I worked for one year in a retail store in my home town. It was a minimum wage job, where I worked at a checkout counter, photo lab, and in a stock room. I performed many cleaning tasks as well as organizational ones, and the job was overall good. I enjoyed it. It was hard work and often involved dealing with difficult people. It was pretty thankless at the heart of it, but I liked it just the same. I got to serve people, and I did it well (If I do say so myself). Everything was peachy keen, until that fateful day…
…She showed up.
Now. I will preface this by saying this woman was nice. She was kind. She had a very large heart for her co-workers. So, I mean her no ill-will. This story is not to shame her in any way, but to simply express what it was like to work with her.
In a word, I would describe the experience as…
Nightmarish.
Have you ever met someone who just didn’t get it? That seemed clueless? That had no regard for the people around them as if they were oblivious to everything in their environment?
That was her. I call her Marge, to protect her identity for one, but also because of the nickname I use when telling stories about her: Large Marge.
I do not often talk about people’s sizes. I used to be pretty overweight myself. However, this woman was so large I got stories out of it. So, I am making an exception.
So here we go.
Large Marge was so large, she wore a black brace on her back, that hung on her shoulders. This brace was filled with weights because if she took it off, she risked falling over from her immense upper body weight. She had legs that looked like cones, because as you got closer to her torso, they grew in diameter to an unhealthy radius, but as you went down, her ankles were the size of everyone else’s. Her shoes were tiny, and so were her feet. Her face was quite… well, bulbous, to the point where it was uncomfortable for her to close her mouth. Her chest was so very large, that it could not sag. Instead, it created a perfectly level shelf that stuck out about 6 inches from her chin. This seems to be a harsh description, but let me assure you it’s accurate.
The first time I met Marge, I said, “Hi, nice to meet you!” and stuck out my hand to shake hers. She responded with “I’m going to call you my little Neufchâtel. That means ‘my little cheese.’” I responded by saying “Oh.” And screamed internally until I had no more internal breath.
Once, Marge returned from a break rather quickly, as she had well surpassed her allotted break time, and the line at the register had begun to back up. I was having a very hard time keeping the customers flowing, as I am only one man with one register, and the customers had me greatly outnumbered. The manager went and found Marge, and brought her back to the register to help. However, Marge had just plowed into a bag of Lays potato chips, (family size by the look of things) and there were many, MANY, remains from the poor chips lingering on her “shelf.” She leaped right into the process of ringing up the customer, but as she moved, chips began to fall into the bags she was filling, and onto the customer’s merchandise. Marge did not realize this and kept loading, as the customer looked on in muffled horror. She really seemed as if in shock, her mouth hung open, and I could see she was trying to say something but kept stopping herself. I stopped Marge and said quietly to her, “You’ve got some stuff on your shirt.”
Marge stopped and looked down at her “shelf”, and said “oh.”
She then took her hands and brushed all that remained of her slaughtered chips off her “shelf” …
…and ONTO THE CUSTOMER.
She proceeded to ring up the rest of the items in the lane, bag them, and hand them to the customer. The customer, a woman in her 50s, proceeded to take the bags and look at myself and my manager. We returned her open mouth, astonished look with nervous smiles. The customer then, still mouth hanging, turned and left the store.
Another time, Marge was ringing up a customer and had to count some of the items to make sure she rung them up right. She proceeded to take off her back weights, and plop herself on the counter, like a beached whale. She finished the transaction, and pushed herself up, off the counter, and found two of the items she had been looking for under her body mass that had covered more than half the counter. She had charged the women for 12 products, but swallowed two of them into her girth.
These three recounts are not actually the stories I wanted to tell, these are simply precursors, sequels, to the real story: THE Large Marge story. The story, of why I handed in my 2 weeks’ notice.
To preface this, people Marge had been scheduled to work with had complained. Marge’s breaks took twice as long as everyone else’s, as she moved very slowly, and took advantage of kind-hearted managers. The way the break system worked, was that you got two 15-minute breaks, and one 30-minute break if you worked a 6-hour shift. This was carried out by self-policing your 15-minute breaks, and for the 30, you punch out as soon as your break begins, and then punch back in exactly 30 minutes later, and start working right when you punch back in. Marge, instead, would take 15 minutes to waddle through the food aisles and choose her victims, buy them, THEN punch out, spend 30 minutes eating, punch in, and then clean up her stuff in the break room. Basically, her 30-minute breaks turned into an hour, and her 15’s turned into 30’s. Basically, she only worked for 4 out of the 6 hours she was scheduled. So, people often complained to management that they were having to pick up Marge’s slack, and they either needed raises, or they needed to get rid of her. This sounds harsh, I know. But if you can’t do the work you were hired to do, you’re out of a job. That’s how it works. The management compromised and scheduled a third person to work at the time Marge did. So, a normal shift involved two employees and a manager, but a Marge shift required Marge and two more employees, as well as a manager.
This particular night, I was the sole employee scheduled with Marge. Our manager was new, and already had a bit of a reputation of being lenient with employees. Need to step out for a smoke? Sure, it’s not busy. That sort of thing. But that’s not the point.
I had been put in a bad place that night. The manager had a list of things for me to do out “on the floor,” or, not behind the counter. Marge, in turn, would be behind the counter. Now. The end of the night is the busiest time of night. And it’s when we need people to be focused, and working hard. Marge had somehow saved all three of her breaks for the last three hours we were open. I was scrambling to get things done. I was jogging back and forth in the store in order to do tasks faster. I had never failed to complete a task at work, and I was determined tonight wasn’t going to be any different. That is until Marge took all 2 hours of her breaks in that 3-hour period we were open. I had to cover the front desk and skip my own breaks, in order to accommodate her. This left many of my tasks undone, but I was determined to finish. Marge had just finished her last break, and I had jogged back out on to the floor to start on the sorting of bins of products when I heard my name called over the intercom by Marge. I jogged back up to the front, and Marge was standing, not behind the counter, waiting for me. Meanwhile, a customer was standing at the counter, waiting to be serviced, and looking quizzically at Marge. “I have to step out for a minute,” Marge said, car keys in hand. “Can you watch the front?”
We had an hour before the store closed.
I had three hours of work to do.
“Sure,” I said. I was fuming. I was so incredibly angry that this woman had inconvenienced me to such a point that my superiors were going to look at the mess of work I hadn’t finished that night and shake their heads. Not to mention that somehow, even after her double-time breaks, Marge still managed to find a way to skip out on work. I would have said something to her, like, “Didn’t you use up your breaks already?” Or, “Marge, I have a lot of work to do and I need to get it done.” However, there was a customer waiting to be helped, so I kept my mouth shut and helped them. As I was making my way behind the counter, Marge started mumbling to herself and then calling to me as she left. “I really shouldn’t be doing this, tehehe, it’s so bad. I’m so naughty, tehehe.”
…
This was a strange thing to say in front of a customer. This was a strange thing to say in general. I didn’t acknowledge the strangeness as she left, I just asked the customer in front of me how they were, and if they had a rewards card.
I waited for Marge for ten minutes before seeing a manager. She walked from the isles toward the front desk, and asked, “Is Marge back yet?”
“Nope.”
“Alright. That’s fine.”
“Did you tell her she could leave?”
“Yes, she said she’d only be gone for five minutes.”
“Alright.”
But Marge didn’t come back after five minutes.
Or ten minutes.
Or twenty minutes.
Twenty-five minutes after she had left, she walked inside. She strode straight in the doors and walked to the closest shelf of merchandise. She reached up, and straightened a jug of Arnold Palmer Iced Tea, then turned around, and walked out again.
??????????????????????
I was so confused. Why? What…? WHY???
Five minutes later she walked in and came up to the counter.
“Are you back?” I asked.
“Yep, I’m back!” She replied. I immediately made my way toward the swinging part of the counter so I could get out before she came in. The behind-the-counter space had been designed so two medium-sized people could squeeze by each other if necessary. However, Marge was so large, once she got in, you were not getting out. She didn’t realize this, of course, so she got in before I did, and I was trapped.
“I really shouldn’t have done that tehehe.”
I tried to find any sort of opening to get past her. It was in vain.
“It was so naughty, tehehe.”
I was starting to panic. I might be trapped here forever now. “I’ve got to get back to work.” And I tried to push past her to get out of this lagoon I was stuck in, being closed in on by the largest shark in history. As I managed to squeeze past her by flattening against the rack of cigarettes, she felt that she could no longer keep in her secret.
“I had to buy a six pack.”
I stopped.
I turned slowly to face her, one hand on my hip, and the other on the counter. She had her hands to her face like a child who had said a cuss word.
“You were buying beer?” I asked. Not accusingly, but curious.
“Yes. My husband and I were out and I forgot to get some earlier. The liquor store closes at the same time we do.”
“What liquor store did you go to?”
She named the store and my heart sank to a new all-time low. You see, our store was in a complex. two doors down from us, maybe a distance of 30 feet, was the liquor store that Marge had visited.
“Did you…did you drive?”
“Yeah.”
My colleague had stepped out to buy booze from a liquor store two doors down from our store. She had driven there, and it took her a total of 30 minutes. After that, I went back to work and stayed after my shift was over to finish as many of my tasks as I could. The following day I returned to the store and met with the manager who had hired me almost a year before. I asked her why no one else had been scheduled to work with Marge that night. Every other night, two people had worked with Marge, why had my shift been different? My manager said she was going to level with me. Most of the employees who had previously worked with Marge had refused to work with her anymore. I, however, having a very strong work ethic and drive, had been able to complete my tasks assigned to me even with the extra work coming from Marge. She said that I was one of the only people who had not refused to work with her, so I was the only one she could schedule.
“Okay. So, this was just one time though, right? I’m not always going to be the one, right?” My manager gave me the most pitifully fake smile ever and said that I was a great worker and that they were counting on me to be cohesive and hold the workplace together. So, yes, I would be working with Marge every night that I was scheduled from now on.
The next day, I handed in my two weeks’ notice. I would not work for a group of people that would stick such a hindrance on one of their hardest workers. Why couldn’t they expect that much out of their older, and more experienced employees? But I digress.
I quit. And visiting that place over the next year, Marge was still there. The store had hired a man of 34, living in his parents’ basement, to replace me. He was so desperate for a job, that he didn’t dare complain about Marge.
That is the story, of how a rather swollen women ditched work to buy booze, and drove 30 feet to do it, and caused me to quit my job. I got home that night and collapsed on my couch. “How was work?” My mom had asked. All I could do was shake my head. “What A Day…”
Photo by Bernard Hermant on Unsplash
What A Day 