must be innate or something. So, instead of shoving a bottle or pacifier in their child's wailing mouth, they would shove their child in my face. I can't run away. I can't grimace. All I can do is puff up my cheeks and pretend that I like making obscure faces at their baby.

Oh yes. I, Aeriale, would entertain their drooling, bald thing while the parents decided to argue over whether or not the blue or green outfit would look better on Baby Drool. Listen, I wanted to tell the parents, your baby is kind of gross. The drool is dripping on your hand and down to the floor and you don't even notice. Really? Is the outfit argument even necessary? Your baby doesn't care about the outfit and I don't particularly care about your baby, and this puffing out my cheeks thing needs to stop.

There are also those times when I have the RC car out on the floor and show the kids how to make it spin and flip and whatnot. The best part is when bratty 8 year olds misbehave in front of their parents and the parents don't do anything about it. This one kid, in particular, didn't bother to listen to my instructions on how to control the RC car in a store setting, and he quickly became out of control. The car smashed into elderly ladies' ankles, and into our rocky, breakable displays, and up the sides of my legs. His mom stood by and laughed. LAUGHED. For fifteen minutes.

Uh, Lady with Bratty Child, I think you need to leave the store and then spank your kid who is not listening to me or you or anyone's complaints. Look, he just rammed the car into a wheelchair. Now he is kicking the RC car. So....I'm going to go ahead and take the remote control and take the car to the cash register where it can be his to break and run up your ankles for eternity.

Oh, the hostility! Finally, S came to her senses and switched me from the toy section to the section where I had to model clothing for our guests...which, of course, is a story of it's own.

Training Haze

Now let's get one thing straight, before I go any further. Cashiers do not equal Retail Employees. Cashiers manage all things cash register. Retail people do everything else. We are two VERY separate sections in one teensy store. We even have two separate managers...and our Retail Manager is freakin' crazy. More about her later.

I want to tell you about the vigorous one month training all of us brand spankin' new employees had to endure before RH opened it's doors. Hired, check. Fill out paperwork, check. Sit through hours of low-quality videos about situations we'll all be dealing with in a month, checkcheckcheck. Half the month was about getting to know each other, and getting to know our training managers.

Most of the trainers came from the South. I'm talking Texas, Tennessee, Louisana, Arkansas...they all had thick accents and enjoyed grits and called us "sugar" and "baby". They were (some of them..) the kind of people that you might enjoy hugging. If you liked hugging people.

Before we could train, however, we unloaded the trucks. I'm talking two weeks worth of trucks. A whole store's worth of merchandise that needed to be set up in an orderly fashion before we opened our doors at the end of the month. We (cash and retail) performed the duties of unloading the merchandise off the truck (most in boxes taller than I stand), opening the stuff, and setting the store up for business. Talk about manual labor at its finest. I set up and decorated more Christmas trees than I've decorated in the last seven years total. I drove home every night wearing suits of glitter and dust and smelling like biscuits and gravy. It was not my best look.

After we managed to set the store up per our display pictures, we started wearing our uniforms to work. In light of this, the managers actually made us lift up our pant legs to make sure we were wearing the proper socks. One day during training, a server actually got sent home because her socks did not match her shirt or pants. They told me to take out a set of my earrings. I did not. I made sure to wear my ponytail low so it could cover my ears the next day. I'm a rebel.

Each section of the restaraunt and retail had its own trainer; cash trainer, cook trainer, retail trainer, server trainer...you get the idea. We all trained separately and learned things according to our sections.

Retail trainers huddled us close together in little kumbaya circles and breezed through facts until our feet started to break out in blisters. Between Display 1 and Display 2, there must be precisely 36 inches of room to accomodate wheelchairs. FIFO with food - First in, First out - make sure the later dates get pushed to the back of the shelf, and the earlier dates pushed forward. Always wear a smile - it doesn't matter if your mother died yesterday, you wear that smile and you wear it convincingly. Or else.

They gave us acronyms and quizzed us on them daily. UTAH. STARS. Something else that I cannot remember because I'm a bad retail employee. We make sure the guest (not be be confused with customer) always comes first. We make sure the bathrooms are always clean. We make sure our demos are always turned on and their batteries are always on full charge.

We are RETAIL, hear us ROAR. LOUDLY. WITH A SMILE ON OUR FACE.

My least favorite part of the training was the role-playing. The trainers gave the cashiers cue cards and we retail ladies had to deal with their crap. Some of them were grumpy guests with a chip on their shoulder. Some of them were just looking to eat and not shop. Some of them were really bad actors, and mostly, I just laughed. It's what I do best in any situation, at any given time. Laugh. The cash actors would ask where they could find a gift for their grandpa. I laughed. They brushed me off and I laughed. I laughed until everyone else was laughing, too.

I'm pretty sure the trainers were thinking Well, the girl can't make a sale to save her life, but when she laughs, it'll set things right. Maybe we'll keep her, make her tell jokes or something. We'll stick her back in the toys every day, make those kids laugh.

And boy do I love kids. But that's another blog post.

Glitch

This began, not because I wanted it to, but because I had bills to pay. Money was leaking from my account faster than the lemonade pitcher sweats in June. Something had to be done. And that something consisted of walking into my current place of employment (which I will never name on this blog, that is, until I can find employment elsewhere..and then maybe I will BOLD and Italicize and Underline this place of employment to my heart's content but for now, I will refer to this as RH, or Retail Heaven), and applying for this job.

This is not to be confused with CH, or Cedar Hell, where I was employed last summer. We will never confuse this with that. This is Heaven we are talking about, after all. Stocking and Smiling and Acting Passive-Aggressive, when need be.

RH was a glitch in my plan. I was supposed to be at Grad School, somewhere in Montana or Oregon, hunched over Camus and critiquing other student's essays on living abroad and loving it. I was supposed to be mingling over wine and chai, under streetlamps and in cafes and in the darkest of bars on the coldest of nights.

Ha. Just kidding. That wasn't really where I was supposed to be. Nobody likes the darkest of bars, anyway. What I meant to say was this: I graduated with my BFA in Creative Writing, and now what?

It took two months of lounging on my front porch reading the lazy summer away, and three months of actually applying to jobs that I thought were close to my field (writing, editing...or something like that?), and being turned down by every single one of them. It took five months total for me to realize that college teaches nothing about what to do when there are no jobs in your field, or Grad School in your future. College didn't prepare me for the heartache and the restlessness and family members who figured I was wasting my higher education (and life) by holing up in my room, in my comfiest PJ's, on a Friday night, and reading novel after novel about the life I wish I had.

But no! No! Lo and behold, I was not wasting my life away, accusing family members! I was preparing myself for the real world. I was preparing myself for living the life of an employee of retail...at least until something else came up. Or I came upon something else.

I began this job on October 6th, but there is something unique about the situation...first of all, I work in the retail part of a restaraunt, and second of all, it is brand new to our area. So I went through training with everybody else. I went through a month's worth of sweaty labor and tormenting acronyms that begged to be memorized, and a newfound light-heartedness that crept up when I least expected it. Ha, Working World! Watch Out! I can do this! I can work and make money with the best of them! In retail! Not even in my field!

I can be a SALES PERSON!

This, at least, was my mantra during that one month of vigorous training. And it partly worked (mostly on days when I wasn't quite awake and didn't fully grasp that I NOW HAVE A JOB, YO!)...mostly on days when we didn't have to role play with the cashiers.

This blog is for my personal entertainment only. I must relay this information without even cracking a smile. Because one day, I will look back from my personal library, on the 28th floor, and cackle at the stories I will have shared here about the days when I, Aeriale, was a SALES PERSON. It's quite laughable. And, as always, there will be more to come.