Ultimate Christmas

1.23.2008

Christmas day. Its snowing/sleeting. A group of crazy people have dressed up like elves and are playing ultimate frisbee with heavy metal music in the background. Rock on Santa Claus!


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Pictures at Powell's

1.16.2008







Alisha and I never manage to look good in the same pictures,
which is probably because the camera could not handle
the combined power of our fabulous attractiveness.
Griff, on the other hand, always looks nice. Bastard.

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Grow a Pair

1.14.2008

“Is anyone actually going to help me over here?” A woman asks me, speaking loudly across the candy aisle. “I’ve been waiting for twenty minutes to ask someone questions about treadmills and no one has even talked to me.”

I say that I will page someone and do so immediately. The guy that works that department is the typical no neck macho man. He wrestled in Division I, until he got in a fight with his coach and dropped out of college. As he carries a punching bag to someone’s car I tell him, “There’s woman who’s been waiting to ask some questions. Could you help her when you get back?” He nods and looks over. “Which one?” I point, “The lady with the green shirt on.”

The woman comes back to the cash register ten minutes later, and she’s furious. “I have been waiting a long time and then your associate guy walks right past me and helps a man who just got here.” She moved towards the door, speaking loudly, “I don’t have to take this!”

I wanted to feel compassion for her but all I could think was, At least you don’t have to work here.

Most of the women in the store work as cashiers or in apparel. I find being a cashier a bit demeaning. All that forced perkiness is exhausting. “You want to sound happy and cheerful,” my manager told me. “Make the customers feel special.” To me, if somebody needs the cashier at a sports store to make them feel special, they might also need therapy.

I think being consistently happy has a bad effect on your hairline. My female manager, a woman in her mid thirties, attempts a high pony tail so tight that it appears her hair is receding and her face along with it. Picture an overweight, white Janet Jackson. She trained the cashiers and demonstrated for us how we are to greet people. In a high girly voice she squeaks, “Well how are you today? Welcome. Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.” I think she scares the customers. Her face has become skull-like, permanently fixed with a smile like one of those scary clowns in horror movies.

I can’t blame her, I disintegrate in the same way. After eight hours of being upbeat, putting sugar and happiness into my voice, I begin to feel that I will soon lapse into a diabetic coma. There is one male cashier. He had to fill in when the head cashier went on maternity leave. “I hate this,” he moans. “I should have kicked her in the stomach before she left so that I wouldn’t have to work up here.” He’s joking, I think.

That’s a rough space to navigate, the “I think” territory. The head cashier had her baby on Black Friday--the biggest shopping day of the year. “That’s so selfish,” the senior manager complained. “Couldn’t she have put it off or something?” He’s kidding, I think.

But I wouldn’t put it pass him to be serious. I don’t think there’s much he wouldn’t do to his employees if it meant a higher profit or made him feel more powerful. I once had to scrape glue off a printer. A printer that no one even looks at. So I began rubbing at it with goo gone and a rag, scratching at it with my fingernails. It took me forty minutes to get the sticky mess off. All the while, he was talking and throwing footballs with my male coworkers.

“I think my dog is afraid of me,” he told me. “Him and everybody else,” I respond. I said that, really. Out loud. I dream up a lot of snippy little comments, but rarely let them leave my brain. He laughed and looked at me with a face that said, She’s kidding, I think.

I wasn’t really kidding, but don’t tell my boss. No one likes him, not even the males who get preferential treatment from him. In my store, every promotion has gone to a male. And the commissioned departments are staffed almost exclusively by males. This means that, despite the fact that I work harder than all of them, the men get payed more than I do.

And the manager has covered his ass well. I’m not promoting men because they are male, he could say. I’m promoting them because they have more expertise in these areas. The thing is, these men didn’t come in with more expertise than the women, they went through courses that taught them this knowledge. I have asked several times over the past three months to be trained, but I’m told that there is no company budget for it.

Being trained is a bit overrated anyways. A woman I work with has been the unofficial apparel and footwear manager for three months. She knows where everything goes, how to arrange displays, and actively communicates with the vendors over stock. So when it came time to promote someone to Soft-lines manager the position went to, you guessed it, a male. A male who knows nothing about these departments. He shadowed me for a couple of days to see what needed to be done. Me, the lowest level of the retail food chain, and I showed him how to do his job. I actually had to teach him how to fold.

In his defense, he does have a penis. I wore a softie to work a couple days to see if it would help. In case you don’t know, a softie is a sock or an actual fake penis that women wear in their pants for a variety of reasons. Some women find it empowering; I found it difficult to cross my legs. It was annoying to wear but when my boss started yelling at me, I did have the pleasure of thinking, At least my penis is bigger than yours.

My softie did not improve my job prospects, and so I abandoned the project. It turns out that other people have to know that you have a penis for it to work to your advantage.


Its not that being male is the only thing you can leverage in our store, being cute helps too. A new girl just got hired on in apparel. Within a week, she was promoted to cash lead. She has worked at the register all of three times. “I think the head manager is attracted to her,” one of the women in lower level management told me. “She was supposed to be hired on just for the holiday season, but he’s going to keep her full time.”

He did hire her full time. I’ve been working at the store for four months, but this girl gets more hours than me. I began thinking: Am I not attractive enough? Should I do my hair differently? Does my butt look big in my uniform? Then I realized that I was worrying about how I look to a man I have no intention of sleeping with.

Let me repeat: I have no intention whatsoever of sleeping with my manager. The way he tromps around the store, I have no doubt that he’s into BDSM. While I don’t judge others for this lifestyle, wearing a leather studded collar gives me a rash.

And for all the coaching we’re given on being friendly, he is actually quite rude to customers.

“We can’t refund you your money,” he snaps. “You have no way of proving that the item was damaged before you bought it.”

The customer is obviously intimidated but she doesn’t leave. “I didn’t do anything with it. It was like that when I opened the box.”

Normally returns of this kind are processed with out a problem, but this customer bought a high dollar item and my boss doesn’t want to lose the money. “I’ll make some calls,” he says and walks off.

After he is out of ear shot, I mouth to the woman, “I’m sorry.” She mouths back, “Thanks.”

I was proud of her for standing her ground. It's a tough thing to do. A friend of mine actually consulted a civil rights lawyer about the store. Then she wrote an anonymous letter to the district manager. She never got a response but the head manager asked one of the women to inform him if anything was “going on that he needed to know about.”

“I’m not going to rat anyone out,” she told him.

“Yeah,” he said, patting her shoulder. “Just tell me if, you know, you hear anything interesting.”

I thought of a few “interesting” words to say myself after I heard this. For a while, a lot of the women in the store were on edge. Who did they think sent the letter? Would we get in trouble? It turns out that there was no need to worry, management had already decided who had sent the letter. She works in footwear, and she’s butch. “We think she would be the most bitter,” a manager told me.

Not that she wouldn't have good reason to feel this way. I had heard statistics of women getting paid less than men on average, but now the point is hammered home. If this happens at my one store, I can't imagine how many times it happens nationwide. I'm beginning to feel a little bitter myself.

I try not to let it get to me too much. At least, if it does get to me, I take it out on the lazy male employees. I'm in apparel now and it requires the most work. So every night I run around like crazy, trying to make sure everything gets done. My male coworkers complain. We’re so bored, they say. There’s nothing to do. I offer them things in my department. "You can zip up coats if you want," I tell them. "Or fold these shirts." They tell me that they’re not quite that bored.

I take down signs. I dress mannequins. I clean up the mess left by customers. I never stop moving. As we’re packing up for the night, one of the boys moans, “The manager says we have to set this ad tomorrow morning. I hate having to do that, it takes like 45 minutes.”

“Oh, come on,” I tell him. “Grow a pair.”

Or at least stuff a sock down your pants.

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This is even more offensive

1.07.2008

Than the racial profiling I'm told to do on my job.








You'll have to forgive me for ripping off Aaron Mesh's comments on Josiah's blog, but it was just too funny.

I like how the ad implies that Rudy is going to kick the living shit out of those Muslim children.

Also he's going to go back in time and prevent the Bhutto assassination. He's just tough like that.

Posted by: mesh

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