I have a new job. To be clear for my entire audience (which consists of three obligated relatives) my boss at my old job, who doubles as a buddy of mine, will undoubtedly be reading this at some point, which casts a necessary bias on my storytelling. Whether my new boss would ever read this is a point of some imaginative contention, since I have eavesdropped enough to discover that he is on Facebook and is at least networked with employees from other locations of the business, but I have yet to determine if he has any social life beyond the store that he has poured his life into. I am absolutely undecided about whether this new venture into the retail world is my dream job or my ultimate nemesis. 1.5 days in, I was ready to throw the towel in and concede the victory to the 18 year olds vying for top teammate. now I am at day 4, and I almost enjoyed my shift.
Most of you know that I worked at Costco. Most of you have seen Employee of The Month. Other than the bad ass forklift-accessed forts, if any current or former Costco Employee tells you that this movie is not almost dead-on accurate - they are lying. Probably because they never made employee of the month and/or were never Jessica Simpson and/or got to take Jessica Simpson out. Every male in the warehouse will protest that he is the Dane Cook of his warehouse, and 98% of them are realistically the Dax Shepard of the warehouse. Obviously, in my three seasons at two different warehouses, I was the resident Jessica Simpson - new employee transfer with the looks (substitute personality?) and cashiering skills to score me a good flirt with any guy in the store, but with one little flaw: What J.Simpson did for that movie in her jumbo ears, I quadruplicated in offspring for real life. I was entirely dateable and desirable - with A LOT of kids. Anyway, all of that rabbit trail was mainly to point out that the retail (wholesale) world is largely in real life what it is in Hollywood - ridiculous and full of drama.
I wasn't sure how this job was going to work out until I realized that I just needed to imagine a big invisible teleprompter in the sky to cue all of the speeches and pitches and "Power Statements" that I needed to deliver through the course of a day. It took about 3.5 days for me to figure it out. Then suddenly the lines started flowing freely off my tongue as if I was born selling jeans. Part way
through my last shift I felt like I was one of the chorus performers in High School Musical, and was expecting to burst into song and perfectly choreographed dance routines around the tables of jeans. This job is scripted. If the 6 hours of training videos didn't clue me in, I must have been dense. This corporation has it figured out, in recruitment, in training - they are a highly organized program, that must be fairly successful... the high turnover rate at this store has me a bit curious, but both past and current employees proclaim the greatness of working there. So we shall see. Maybe the first week is like hell week, and once the actual performances start it gets way easier?
Heaven or hell, the cumulative total of work hours has pretty much put the kibosh on any fantasies I had of a life of leisure. Due to a scheduling conflict I had yesterday, I ended up with a miraculous day off, which I used to let a few people know that I was, indeed, alive, list a million pairs of panties on eBay, and cook some amazing appetizers for the first of four combined Scentsy/Thirty-One/Paparazzi parties which I had volunteered to host. What the hell is the matter with me? As we get closer to summer and claw our way out of the financial hole I have created, I plan to phase out Scentsy, eBay and any other superfluous actvities in my agenda so that I can get back to important things like floating the river and riding my bike to Cuppa-Yo. But for now - I have a job to get to. And then another.
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