I was hiding in the freezer, because that’s where you go to have a breakdown when you work retail. It had been a particularly garbage day at bar none the worst job I have ever had. Here’s how early 2020 was going for me: I graduated with a post-baccalaureate certificate in March of 2020, just in time for my efforts to become worthless as the industry I was trained for died in a pandemic overnight. Instead of doing an internship and then finding an entry level position in a job I actually wanted, or could at least say built some industry experience, I was working at a grocery store.
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That’s far from a glamorous gig at the best of times, but in 2020… my god. It wasn’t worth the $10/hour at all. I delayed quitting only because it was announced that food service workers, which I technically was, were going to get early access to the newly developed vaccine. I stayed just long enough for those initial doses and then fully bounced, and I don’t even feel bad about it.
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My first red flag should have been the circumstances under which I was hired. My entire department was new hires, getting their orientation on the same day I did. This is because the entire staff of the department had quit all at once a few weeks before. This would happen again with the new cohort. We didn’t plan it. We all just got up individually after a couple of months and decided enough was enough. The youngest of us was seventeen (his first job), the oldest was in her eighties (certainly not her first), with three or four of us between, and not one of us stayed for a full year.
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When I came in to sign my paperwork and sit through the obligatory training videos, the HR manager was super put out that I actually wanted to read what I was signing. It was five minutes’ worth of text, and contained nothing different from the standard Retail Garbage, but it took about twenty minutes to get through because this conversation —
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Me: I’m going to read this real quick before I sign it.
HR: You have to sign it.
Me: I know, I’m just going to read it first.
HR: If you don’t sign it, you won’t be able to work here.
Me: I know. I’m going to read it before I sign it.
HR: You’re required to sign it.
Me: I am aware of that. I am going to read it before I sign it.
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—happened at least twice on Every. Single. Page. She went from weirdly baffled to legitimately annoyed that I wanted to read the legally binding documents before putting my signature on them. This type of response to perfectly reasonable behaviors was, it turned out, merely the first small sign of things to come.
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I don’t need to give you the full breakdown of the nonsense—most of us these days have had a job like this. This was a 39.5 hours per week, just to avoid giving me full-time status kind of a job. It was a job where they legally couldn’t have me leave at 11PM and then come back at 6AM, so they scheduled me for 7AM instead. I promise that stack of bread loaves is fine, it does not need to be rearranged again. No, it doesn’t. God, Jesus, FINE. I remember at one point I could not get out of standing face to face with this woman who, though she had nominally met the requirement to wear a mask in the store, had opted to wear a mask made of mesh just as a fuck you to everyone around her who had bothered to actually meet the rule where it was. THAT kind of job.
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There were two benefits I took away from this experience. One, like I said earlier, was getting early access to the COVID vaccine. The other was that it finally got me in the habit of carrying a notepad and using it. That happened because very quickly I realized I needed to be able to account for every single minute on the job, everything I did, how long it took, and who told me to do it. This was the only way to avoid being slapped with absolutely dogshit accusations every single day.
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Let me give you the flavor. I would mop the bakery floor at 10PM, and then at 4AM, the bakers would come in and use the bakery, and then I would come in at 7AM and the manager, incensed, would demand to know why I didn’t mop last night, which she knew I didn’t because there was flour on the floor. Brilliant deduction. If I couldn’t tell her exactly when I started mopping and when I stopped and who I last saw when I put the bucket away (I don’t know? I didn’t pay attention to that?? Literally who cares???) then I must be lying. Fortunately for me, my dad was in the postal union for a good 25 years, so I can play this game, and the name of the game is documentation. So, I suppose, I must thank USPS and my shitty manager for my journaling habit.
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Theoretically, we had a union as well, which I paid into as was mandatory of all employees. However, because of the pandemic, all meetings were canceled until further notice a week before I got there, and they never did adopt Zoom. I never met my representative. In fact, I received an invitation to come to a union orientation for new hires in the mail about two weeks after my last day. So, we were on our own for the most part.
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The incident after which I started carrying the notepad happened the first week of my employment. I was scheduled for a shift that went 3PM-11PM. I had only been working for a couple of days. It was not until the only other member of the department on the clock at that time left to punch out at six that I realized I was completely on my own.
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I had been left with a list of tasks I had no idea how to complete. The list was full of jargon too, so there were entries on there that I didn’t even know the meaning of. No one had given me any information that would lead me to deduce that “Bagel—24/24/24/12/12” meant “set up the bagel dough to thaw for the baker later, here’s how many of each type you need,” and certainly not where the dough was kept (no, the OTHER other freezer), or the dozen or so steps that went into that setup (line trays, add toppings etc) so that the bagels could simply be wheeled into the oven on a rack in the morning.
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The department manager and the store manager were both gone. I didn’t have anyone’s phone number. I eventually ended up going to customer service, because the lady there was also part of HR, because I could think of no one else to ask for help in deciphering the coded message I had received in lieu of instruction. She called the department manager, who told her to tell me to do my best. Sympathetic to my plight, she told me it wasn’t the end of the world if the bakery was behind schedule tomorrow. Just clean up and deal with it tomorrow.
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And deal with it tomorrow I certainly did. First thing in the door the next morning, the bakery manager got right in my face to demand “WHAT HAPPENED LAST NIGHT?” Same to you! What the fuck happened?! You scheduled me alone with no training and no instructions!
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Retail Garbage gets dismissed as a whiny person problem, but genuinely the only time I can think of when I was doing worse mentally was when I was like “Do I really want to come out? Maybe killing myself would be easier. HMMM.” I started having stress nightmares about being at work. I wasn’t even pantsless or anything in them; I was just At Work. I had to wear these heavy no-skid shoes that destroyed my feet. I never used to have foot pain before I took that job, and now I have it all the time. It’s not as bad as it was while I was actually wearing the damn things every day, but goddamn, it’s been several years at this point.
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So that’s what I was dealing with in the background. As you well know, 2020 was already a miserable year in a lot of ways. Famous people dying during it feels like a shallow concern in the grand scope, but every straw the camel carried had weight at the time. We lost Sean Connery, Chadwick Boseman, Kobe Bryant, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Kenny Rogers, Alex Trebek, Regis Philbin, and that’s not even a complete list. I think you understand now what I was primed for when I looked down at my phone and saw “BREAKING NEWS: Standup Comedian John Mulaney…” and then the blank edge of the screen.
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I dropped what I was doing. I don’t remember what it was—some menial task that didn’t matter at all, which I would get chewed out for not finishing. I had already been contemplating just telling my manager “Fuck” and going home about three hours early. If John Mulaney was dead, I told myself, I would finally do it, consequences be damned. That would be too much. That would be one too many things for my brain to tolerate and still be here getting yelled at to arrange the baguettes just so.
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“2020, don’t you fucking do it, you bitch,” I muttered out loud as the freezer door shut behind me. Those two Netflix specials had become a major comfort watch for me. I had them so close to memorized that it took no brainpower whatsoever to enjoy them. Mulaney being dead was going to poison that AND most of the online spaces I lived in at the time. I was getting ready to yell. I was getting ready to cry in my car, because this headline was shaping up to be still another sad, terrible thing that I could not fucking escape from, anywhere, ever, at all, for however long it took for the next sad, terrible thing to happen.
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So when I unlocked my phone and the full headline was “BREAKING NEWS: Standup Comedian John Mulaney Has Checked Into Rehab For Cocaine and Alcohol Abuse” I literally cheered out loud. I mean, it was a single “YES!” but the point stands. It’s not like I was happy that the guy had relapsed into addiction and was probably having a terrible time even as I read that headline. I was just sincerely glad he was alive. I was absolutely sure up until that moment that it was going to be a suicide announcement. That headline said what it said, but what I read it as was “BREAKING NEWS: Standup Comedian John Mulaney Has Consciously Decided To Continue Being Alive.”
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I came out of the freezer like “Sure thing, God! I’ll finish my shift! A deal is a deal!” and just kind of brain-fuzzed through my shift smiling inside two layers of mask and paying no attention to anything whatsoever. The words of my terrible manager and her terrible assistant could not reach me. I was completely in my own world, quietly reciting The Salt and Pepper Diner word for word inside my head.
Dramatic Pause 