In response to finding out that her glasses were broken: "I'm not really sure I wanna see that much anyway." - Carole
"Could I grab a stalk of your aloe plant? I left mine in Florida." After a pause of wondering if this was a normal request or not, I said, "Yeah, sure."
"Hey boss. I got you a 2012 vintage edition Coca-Cola." An older man cuts in front of a few customers in line to put an open and bubbling-over-its-edge Diet Coke on the counter.
"Could I get your last name, please?" "It's Watson." Ten second pause while I finish the transaction, and he asks, "What's yours?" like he's getting me back. I tell him. He doesn't react, and I hand him his receipt.
A lady walks in and says, "Oh they've got one of those robots that sits at a computer with one hand on a mouse."
Two little kids, a girl and a boy maybe around age 9 walk up to the counter with a parent nowhere in sight. They stare around aimlessly, and then the boy says quietly, "This looks like a pawn shop." They turn and walk back toward the window section in no apparent hurry.
Regular customers who are in five out of six days of the week ask on an almost daily basis how late we're open. It's 9 to 5 Monday through Saturday and hasn't changed in the near 8 months I've worked here. I doubt it changed in the years before that.
Customers come to counter with items, learn the price, and then go out to their car to get money. Then they come back to pay.
A fascinating list for a few different reasons:
ReplyDelete1.) It largely uses a genre of name I think you invented: the dialogue/conversation genre.
2.) It delves heavily into two themes which abounded aplenty in your career: awkwardness and work.
3.) This seems like one of those rare "concept lists," in that it's based largely around a single topic or idea, and should be read as a whole, instead of just composed of a bunch of parts, like the earliest lists (and, frankly, MOST of the lists).
Haha, all of that is true, except I didn't mean for this to be a list. But it might as well be. I wrote it back when I was a cashier in the warehouse in New Orleans and meant to post it after the other post I made about working there (see Feb 2013 post, Fragments of a Tender Keeper). But instead I just sat on it until I unearthed it recently with the other post, Dream Weaver. I never could really tell what was strange or normal in that city. There wasn't really a spectrum for it. But I loved that job and the people that walked through the door. I loved that there could be regulars at a salvaged building materials warehouse. It felt like the edge of the world, next a freight train that would back up and move forward over and over again at the end of its line, doing I don't really know what, I guess unloading and getting maintenance work done?
DeleteThat's fascinating. I need to read your other post about it, as I don't think I have yet.
DeleteLove working cashier jobs. And yeah, I've still yet to visit New Orleans. I feel like it's one of the strangest, ghostliest cities in the entire country (and I guess also world). Probably a place where you can only fully appreciate its weirdness by living there.
Train has always fascinated me. They are definitely the most interesting of all forms of transportation, although really huge ships like the Titanic are also high up there. But trains are an easy #1. The most mythic of all American things is the cross-country train.
I can imagine there was an interesting clientele there. If you could sell salvaged materials, it would probably be a lot of people trying to sell junk like Bubbles from The Wire, but it sounds like it's a place where you buy it.