Drama
I used to work with two cashiers. For the sake of this article, let’s call those two cashiers Erin and Don.
Erin was a sixteen-year old neurotic mess of a teen. She was approximately 5’5” and she probably tipped the scales at around 160 pounds. This kid didn’t have a spoonful of self-esteem and nothing she did would change that. She was the type of person who got sad and ate, she would get mad and eat, she would chip a fingernail and eat… You get the point. She was not very adept at dealing with the little curveballs that life tends to throw at you. Her mother wasn’t very helpful either. I would sit in my office and watch the mom pick Erin up when her shift was done. The amount of browbeating her mom gave her would send a normal person into fits; she would make comments on the girl’s weight in front of customers, she would punish her daughter for poor grades loudly and out in the open, and she would discuss Erin’s boyfriends or lack of boyfriends in a disgusting manner. Whenever Erin’s shift would end, it would go something like this:
Erin sits down on the bench located outside of the store’s manager’s office. Her mouth is twisted funny as she is nervously chewing the inside of it. Her hands are never still but seem to always be flipping and flopping about in a tense or uneasy manner. She keeps glancing behind herself, out the huge plate glass windows of the store, to see if her mother has pulled the car up.
Suddenly, while Erin is looking over her shoulder, a woman materializes in front of her and she begins to speak. “I see you got a C- on your English paper.” Says the woman in an obnoxious and sneering tone. “I really thought you would do better this time…”
Erin jumps out of her skin. “Mom!” she says breathlessly, “you startled me!”
The mom is uncaring. “We need a few things, let’s go shopping.”
For the next forty-five minutes, you can hear the mom all over the small store. She is letting Erin have it over small and trivial things like leaving a hairbrush out on the bathroom counter or forgetting her pullover at school. The girl takes all of this in stoic silence. It’s as if she knows that if she speaks, the mom will launch into a greater tirade at a higher volume. Finally, their shopping is done. I glance out onto the sales floor and realize that it has taken the mom the whole forty-five minutes to accumulate a roll of paper towels and two loaves of bread in her cart. Someplace in the back of my mind I think that Erin has taken this job just to escape her mother’s continual nagging, but the mom is just as smart and brings the nagging to the job…
They are in line now and the mother is talking to their cashier about some guy that both the cashier and Erin know.
“Oh yes,” the mom offers, “Erin thinks that boy is kinda cute…”
You can see Erin visibly turning purple. This sort of back and forth between the mother and the daughter goes on until they get into the car and pull out of the parking lot.
I don’t want you to think that Erin is a hero here. She isn’t. She is just as bad as her mom (when her mother isn’t around), and she takes great pride in setting up embarrassing situations for my other workers, going so far as to actually involve the police in one of her attention grabbing schemes. That is where Don comes in.
Don is a forty-year old single guy with the types of problems that would keep a guy like that single. He doesn’t take care of his appearance, he tends to wear clothes that are not only unfashionable, but several sizes too small, he has an odor about him that suggests he sits around fires a lot, and he talks to people too loudly—punctuating his sentences with a very annoying laugh. This is just the tip of the iceberg with Don. A typical interaction with Don would go something like this:
The store loudspeaker booms out: “Don, please come to the manager’s office.”
Don waddles up slowly. He knows he has done something wrong, so the inevitable can be held off if he takes five minutes to walk twenty feet, adjusting his “highwater” pants several times as he walks. Finally, he enters the office.
“Yeah,” he says, scratching at the three-day old stubble on his neck and chin.
“Don, we had a complaint from a regular customer about the way you were talking while you were ringing up their groceries. Seems they didn’t want to hear about your Star Trek models or the dirty scenes in the movies you have watched recently…”
This sort of thing is regular. Don is embarrassing to all his customers. If he can’t visually harass you, he will do so with his body odor or his constantly annoying voice. When he is verbally reminded of his duties, he tends to become dramatic. His arms wave wildly and his voice shifts up at least three octaves. Also, when he is talking to the managers at the store, he hangs half way in the office and halfway out of the office, making sure that anybody nearby on the sales floor can see and hear his theatrics.
“Who was it?” he demands, trying to make us believe that he will work on his problem as far as that one customer is concerned, but we all know it is because he will use the information to adjust his level of irritation towards the customer in question.
“That doesn’t really matter Don, what we want to discuss here is your overall performance. The complaint was only what tipped us off. We then looked over your files for the last month. There are some things we need to change here…”
You can actually see Don shutting down one engine and firing up another. He is shifting from “pay attention” mode to “get really loud and awkward” mode. In my experiences with this character, he uses this mode as self-defense. He begins swinging his arms around and talking in that high screech he uses.
If you didn’t know this already, Don has problems interacting with the female sex. He is constantly being warned by the management staff about the way he treats his fellow female employees and how his conversations with them almost always have sexual overtones. This is where the drama portion comes into this article.
Erin and Don were on neighboring registers for most of an eight-hour shift. Their back and forth chitchat was mostly harmless, but as the day got later, Don began to shift his conversation over to “the gross zone.”
I like to work on the floor of the store I am working in. When things get busy, you can find me in the thick of it, talking to customers, helping them out to the car with their purchases, and giving them directions to find certain items. On the day the drama occurred, I was bagging groceries on the front-end; I could hear Don’s gross talk becoming more and more suggestive. I mentioned this to him and for a while he toned down his loud voice. As soon as my back was turned he began right where he had left off.
From what I read later in the police report, he was saying things about Erin’s backside, her boobs, and the way she moved under her store uniform. While this began as quick little quips that made Erin giggle, the comments soon became creepy and the young girl was bothered by what was being said. Of course, she didn’t handle the problem like a normal person; she handled it like a six-year old.
After one certain comment from Don, Erin turned to him holding a cucumber aloft and in a voice that was much louder than the store’s P.A. system she shouted “Shut the fuck up!”
The front end, normally loud with the sounds of cash registers, chatting people, and the clash of carts became dead silent. This was followed by the sound of Erin crawling over her conveyor belt and bringing the cucumber down squarely on Don’s head. The two began to tussle vigorously and it took three other workers and me to separate them. I got Don away from her and put him as far away from her as I could in the rear of the store in the break room. I put Erin, along with two female employees, in the store office. As I left her, she was crying and wildly dialing her cell phone; calling her mother.
Within minutes, the police arrived (I didn’t call them) and so did Erin’s hysterical mother. She stormed passed me and into the manager’s office. “Where is he? Did he hurt you? Let me talk to the police!”
After a long and tedious session of retelling their stories, the two offenders were allowed to go home. Later that week, Erin’s mother filed a restraining order against Don and he eventually had to quit his job to avoid being arrested every time she worked alongside him. No charges were ever filed against the girl, even though she had been the one who had attacked Don. Several customers wrote statements and most of them agreed that she had acted like an idiot. Some even suggested a good psychologist. Over the next few weeks, several hateful and hurtful rumors began to spread about both of them. Mostly started by each of them and passed through people at work.
Thought the hate was powerful between the two, it quickly passed as new hires, who couldn’t care less about their drama, began to show up, or old workers found new gossip to chat about. That is one of the wonderful things about the grocery industry…there is always some new drama about to unfold.
Fast-forward two years. Erin has graduated from high school and she is still living with her mother. I have not seen Don during the two years, but some of his co-workers have. They speak of him still being the same annoying guy who now has a job at a tire outlet. He sells tires and tells his customers about the dirty parts in the movies he has recently enjoyed. One can only imagine what sort of activities he partakes in while watching these movies…
Erin has a car now. She had been saving up her paychecks to purchase an old beater and she now drives herself to work. I think she did this to keep her mother out of the store, not to go out on driving dates or to car-pool her friends around on a Friday night. The car needs new tires; I think you know where this is going.
I thought I did too. It turns out we both, you and I, had this all wrong. Erin and Don are married now. She went to the store where he sold tires, fully knowing he did so there. No attacks, no dirty comments. The whole transaction was done in a courteous and almost cuddly manner.
Huh? Yeah, it’s really weird. Seems that after the incident at the store, the two began dating. Why? I don’t know. But I do know (from talking to others about it) that Erin began sneaking out of her house late at night so she could be with Don. After several months of this, Erin’s mother found out. Of course she was furious at first, but then she either realized that Erin probably didn’t have much chance to find somebody, or she got a hold of one of Don’s tire-store paycheck stubs. She rapidly calmed down and even granted Don some daylight visitation. Once Erin turned 18, the talk rapidly switched over from dates to marriage.
The last time I saw the two, they were perched on a bench in front of a Wal-Mart, eating ice cream and sharing it with their two-year old toddler. They both greeted me as I walked by. I looked over and did not realize who it was I was talking to at first, I couldn’t recognize Don under his huge blonde beard, and Erin had probably put on an extra hundred pounds since I had seen her last. Realizing my peril, I made some quick chat and got the hell out of there as if crazy rubs off.
I have to end this article by saying that I will never figure out human beings.
