‘Suck it Retail’ or ‘I’m not Racist, I Hate Everyone Equally’

Let’s face it; Work sucks. We all have ignorant bosses whose jobs we KNOW we could do better, we all have to occasionally eat shit from whiney customers, and from time to time we feel that the blatant repetition of our jobs is slowly sucking the life from our souls.


I’ve found that in the course of trying to find that special someone online, my job has played a hand in hamstringing my efforts. It’s easy to be a happy go lucky moron who women find charming and charismatic when you already have money, or even when you don’t have a lot of money, but love what you do. However, when you have a shit job and your station in life makes you want to suck on the end of a shotgun, that cynicism tends to leak out in conversations with potential bed mates. The worst part is knowing that there is nobody to blame other than myself for working in the field I currently do.

The truth is that I hate my fucking job, but to be honest with you in this economy I’m actually grateful to HAVE a job. I do however find it hard to explain my vocation to prospective dates. I try not to bring up where I work in conversations with women, and invariably if I HAVE to? I lie about it. Not because I’m trying to impress anybody, but because I’m embarrassed that I’m about to turn ‘Face book’ thirty and I still wear a fucking name tag. Maybe it’s the atmosphere of fear that my bosses invoke, the shit hours for shit pay, or the lack of any viable women for me to bang in the work place, but the fact is that there are so many reasons for me to be unhappy at work, there just isn’t any ONE I can put my finger on. The one thing I DO know? Most of my misery comes from the endless barrage of idiots, thieves, and just plain douche bags that frequent my place of business daily. Yeah…I’m talkin’ about you.

As I write this, I’m currently working at a corporate electronics store which shall remain nameless. I’ve been in retail, in some form or another for almost 16 years now and I’ve learned that when you work with the public, you gain a little insight into how certain types of people act. I wouldn’t call it ‘stereotyping’ or ‘profiling’, but I’ve become something of a retail psychic. This is a super hero type ability which holds no discernable use in the super human community, like Cypher from the ‘New Mutants’ or Aqua man from ‘The Justice League’. I carry the albatross around my neck of, not ONLY having this ineffective super power…but also in knowing that its origin lies in the fact that I’ve been sucking on the corporate teet for far too fucking long. And when you’ve been doing this shit for TOO long, one of two things happens…you die alone and downtrodden at an early age from the stress brought on by the corporate whip, or you snap and start building a hut in a forest preserve out of Oberweiss milk jugs filled with urine.

So in an effort to try to avoid either of those eventualities, and to try to calm my nerves when talking to women, I’ve decided to vent. Since it would be inappropriate and unprofitable for me to unload a barrage of fuck you's at the random assholes that frequent my place of business, I’ll do HERE, what millions of people across the country would LIKE to do…and bitch about customers, bosses, and fellow employees.

One of my rules in life is to NOT think about my job outside of work. I learned a long time ago that this will drive you crazy. When I’m at work, I concentrate on work, when I‘m not at work? I concentrate on everything else. In this chapter however, I’ll forgo my usual trepidations of mixing work and pleasure in an effort to entertain you, and to let off some fucking steam. As usual, you may relate to some of the things I’m about to say, and you may disagree with some of the things I say, but either way? Feel free to shoot me an email if YOU’D like to vent. I don’t mind hearing about your job, I just don’t like talking about mine. And if you DO disagree with some of the shit I say? As always, I would like to cordially invite you to PLEASE…go fuck yourself.

I’ve had a lot of jobs over the years and even though my current one will most certainly not be my last, because I’ll put a fucking bullet in my heart if I feel that it’s coming to that, it may be the worst. I’ll be honest with you here; in my teens I was fired from a few jobs for lying, stealing, or cursing out my boss in a store full of customers. But when I was 22, I got my first REAL job, the one that started me down the retail path that I have travelled but a short distance on. Not in a timeline kind of way, I’ve been doing this shit for a LONG time, but in a promotional way. I’ve only moved up ONE fucking job code in all that time.

My first real girlfriend Jackie, made a big impact on me by clearing out the cobwebs from the corners of my life. She made me get my GED, she made me get new clothes, and she made me get a ‘real’ job. That job was at Waldenbooks. I was hired as the assistant manager, and between my original store in the Chicago Ridge Mall, my promotion without raise to the Ford City location, and my eventual lateral movement to a better environment at Borders Books and Music in Orland Park, I worked for the company for 11 years total. Waldenbooks was always there and deep pivotal moments in my life took place within the confines of my responsibilities to it.

While I was in her employ, I suffered the heartbreaking end of my relationship with Jackie, I met people who I still consider to be some of my best friends to this day, I went to college around my work duties, my appreciation for Howard Stern was developed, and I fucked a lot…and I mean a LOT of co-workers. However, my downfall came through the death of my mother. As she became increasingly ill before the end, I started drinking more and more. When I eventually told my bosses that I needed a day off for her funeral, they reluctantly gave it to me. To my surprise, my boss ACTUALLY showed up to the funeral under the auspice of delivering his condolence, but I had a feeling that he was only there to see if I was lying about the event. That feeling festered in me like a bulging neck boil. When I came back to work after a week or so, I began showing up late or If I wasn’t late, I would be in the extreme throws of a hangover. When my boss took me to the side one day to talk about my ‘lack of enthusiasm’ in the work place…I called him a crop eared midget fuck and told him that I’d taken shits bigger than him. Then I walked out and never looked back.

I took a few years away from working at all in order to spend every dime that my mother left me on booze and cheap floozies. When the dough ran out, I applied for a job with my current employer. I was hired there in 2004 as an assistant manager and was promoted to manager 2 months later. I’ve busted my ass for this company over the past 5 years, and it’s coming to a point where I feel a change is needed. Not that I feel the need to work at another retail joint, but that I need to get the fuck out all together. These days I can barely plaster on a fake smile and make my customers feel welcome. However, I’ve noticed that it’s not only my customer service that’s changed…but the customers themselves. People have become increasingly stupid over the years and even though my opinion is that current pop culture is the lead suspect in the murder of intelligence, I can’t help but think that maybe retail’s code of ‘The Customer is Always Right’ is part of the problem as well.

Corporations have given every whiney person on the planet a way out of taking responsibility for their own inept choices and their general desire to NOT fucking read. People bitch at me daily because they can’t complete simple tasks on their own and they don’t want to learn how to help themselves.

There are the crotchety old people who curse like sailors because I can’t program their new television remote control for them. It doesn’t seem to matter HOW politely you try to explain to them that they have to be IN FRONT of their television set to do it. Even when I highlight the 8 word passage in the instruction manual that shows them how to EASILY do it themselves, they STILL come back complaining that it’s too hard. These people all but say “I’m too dumb to figure this out”

There are the twit nipples that get an attitude with ME because the electronic signature capture devices elude their fucking faculties when they pay with a credit card. ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS SIGN THE FUCKING THING! IT’S THE SAME AS SIGNING ON A PIECE OF FUCKING PAPER! Jesus.

And don’t get me started with the minutes for pre-paid phones. I get customers who ACTUALLY get pissy with me because THEY don’t know what their own phone number is. How the FUCK do you expect ME to put minutes into a phone without the fucking phone number? When I put minutes on a phone, I do it as a fucking courtesy by going to the SAME god damned website that they could go to themselves, putting the phone number into the ‘top up’ box, and the code that prints on their receipt into the ‘pin number’ box. Go to 7-11 or Wal-Mart and see if they’ll put your fucking minutes on the phone for you. They’ll tell you to go fuck yourself. I tried to be nice for a long time, and do for them what they so moronically couldn’t do for themselves, but after a year of putting up with their blathering, self entitled, bitchiness, I tell every fucking one of them now that the stores internet connection is down so they’ll have to put the minutes on themselves. When they walk out cursing and flipping me the bird behind their backs saying “I’ll never shop HERE again”…GOOD FUCKING RIDDANCE! And don’t slip in the parking lot and get your head run over by a pickup truck. My store, my staff, AND my company make absolutely NO profit from pre paid minutes. Fuck ‘em.

And then there’s the rest. The deluge of moronic imbeciles I deal with daily would make a mental hospital look like a fucking Mensa hospital. Over the years I’ve learned to deal with the pressure of a corporate boot on my neck, but the thing that I’ve found increasingly difficult to bear is my customers. Maybe it’s the neighborhood that my store is in or maybe I’m just getting old and can’t deal with nonsense like I could when I was young, but I think that I now know WHY retail pays so poorly; it’s so we can’t afford guns.

There are times when I’ll fantasize about what it would be like to just have a gun at work. Take today for example. A customer came in and asked if we carried digital voice recorders. I gladly showed him to the section that they were in, and asked him what he would be using it for. He looked me in the eye, put his pointer finger to his lips and went “Cht-cht-cht-cht”, and then he inspected the packages. My heart began to race “did this mother fucker just ‘shush’ me?” I thought to myself. After about five minutes of LOOKING at the pictures on the package, and not READING the words…he looked up at me and said “where do the tapes go in these?” A DIGITAL voice recorder is about the size of a pack of gum. They don’t TAKE fucking tapes because they record digitally. I politely told the guy this and he asked me “Do you have any digital voice recorders that take tapes?” I told him that we have TAPE recorders that take tapes, but DIGITAL means that it does NOT take tapes. He looked at the TAPE recorder, which is about the size of a cassette tape and said “That’s too big”

BOOM! It’s at this point when I would simply take out my gun and calmly shoot him in the temple. Let’s see him “cht-cht-cht-cht” me with his fucking brains all over the ‘home/office’ section of my store.

As dumb as that imbecile was however, he is NOT the biggest piece of shit I have to deal with on a daily basis. I have a cast of moronic characters that frequents the stage of my retail theatre. In no particular order, they are as follows:

First up is The fucking Pollack’s: These people come into my store with an attitude of smugness plastered on their all too big heads and REEK of some knock off cologne called ‘Repel’ that they bought from a kiosk in the mall. They smell like a man eating gorgonzola cheese, while getting a perm in the septic tank of a slaughter house. Now, I’m not talking about every Pollack out there, just the ones with accents. Not only are they cheaper than George Costanza at a charity auction, but they return EVERY fucking thing they buy. I don’t even know why they shop, it’s like retail masturbation. Even when you TELL them “look, sir…you cannot plug a candy bar into ANY thing”, they get mad at YOU for telling them it won’t work and then buy it anyway. An hour later, I hear the door open and turn to see fucking Sven, all attitude, wearing camouflage cargo shorts who gives me the hairy eyeball and says: “Why you no tell me this not work?”, while holding a melted ass cigarette lighter with fucking chocolate all over it. And every god damned one of them thinks that if they buy a remote control, a pie tin, and some fucking paprika…they’ll get every cable station on the planet. But try to suggest an antenna? And explain to them the interference caused by the airport they live underneath? You may as well be explaining nuclear physics to a fucking chiwawa with one kidney that has to take a leak really bad. LOOK, Stash…it’s not my fault that your country got annexed OK? Now put the fucking J. Crew catalogue down and go read an instruction manual.

Old ass ladies: these dingbats are fucking time vampires who cannot figure out how to press a button on their phone. You have to spend 3 hours with them because they don’t know what a number 2 looks like on the 10 dollar pre paid phone that their grandson bought them 8 fucking years ago. While you’re helping this extra from the thriller video, 10 people who want ACTUAL cell phones, that I can make money on, are walking out the door pissed. LOOK Aunt Bee…it’s the SAME fucking configuration as on the HOUSE phone you have. You know the one that Alexander Graham Bell autographed for you back when you were only 147 years old? I should invent a fucking rotary cell phone.

Fat white women: These bitches are the WORST. They think that just because NOBODY wants to deal with them on a personal level that gives them the right to come and fuck with someone on a professional level. Every time I see one of these big bitches with their ‘chick mullet’ and their purple Grimace sweatshirt trying to take the 3 inch step up on the side walk in front of my store with the same expression on their face as an Olympic runner taking a hurdle, I want to dive into my back room and hide Anne Frank style. Just their greeting is full of hatred and bile and special sauce. They HAVE to know when they come in that we don’t carry what they’re looking for, so it’s OBVIOUSLY a front perpetrated JUST so they have an excuse to be vicious. ‘What do you mean you don’t carry a front bumper for an 87 Cadillac?’ Ma’am, this is an electronics store. ‘Don’t call me ‘ma’am’, you don’t KNOW me’. AHHHH! LOOK, NOBODY wants to know you, you waste of fucking oxygen! Why don’t you put a piece of coal on your fat person scooter seat so you can make yourself a diamond when you sit down on it? That way you can afford to shoot yourself into outer space where you’ll have a better chance of running into SOME kind of mid level intelligent life form that has the probing technology to find your twat in that double gunt you carry around in front of you that looks like a fucking tent filled with chewed bubblegum! FUCK YOU!

Old white men: these guys are the most common of the lot. They either want batteries for something so old that Moses borrowed it once, or they want a police scanner. First of all Colonel Hogan, what kind of creep sits around eating porridge and listening to the awful shit going down in their hood all night? No wonder you people look so fucking scared all the time. This is the old man equivalent of a 35 year old going to fucking star trek conventions. Secondly, I do everything in my power to convince these crypt keepers NOT to buy the fucking thing because, much like the Pollack’s, they return it every time. Why? Because this thing comes with an instruction book that's thicker than a stack of James Michener novels, and these coffin stuffers think that: A.) if they just press a button the fucking thing will magically read there feeble minds, or B.) I have 6 years to read the manual TO them. LOOK Ed Asner, you've been alive long enough to have carved your initials into the pyramids as you were building them, SURELY you know how to fucking read, so quit sitting around with the other mummies reminiscing about the fucking civil war and learn to rely on yourself to complete a simple task.

Homeless people: God fucking forbid it rains because every house less fuck with a shopping cart piles into my store like a college fraternity trying to win the world record for how many dickheads you can squeeze into a phone booth. “did you need any help today sir?’ is invariably answered with “gobba duke dish monger” or some other garbled nonsense followed by a wet spot appearing and spreading on the front of their tattered bugle boy jeans. Even on a sunny day, I don’t want to step outside of my fucking store for a cigarette break because the minute I light up, I get soapaphobics repelling off the roof like a dirty, mop headed, swat team and asking if they can ‘borrow a cigarette’. Yeah, you can ‘borrow’ a cigarette at 18.5% compounded interest per annum over the next 3 years. FUCK YOU, Look, if you have an addiction? Get a fucking job to support that habit! I may not work hard, but at least I had the good sense to put some deodorant on, bring my sorry ass to work, and earn enough money to pay for cigarettes which now cost more than most monthly mortgages. You may as well ask if you could ‘borrow’ my house.

I know it seems stingy, but I won’t give ANYone a fucking cigarette. I’ve had everyone from cops to super hot women ask if they could ‘borrow a smoke’ and my answer is always the same; ‘No’. Then they always want to know ‘why’. Where most of you would lie and say “I’m out” or “I left them inside the office”, I don’t even bother with that any fucking more. I simply say “because I don’t care about you or your addiction.” I’ve been homeless twice in my life, and I would have rather stuck a fork in my fucking eye than ask someone for a cigarette. I busted my ass and worked hard to support that habit and build my lower middle class empire up from the ground with little to no help from others. Although some people’s tales of woe are truly heartbreaking, most ‘homeless’ people got that way from their own addictions, failures, and general stupidity. I know that because that’s how I got homeless. Now, go down to the ‘Y’, take a shower, and fill out some fucking job applications. Even if you have to work at ‘7-11’, that’s better than pandering outside of one.

Hispanic people (English speaking): Minutes for the boost phone.

Hispanic people (Non English Speaking): I have no fucking clue, but I get to listen to them yell at me from ‘lack of communication’ frustration like Ricky cursing out Lucy, but mustachioed. Most times if I just casually utter the letters I.N.S., they’ll at least head for the door as they yell gibberish at me.

African American Postal Employee: Bluetooth. Everytime.

Black guys: I am not trying to be racist here, but I DO have a simple line that I like to use at work; ‘Not ALL black people steal…but ONLY black people steal. I truly mean no offence by this, but if a black guy comes into my store? I know there’s credit card fraud or some kind of theft afoot. I’ve had to call the cops for SOME kind of shoplifting incident at least twice a month for 3 years and EVERY fucking time? It’s an ‘African American gentleman’. Every shoplifter warning sent out in our company emails? ‘African American gentleman’. Every call I get warning me about cell phone fraud to look out for? ‘African America gentleman’. Just ONCE I’d love to see someone be HONEST when they send out these ‘warning’ emails to the stores: “A customer came in, immediately went to the back of the store, shoved a bunch of items into his ‘Shaft’ fro, and when I approached him he ran out of the front door. Description: Big nigger with an afro”. Look, I tend to see the racial divide much like Chris Rock: “There are niggers, and there are black people”. In my store? The black people are the postal employees who buy blue tooth, the niggers are the thieves.

I also love the fact that they just assume they're criminal masterminds and I’m a bumbling moron. Like I’m the ‘token’ idiotic white guy in a ‘blaxploitation’ flick. They’ll come in, walk RIGHT up to the counter looking like an extra from ‘Breakin 2: Electric Boogaloo’, with shitty clothes, nappy ass hair all backed up like rush hour traffic, and say in a comedic 'black accent' circa 1983, that I'D be called racist for mimicking: ‘hmmmm...I sure am would like 6 TV’th and foe laptop computerth…and why don’t you throw in a few iPodth with that?’. THEN, one of two things happens. You go in the back to get that shit and they steal everything they can fit in their fucking I.O.U. jacket OR you ring them up and they hand you a credit card with the name ‘Howard Whiteman Finnius Thronbrecker III esquire’ on it. When it doesn’t go through? They TELL you ‘oh, I am got the approval code for that right here’. Am I wearing an 'I'm an asshole' t-shirt? FUCK YOU! IT DOESN’T WORK ON ME!!! As sad as it sounds? I’ve been doing this for over 20 fucking years now! Go try that shit at the barbershop you fucking ‘Sugar Hill Gang’ reject.

Oh, sweet zombie Jesus, I almost forgot...the phone. I don't know why the fuck it is that I.Q.'s drop from 20 to negative fucking 20 whenever people put the receiver to their ear, but I won’t even answer the fucking thing anymore for fear I’ll go bat shit crazy. Some of these people want to stay on the phone longer than the drum solo in ‘In-A-Godda-Da-Vida’. I don’t stay on the phone that long with friends who are contemplating suicide for fucks sake. A typical retail phone conversation usually goes like this: Me: “Thank you for calling Patio Tack, how can I help you?” customer “do u have any iphone 4s?” Me: “no, I’m sorry we don't” Customer: “is this Patio Tack?” Me: “yes” Customer “so you don’t have any iphone 4s?”



AHHHHHH! What the FUCK did I just SAY? How do u not know who you just called?!? Especially when I just TOLD you who you called? Do you think that you accidentally called your molester uncle Ronbo and he just HAPPENED to say 'thank you for calling Patio Tack? And NOBODY HAS THE FUCKING IPHONE 4!!! Put the fucking phone down and pick up a newspaper, over a hundred thousand people around the world waited in line when they came out this week, sometimes for 48 hours before the launch, who the fuck do you think you are that YOU'LL be the one to get a good night sleep and lazily saunter into a random store like I've been holding one for a 'special' customer, and YOU happen to be him?



Then there are the ones who call up and give me a list longer than a donkey’s cock of shit to find. When I finally get back to the phone after tracking down their items like Richard Kimble trying to find the one armed man, and tell them what we have...they say 'how much are all those?' now I got to go back and find the prices. FUCK YOU! You wanna shop? Wade through your swarm of fucking cats and piles of old Sally Jesse Raphael show transcripts, leave your hovel, and fucking SHOP! I don’t get paid enough to be YOUR personal shopper just because you only leave the house when fucking McDonalds is having the 2 for 3 Big Mac sale. THAT’S why your ass gets put on what I call ‘forever hold’. I put you on hold, and NEVER pick up again.



Just starting my day off with the drive to work is an exercise in patience. I spend so much time driving to and from work that I make Jack Kerouac look like a fucking agoraphobic. It seems that the EARLIER I leave every morning, the MORE construction they start on my route. Just yesterday I left my house at 10 P.M. and STILL showed up 15 minutes late at 9:15 A.M. And it’s ALWAYS ridiculous shit too, they’ll have the LEFT lane closed off for the Sheriff’s Work Alternative Program so they can plant daisies on the fucking median because the jails are overcrowded, then the RIGHT lane is closed because the city is building a side walk outside of a trailer park in the hopes that the multi colored Mountain Dew bottle covered fence line surrounding it will be less noticeable, then BOTH lanes are closed with an arrow pointing ‘up’ like I’m supposed to ‘ Duke’s of Hazard’ the big concrete barriers blocking the fucking street.

Then when I finally DO manage to get through this psychotic level of ‘paperboy’, I end up at train tracks with a train so long that it must stretch from New York to San Francisco like a big smiley face across America dropping off cars, one at a time, on either end. It stops, you wait 10 minutes and it moves FORWARD one train car length, then it stops for another 10 minutes, and moves BACK one train car length, and repeats the process until I’m ready to speed down to the engine and drive my fucking car up the conductors ass. FUCK YOU TRAINS!

And if ONE drop of rain falls from the sky? Forget it, I may as well just keep a tent in my car and sleep on the side of the road because every moron behind the wheel suddenly forgets where their fucking accelerator pedal is. Usually Sunday is the only day when I have NO obstructions blocking my path to work, it takes me 21 minutes. Every other day? An Hour to get to work, almost 2 hours to get home. And do we get paid for that shit? No, I find it laughable that the taxes we pay, and that get taken from our checks, pays for the shit that makes us sit in traffic for hours on end with NO pay.

Even considering my vast list of endless hatred…I have to give a shout out to a job that I thankfully have never had. The service job that has to have the most miserable, tedious, hateful, sophomoric, idiotic, winey bitch ass customers of the lot…I’m talking, of course, about waitressing. I’ve dated a lot of waitresses in my time and the ONE common thread they all have? Nice on the outside with a steaming ball of hatred toward their fellow man, the size of Venus, inside of them. It’s like a dog shit cake. It LOOKS really good because there’s this nice white vanilla frosting all around it, but then when you take a bite? Your face contorts to the point that it almost turns inside out, and you have dog shit stains on your teeth.

And really? It’s not their fault. They have to deal with assholes on a daily basis that if MOST of us had to put up with? We’d end up in jail for stabbing them in the eye with a fork. But they HAVE to deal with it. Why? Because they live off the tips, and even when Gus, the used car sales man says that his steak is over cooked and lobs it at the waitress like he’s pitching in a softball game, SHE has to plaster a smile on her face and suppress her rage to the point that I end up in the ‘friction burn groin’ ward at Christ hospital because her vagina is dryer than a used dust store in the Mohave desert, JUST on the off chance that this cheap prick who bought a 4 dollar steak at a ‘Red Bull and Steak’ shit truck stop will tip her enough to buy a 99 cent bag of Doritos for her and her hamster to eat that night. FUCK YOU GUS! Be patient, DON’T yell at your waitress, all she’s doing is BRINGING you the fucking food; she’s not COOKING the fucking food. And don’t take out your job related angst on some poor girl JUST because you don’t have the balls to tell your boss, Todd Dickstripe, down at the dealership to go fuck himself after he asked you to grease the axels on his Mercedes when YOU still take the bus to work.

Then, on the OTHER side of the customer service door? Dealing with management. Do you know why the British lost the war against us? It was because they had TOO many fucking people in charge. They had generals, and sub generals, and fucking admirals and panda captains, and infantry superior generals, and pasta sauce supervisors, and it got to the point that there were SO many people in charge, nobody knew who the fuck to listen to. The corporate retail world is much the same way. I have to deal with MY boss, district managers, regional managers, continental managers, global managers, solar system managers, universal managers, and all the way up the suck ass corporate food chain until you get to whom? Our British CEO.

That’s right, they may have lost to us back then, but the Brits are taking it all back folks, watch out because if you truly want to kiss ass in this job market? You better learn to NOT stare at those fucked up teefus, learn to measure your heroin in kilo’s, and learn to NOT laugh at that jag off tie. This guy came into my store once and he was either SO drunk on power that he couldn’t think clearly, or he just smoked a joint and had a pint of lager. He told us in a cartoony British butler accent to ‘turn the windows around so that the INSIDE window is facing the outside, hang up posters of Peirce Brosnan everywhere, and ONLY flush the toilets on Tuesdays’. Then he called my retarded employee a ‘cheeky monkey’, threw his bowler hat at an old lady like Odd Job from 'Goldfinger', and skipped out the front door singing Sgt. Pepper.

Then we have the Regional boss. The last guy who had this job was about as pleasant as a gorilla after you smash his big toe with a hammer. I’ve HEARD the expression ‘puss on your face’ before, but this guy ACTUALLY had a cat stuck to his face, claws all dug in to his cheeks and forehead. Outside of my ex girlfriend Jackie, I’ve never met anyone with NO sense of humor. This is the kind of guy whom I imagine only snickers at the occasional Gallagher bit. HE got transferred for fucking a DISTRICT manager. I love the irony behind that. This guy nearly fired me for having a fucking balloon up in my store because he said that it ‘presents familiarity to the employees’, but he can drop fuck his ass kiss underling behind his wife’s back. Fuck him.

So NOW I’m stuck with the new guy. We can’t figure out yet if the new guy is Mexican or Asian. So we’ve dubbed him a Masian. All I know about him is that he’s JUST as mean as the last guy, but with the bonus of being passive aggressive on top of it. Every email he sends out is just dripping with intent to fire everyone. Multiple exclamation points and fear propaganda are the norm for his regime. He came into my store last week with my District manager, and walked around my sales floor with his arms behind his back like Hitler inspecting the troops. He’d occasionally say something to me in a low monotone voice similar to a serial killer talking to himself just before he starts fucking his victims belly button, but mostly would only talk to MY boss who was writing every word down like a frightened lackey. You could see the sweat dripping from my bosses brow, and his hands shaking as he furiously wrote everything out into an epic tome that he eventually sent in an email titled ‘why my boss thinks you are all assholes’.

My boss is actually kind of O.K. I’m sure that he buffers a lot of the shit from us that he gets, and if I’d met him outside of the job? I wouldn’t mind having a beer with him occasionally.

Which brings me to my employees. I heard a long time ago that managers hire themselves. Based on that saying? I have the best employee’s ever. They may not be the most handsome, but I constantly get compliments on them. Occasionally they’ll work at other stores, and I have to deal with THOSE managers trying to lure them away from me with promises of candy and rub downs…but they always come back. Why? Well, despite what you’ve read here? I think I’m a pretty decent boss. I have the distinction of having the only store, probably in my region that has had the SAME employees for almost 3 years. No ‘retail’ turnaround. Three of them are consistently on the companies list of top five employees for sales. They work hard and I try to foster an atmosphere of fun in the workplace. Hell retail is a shitty enough job without having a douche bag boss to put up with. The ONLY problem I have is that I’ve never hired anyone at my current job that I’d like to sleep with, just big women and Nigerian guys (I’m also the ONLY store that has had THREE Nigerians promoted from within, I fucking LOVE those dudes). My tip to those of you out there that DO have to hire people? Just know that when you hire big women? They shit more than guys. From my experience with the girlfriends I’ve had, I didn’t even know that women DID shit. Hell, I LIVED with a girl for 7 years and ‘shitting’ never came up once. These employees of mine though ‘tag team’ shit throughout the fucking day. I have to have TWO of them work at a time so there’s at least ONE person on my sales floor while the other one is dropping a deuce.

The main thing I hate about retail though is the fucking roboticness of it. I have a mind to foster relationships with my customers, but I have to spew out this corporate bullshit from the beginning to the end of EVERY interaction with EVERY fucking customer. ‘Welcome to my store, did you know that we have the iphone now? (We HAVE to say that EVEN though we DON’T have the fucking iPhone!) What can I help you find, did you need any batteries for around the house? Can I have your email so we can send you coupons? Who is your cell phone provider? Would you like to upgrade or get a new line of service? These are the items you’ll need to buy with that. We have a service plan that can protect your item. Just so you know you can fill out a survey online. Would you like a magazine subscription? Do you want fries with that? Can I suck your cock for you?’ WHERE DOES IT FUCKING END! What happened to just ‘How can I help you today?’ and ‘thanks for shopping with us’. THAT’S IT! Dude came in to get a fucking battery for his camera so he could take pictures of the most important day of his life, and I just made him miss his daughter’s birth with my Billy Mays sales pitch for a fucking hour because I can get fired for NOT going through that rhetoric in EVERY customer situation. Maybe the reason the economy is falling apart is because there’s nothing personal in these interactions any more. It all sounds corporate from the top to the bottom.

Another frustrating thing about my job is the lack of ass. Either customer wise or employee wise. In my youth, I had a vast unlimited resource for meeting women; Work.

The first time I got laid? 38 year old waitress at Red Lobster when I was working there as a bus boy at 17. Later, when I worked for Walden books in the mall, there were more loose women passing through it than a Metallica concert at the end of a pub crawl. The little ‘let me tell ya somethin’s would roam through that place all day, and if you could do a mall cop lean on a kiosk counter? You were going to be taking a trip to an abortion clinic in about 3 weeks (fist bump). Sometimes I’d even find myself hiring these same girls and banging them on the bargain book table in the back of the store after it closed. I LOVED that job. If you've never had 'work sex'? I highly recommend it. Nothing sends a silent 'fuck you' to the higher ups quite like my big white elephant ass pumping up and down on some 22 year old, over the same counter I sold 'Weekends With Morrie' to their gramma on.

Then I moved on to Borders. Let me tell you, that place was like catnip for pussy. Hot, spectacled, intellectual broads looking for YOUR opinion on Kurt Vonnegut or Niche over a cup a Joe with a dick twist. Hell, I dated my first girl with fake boobies while I was there.

Those jobs even brought some great names into my life who I STILL consider to be some of my best friends. Ian, Smart Jim, even Action Jim who I met at my comic book store job over 20 years ago. I feel the same bond with the job I have now, even though there’s only ONE good looking girl in my whole district (and she’s not interested in me), I’ve still fostered many friendships and people look forward to coming to my parties. In many ways I’m a middle child because I was in ONE district for a few years and now I’m in another. Occasionally I bring the districts together at my place along with my old friends and meld all the worlds together.

Look, I get it, the old days were the old days, but sometimes I feel like the product of a bygone age. A dinosaur looking for, I don’t know…whatever kind of food dinosaurs eat. Some kind of big leaves I guess…or other dinosaurs. The point being that all my food is extinct, and without it…or a really smart scientist with unlimited resources and funds, I’m not going to make it. I know that bitching about work isn’t going to help anything, but to be honest, I feel SO much better doing it that I’ll probably be a better salesman when I’m done writing this. To me this is therapy without the expense. I know what you’re saying: “if you’re that miserable, do something else.” Well, I’m trying and you’re fucking reading it.

There are things at all of our jobs that we don’t like, but the truth is that JUST getting through life is a hard job. Keeping a marriage together, raising children, maintaining friendships…it’s ALL work. But it’s something that we HAVE to do in order to feel like we’re making a difference, even in our own sphere of existence.

Some people tend to take work WAY to seriously, work is life and vice versa, you have to enjoy what you do people. If your job sucks? Find a way to make it more interesting. Otherwise you’ll end up single and miserable…like me! Life is a random series of events that culminated in YOU being the chick that manually masturbates chimps for artificial insemination…if you can’t laugh at THAT? Well I hear my company is looking for a new Regional Manager.

Just do all of us who work in the service industry a favor and be a better customer. KNOW what the fuck you need before you shop someplace. Don’t come in and say I need that thingy with a hook on it. Do some fucking research for chrissake. I’ve been shopping for YEARS, and I NEVER talk to anybody but the checkout clerk when I ‘m telling her that I don’t want to give her my fucking DNA sequence so I can get a free Best Buy soap dispenser. And DON’T shop on holidays. Do you know why people have to work ‘til 7PM on the fucking Fourth of July? Because some jag off is going to be sitting drunk in his lawn chair with bruised knuckles from hitting his wife because he thought it would be a great fireworks joke to make her see stars after she didn’t bring him his beer fast enough, and remember at 6:45 that he needs a fuse for the floor mat light in his 92 Buick Popeye. Then next year my company is going to say “well, we’d let you leave at 5…but last year you had a sale at 6:59.” Fuck you.

Look, I come into my jag off existence at work every day and I do the dance because I don’t own the company, I probably don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about, but mostly because they pay me to do their bidding. But I’ll tell you this much…thank god for freedom of speech because I will defend YOUR right to talk shit about your job to my death.



End