014.) Burnt Popcorn and Lost Children

I should have known that my Saturday was going to be insert proper adjective here when I experienced something very strange the night before (Did she say, "... the night before?" Yes, I did. Now hold on a minute).

All of my life I have been prone to paranormal events. I know that sounds kooky, like I've been experimenting a wee bit too intensely with brain-altering chemicals or that I'm possessed by Satan - but it's true that I am a lightening rod for queer happenings. I won't go into great detail about these happenings because this entry will be quite long enough, but I will say that I've had premonitions ranging from deep dark things that happened an hour after dreaming this deep dark thing, to mundane and silly things that take anywhere from a week to a month to occur. I've seen ghosts or dead people or whatever term you like. I've had out-of-body experiences when I was an infant (my first memory, actually) and witnesses have confirmed my telling of the event (though they never saw me floating outside my body, they have been able to corroborate the details of the room and the lousy crow which cawed outside of the nursery window, causing me to wake up screaming).

I've also had an entire month of my life revolve around Alaska. The state of Alaska which I've never been, in crossword puzzles and word searches and fill-ins. People who lived in/were born in/visited. On quarters and key chains, bumper stickers and licenses plates, credit cars and hand bags, tattoos and t-shirts. On television documentaries and in books. Bric-a-brac of all manner and beyond. Telephone calls. Everything that could have possibly come up Alaska did. For a month, and then it just stopped. This was not done intentionally and it certainly wasn't an imbalance in my brain, for all of what came about was tangible evidence. Since this event - given the knowledge that Alaska is where my hero died and most of the kooky stuff in my life has happened after 1992, when I was five - I have taken to calling whatever supernatural force is behind these events - Chris. I know it's not actually a dead man doing all of this, but for my own comfort...

Anyway, back to the main thought.

At 9.15PM Friday night (so 10 July), while I was watching the 20/20 General Motors: From Dream to Downfall special, this force I call Chris leaned over the side of my bed and forcefully clapped his hands above my right ear.

Now, this sound could be easily explained away as an object in my bedroom breaking or falling. But upon investigation I found nothing out of the ordinary. Absolutely nothing had broken or fallen or otherwise altered its normal state. Even the closet, on the other side of the wall from where the noise originated, held no answers. The only thing that could have made such an impressive and clean CLAP! (apart from hands) was the snapping of the long, bowing wooden rod in the closet holding all of my dresses (even then that wouldn't be so much a CLAP! but a SNAP!). That rod was still resisting gravity, as was the other ity-bity rod which cuts my closet in half and prevents me from any true use of the closet. The shelves were still in place, as were the items I had placed upon them.

Maybe the sound was from elsewhere in the house? No, it wasn't. Nothing was out of the ordinary in any other room.

Maybe the sound was from outside? After all, I live on the second floor of a 200-year-old duplex and sound carries. The downstairs neighbors were all away. The old woman to the left (or facing my bedroom) is quieter than a church mouse and sometimes I forget that anyone even lives in that house. The people on the right, for that matter in the entire alley, are hardworking people who don't make a lot of noise. Given the location of the noise, the sound could not have been a backfiring car on the main road at the front of the house - that and the sound was a hand clap.

So, yes, when I went to work yesterday in the first of our two buildings I should have known it was going to be interesting.

• Whoever switched on the breakers missed the one for our radio corner. (silly thing to list, but it was a precursor for the things to come)

• Our regular volunteer, who is usually very good with these things (and seemed quite difficult that day, actually), never plugged in the coffee maker. Of course it had to be me, the woman who doesn't drink coffee, who had to empty the steaming hot drink into the thermos to place out on the "FREE COFFEE" table by the shopping carts. I came very close to scalding the skin clean off my hand.

• The popcorn machine and I are not on the best of terms. Typically, the thing just breaks down on me and sprays hot oil and unpopped kernels everywhere. Not this day. This day the first batch of popcorn I make burnt to a blackened crisp because I'm the one who didn't flick the little switch marked "TURN".
  

• When the business got new credit card machines last Monday (I think it was), not only did the company providing the service not activate the debit card option (inciting riots from the elderly who don't seem to realize that the only difference between credit and debit, apart from the wording, is a pin number) - the company also neglected to provide us tape for the machines. Not knowing this at the time, I pulled out a paper roll from a drawer (thankfully the same length) and plopped it into the machine. Alas, the girth was too great. I had to stand there like an idiot, pulling at the tape and collecting yards (I do mean yards) of paper in efforts of making the roll fit into the machine. Seeing all that wasted money in the trash bin, I gave up and assumed that the credit machine would still work even though the tape compartment didn't close. Having myself a temperamental printer/scanner/copier/fax machine at home, I should have realized just how wrong I was.

A man came up to the register with a furniture tag ("large table") from one of our out buildings. He wanted to pay with his credit card. So there I was, swiping the credit card through a machine that beeped at me: "NO PAPER YOU FOOL". Naturally, I yelled at the machine that I just put paper in. So I pulled out another yard or two and finally the compartment closed, though I had no idea whether the transaction went through and am I going to have to charge this guy $10.56 twice? Thankfully enough, the transaction did go through and all I had to do was press a few dozen buttons in order to reprint the receipts.

• We have two smokers stands out front, chained to the metal railings which extend like tentacles from our glass-enclosed atrium. Normally no one gives these any thought (sometimes I think they're even neglected a cleaning). This day was not normal, however, so of course the one I can see through the picture window behind the register, the one that leans so drunkenly, started to billow with smoke. Whoever had last used it, discarded their half-smoked cigarette without properly snuffing it. I had grand visions of the thing blowing up (highly unlikely) and careening like a rocket through the air, possibly taking out a very large bird and a wolverine on its way back to earth.

• Being summertime, the store gets a lot of traffic from the migrant workers. I do like the migrant workers and find 99.9% of them to be stand-up individuals, but there's this one family (and white and purple and green people do it too) notorious for tearing off price tags in order to get things for less. Like: a three piece, brand spanking new (though without the store tags) infant boys outfit - onesie, blue blankie and a mesh bag with a hat, all connected with matching blue ribbon and a silken hanger. I priced that outfit at 6 - 8 dollars. Maybe even 12. The eldest member of this family handed me a tag (completely intact, indicating that it did not fall from the plastic, thorny barb I had used on the outfit because the only way that tag could have come off is if it was torn), a tag that said "2 piece, boys, 2.50". No. No, no, no. Suck dirt and die, lady. Switching prices is stealing.

• Anorexics tend to make me feel ill. Large people I don't really have a problem with, but the chicks who are unnaturally thin sicken me. I myself am tall and slender. I'm not a size zero (nor do I want to be, thank you, I like having breasts and an ass) but I'm thin enough and have had friends who were thin or thinner; I'd like to think I know natural thinness. So when a mother comes in with her two daughters, one of whom are as thin as the mother, with jeans on and a hooker-esque tank top - allowing me to count every single one of her vertebrae - I feel nauseous. When an aging Baby Boomer comes into the store literally all lines and angles, I can't help but contort my face with disgust. And when, this day, a daughter came into the store with her mother and they came to the register - the mother a bit above average height, pleasantly doughy, and the daughter my height but with a sunken face and bones sticking out all over the place and clothes no bigger than a child's 10 and the tell-tale white hair beginning to sprout... I second guessed taking my lunch.

I realize that these people and people like them have a mental disorder and I feel for them, really I do. But as a child I watched my father being eaten away by cancer. Seeing walking skeletons reminds me on a primal, mostly unconscious level of my cancer plagued father.

• A tween to early teen boy lost his mother, or his mother lost him. Such a handsome kid, too, and seeing him running about the store and then the parking lot with his father/uncle/random stranger yelling for his mother in both English and Spanish with that look of torture on his face was saddening. Luckily, after asking him twice, he gave me his mother's name. A quick call and she was found. Madre had simply gone to the other building without telling her son. Or maybe, being 13-ish, he hadn't really paying attention to what was going on around him.

• The only good thing, really: I met a woman who finally understood my left arm. She said, and I quote, "Ah, yes. Robinson Jeffers."
  

004.) At Least No One Peed in the Dressing Room - Again.

Let it be known to all that I do like my job. I like my job very much, in fact, so it does not bother me at all to find myself on register duty on a Saturday - not in the latter of our two buildings, however, but the former.

The first store where I cannot listen to my own music (however "old folk friendly" it has to be) but must listen to B93.3 (and while, yes, they do play U2 and Queen and... they also won't shut up about Michael Jackson - and while, yes, it might or might not be a shame that he's gone, he also molested little children (got away with it because of his name) and did I-don't-want-to-know-what with/to his "biological" children, and there are other important people who have died or are dying that deserve a tiny, passive mention). The first store where there really isn't a whole lot to do other than organize the jewelry wall, an impossible feat and yet I try so hard and surely that is the definition of madness. The first store, with its counter too short and the popcorn machine which works in fits and spurts. The first store, where customers neither shut off the light to the bathroom nor wash their hands (because there's very little toweling in the trash can for the amount of people who go in and out of that restroom).

At least I don't have to deal with certain coworkers complaining about certain other coworkers, right?

Or the young teenager who does nothing to hide the long stares he gives me from his spot on the floor by the videos (whose fancy is adorable, but I really don't want to have to procure a Rita Hayworth poster and a rock hammer)? That polite white boy with the syntax of 50 Cent, who for once was not bound to his "Pops" and the confines of the second building and its video tapes? Yeah. He stopped by with two of his friends (and how I would love a rich, silken complexion such as theirs). All three of them were dressed nicely, as if they were on their way to work at a country club golf course. Whatever they were dressed for, Blondie was wearing too strong an aftershave.

Most assuredly, in this first building I don't have to deal with the exceedingly creepy and off-centre gentlemen who buys things he doesn't take home (there are still things of his sitting out on the lawn more than a month after he bought them), the exceedingly creepy and off-centre gentlemen who repeatedly mispronounces my name and once asked me out for ice cream - and here I quote - "Boy, you look interesting! I'd love to escort you down to - " [a place I've never heard of] " - for ice cream." The man is a least sixty-five. I thought he was joking. He was not.

Back to my original train of thought:

It doesn't really matter where I am because the difficult people always find me. They hunt me down like a wounded gazelle. They fly to me like moths to a flame. No. They orbit around me in wondrous arcs like planets to the Sun.

These difficult people come barging into the store before we are open, as if they own the place or are royalty or are so hated by the rest of humanity that they must pull stunts like these in order to save themselves from a lynching (in which case, why don't they order things on-line? It works well for those afraid of the "market", those few who would not show up for the highly anticipated lynching of these hated eager beavers even if they were promised money, and a lot of it).

These difficult people complain about the prices of everything. No matter how cheap something is and therefor how utterly stupid they'll sound they will always try to talk the price down, apparently thinking that they're at a tag sale and not a place of business. Seriously, do they do this at Kohl's?

These difficult people will stand in the line and sigh dramatically if things aren't moving quickly enough - then they'll come back later on with their carts loaded to heaping, demanding that each item be placed in a certain bag because they obviously don't have the time or patience to do all of that themselves when they get home.

These difficult people saunter into the store five minutes to closing - "Oh, I'll be quick!" - and take their sweet, sweet time. Even when we shut the lights off, even when we make a few hundred closing announcements, even when we explain to them that we really need to be closing down and, yes, we do mind if they use the dressing room - even when... they shop. The difficult difficult people don't buy a thing; they're waiting around until we all leave so that they can break into the building and take what they want (and thankfully Mullet Man doesn't stop by anymore, not since we installed that fiendishly simple latch on his beloved breached door).

Most customers are good people, though. They have their moments, but they're good.

These aforementioned moments typically involve my tattoos - because, obviously, I am a walking art exhibit. My tattoos are, of course, not my own but the world's. Please, by all means, gawk and comment. Please, poke and prod and ask questions about what they mean - as if they are meant for you, as if they hold significance for you. What am I but the canvas they are painted on?

A lot of people nicely ask what my left arm says, or what the banner on my right arm reads, or what's going on with my right upper arm. Mainly it's the text on my left arm. Usually always it's the text on my left arm, and when I read the tattoo aloud to these curious people they look at me as if I've just sprouted a second head. They don't get it.

A few people will yell, "Stop moving! I'm trying to read your arm!" (in a nasty tone of voice, as if I've affronted them somehow by, I don't know, doing my job and ringing up their items). These people don't so much look at me as a sideshow freak with two heads, but merely blink.

I can hear the cogs turning in their heads. I can see their thought, each individual word shooting up into the air like blooming fireworks. They do not think, "I just accosted you for this thing which I do not understand? I'm so sorry!" but instead, "I just took an extra minute out of my life for that? What the hell is all that supposed to mean, huh? I don't read. I wouldn't know that this came from a poem even if Robinson Jeffers himself crawled out of the grave and bit me in the ass."

Of course, they only smile and tell me "How nice."

Fewer people still simply grab me.

I'll be handing them back their change and one beefy hand will come flying toward me as they grab my wrist. With quite a bit of force they'll do this, grab me and pull me forward so that they can read my arm whilst also taking my blood pressure (for they haven't at all relaxed their grip).

It never fails that the grabbers will then sneer and say something along the lines of, "That stuff don't wash off, honey."

Here I reply by feigning shock. "Well, at least the coroner will have something to look at," I say because I cannot spit. I cannot maim or yell or beat. I cannot say "Suck dirt and die", though I want to so badly.




At least no one peed in the dressing room - again.

I mean that seriously, and if you are sensitive to this breed of things here is where you might want to stop reading.

Once upon a time, the restroom in the front building was not in working order. Not having the strength of bladder to walk the short way to the next available bathroom, a customer grabbed a small wooden barrel from our eternal Christmas display and somehow sneaked into an open dressing room with this small wooden barrel. In this unlocked dressing room, the customer urinated into the barrel.

How this individual was able to do this, pee into a wooden barrel in a small dressing room with walls that do not extend all the way to the ceiling -

(note how the ceiling does not meet the door frame)

- how this could be done without being heard is beyond my comprehension. How this individual could then simply leave that used barrel under the stool of that first dressing room is also beyond my grasp.

Worse yet, the urine must have been sitting in the dressing room for quite some time - at least long enough for it to acquire scent, long enough for that scent to grow into a foul stench strong as a pair of hands around the throat.

All I know is, I was the only one to notice that something dastardly was afoot. At 3.00. An hour before the store closed, six hours into the working day, and I'm the one (called up from the other building to help close) who has to stick her head into the first dressing room and all but vomit from the odor.

How can you be working up there all day and not notice the repugnant, viciously atrocious, disgusting odor of piss in a small wooden barrel? How can you be a customer and not say something? How can you be a customer in that dressing room and not faint?

How can you pee in a dressing room in the fist place? What kind of person does that? I mean, if you have a medical condition we can deal with that - you can use the employee bathroom - but to do that? Have you no soul?