Don't Call Me Shirley

A definite sign that I've been working too many frickin' hours at Albertsons.

 

I’ve never been the popular girl anywhere. I was always that kid in the background that just sort of blended into the wall. Every so often on school trips ever since kindergarten, the teacher would forget to call my name until she finally noticed me in the back of the line and finally marked me as present. Even last week when I was at a fast food joint, I came while it was busy so they had to call numbers. My order was sitting on the counter, the last in line of thousands of other bags, and a bored voice was calling numbers of all the orders that were ready.

 

“…fifty-seven, your order is ready…fifty-eight, your order is ready…fifty-nine, your order is ready…sixty, your order is ready…” I looked at my ticket stub as my stomach growled in impatient hunger, and noticed I was sixty-three. I waited patiently as sixty-one screamed in English that her order was wrong while the poor guy at the counter was desperately trying to explain to her in Spanish that he didn’t package the meals, that he just set them on the counter. Once the Tower of Babel was knocked down by the manager’s threatening the guy to get her order straight or he’d be fired, sixty-two got his meal. I waited in anticipation for my chicken Caesar salad.

 

“…sixty-four, your order is ready…sixty-five, your order is ready…” I waved my hand in the air.

 

“Excuse me!” I yelled. “Miss! You didn’t call my number! Miss!”

 

“…sixty-six, your order is ready…sixty-seven, your order is ready…sixty-eight, your order is ready…sixty-nine, your order is ready…”

 

“HEY!” I yelled. “YOU MISSED ME!” I felt someone’s elbow jut into my gut, and I gasped for air. I shoved through the crowd of people sitting by the counter to speed up the arrivals of their meals, and I snagged my bag, interrupting the bored announcer.

 

“…seventy-three your—hey, what’s your problem, get back here with that bag!” the announcer yelled. I hung on to my receipt and darted for the exit. They sprinkled chopped tomatoes all over my salad just as I told them not to.

 

When I got my first job at sixteen, I knew I didn’t have to say much because since my sister knew the manager from when she worked there before, I was practically hired. But even with that loud orange vest they made me wear that made me a walking fashion disaster, nobody really noticed me. Whenever anybody did notice me, they never called me by my real name. It’s not because I dislike my name or that I have a nickname, nobody really knew what my name was and didn’t bother to look at the nametag to find out. For some reason, they settled on a particular name for me.

 

“Jane, could you mop up that mess on aisle three?” Justin asked me one day. I would have asked him if he was talking to someone else except that he looked me straight in the eyes and asked his question. He walked away before I could tell him that I was late for lunch and that I’d get in trouble for clocking out for lunch late. After I mopped up the half digested yogurt a toddler had eaten before his mother paid for it, I was known as Jane from henceforth.

 

“Jane, can you cover me for my opening shift tomorrow?” Lillah asked me as I clocked out from closing the store at midnight.

 

“Jane, can you cover me for a half-hour on carts so I can go to lunch?” Harold asked me in the middle of an order.

 

“Jane, can you take this thirty-five pack of water to the store director in the back?” my one manager asked me right when I walked through the front door one morning. I don’t know how they arrived at that name—nobody had called me Jane before that incident, and I never referred to myself as Jane. Nevertheless, I began to respond to that name. If they called “Jane”, I knew they were talking to me. It was the first time I remember being in a situation where people were really forced to talk to me and regard my existence. Every other day I came to work, I would leave my nametag home to see if they would notice I wasn’t wearing it, and maybe then they’d learn my name. But “Jane” always fell out of their mouths whenever they talked to me, and there was a day that came that I never wore my nametag again.

 

I was comfortable working at that grocery store for about four months. In my early days, I overheard Lillah talking to another newcomer one morning about some of the duties we had around the store.

 

“There’s no real point in making the bathroom completely spotless,” Lillah told Nina. “You just go in there and at least make sure there isn’t paper all over the floor, so don’t worry if the floors dirty because the janitor is supposed to mop it up. It’s also normal for water to spray out of the toilet when it flushes, so don’t get flustered if there’s water all over the toilet and some on the floor too. And if there aren’t any more rolls of paper towels in the cabinet, don’t worry about refilling them, the janitor usually refills the cabinet with towels every hour too. Anyway, what happened last night on American Idol? I missed it because I had to work the late shift…” I knew that was a lie because I had to cover that shift for her the night before. But I was mentally taking notes, as long as it made my job easier. Nobody really was meticulous about the bathroom checks at our store, and thankfully, the customers didn’t care as long as the toilets had water, and I noticed that I never ever had to refill the soap dispenser.

 

One morning, I had completed a particularly nasty bathroom check, but once I felt that the bathrooms were in reasonable order, I signed both of the bathroom check cards and left. A customer bumped my shoulder and regarded me with a nasty glare.

 

“Watch where you’re going,” she snapped at me. I gave her a blank look and walked to a check stand to begin bagging groceries. While lost in my thoughts of being home, warm in my bed and dreaming about Matt Damon, I vaguely heard Lillah’s voice over the PA calling for my manager for “customer service”. My manager raced out, but I noticed she wasn’t going for any of the check stands but towards the back of the store. I didn’t really think twice about it before I heard my manager’s voice over the PA system.

 

“Attention all courtesy clerks,” she said in an irritated voice over the PA. “I’d like to see all of you by the bathrooms, please.” All of the other courtesy clerks looked at each other with confused looks before walking to the bathrooms. I followed behind them and could barely see over the shorter courtesy clerks to see Lillah, my manager and the lady who had bumped into me earlier.

 

There was a little bit of blood trickling down the left side of her face, her sheer white blouse was soaked in water, one of her shoes were missing and there was something on her skirt that looked like the shadow of her butt, making it obvious that she slipped in something. Her face was scrunched up in the same kind of disgust I saw earlier. My manager opened her mouth to speak, but the lady got there first.

 

“You all should be ashamed of yourselves!” she screeched. “This is the LAST time I will come to this store after I’ve seen what pigs you all are! You leave your bathrooms dirty and disgusting! You leave paper all over the floors and splash your toilets all over the place! I tripped on a paper toilet seat cover and hit the toilet handle and water got ALL over me! When I finally got up to try to wash myself off, the soap dispenser burst open and soap got all over the floor, and when I tried to reach over for a paper towel, I slipped and fell on the floor! Only to find out to my trouble that there were no paper towels left in the paper towel dispenser! And when I opened the cabinet to find more paper towels, all the paper towel rolls fell out and buried me! You all should be ashamed of yourselves, and I want to know which one of you disappointing excuses of a worker left that bathroom in such a horrible mess because I want you fired! I saw one of you leaving the bathrooms, you must have left the bathrooms like that! Where are you?!” The rest of the courtesy clerks stepped back in fear from the fire in her eyes as she searched angrily for the culprit. My heart began to beat a little faster before my manager led her away to the front-end office to begin paperwork for her injury and to regale her story to the rest of the managers. Slowly, we all walked back to the check stands we had previously abandoned before I heard my manager calling me over the PA to come to the office. I pushed my heart back down my throat and to my chest and knocked on the manager’s door before it opened and I was ushered in. The lady still had a severely disgusted look on her face, but it burned into rage when she saw me. The lady stood up and pointed her bony finger at me.

 

“It was YOU!” she screamed. “I bumped into you on my way to the bathroom, you must have been the one to have messed up that bathroom! I’ve seen you before too! You’re that Jane girl, you did a carry-out with me one day! You’re the one who left that bathroom in a disorderly manner, I want her fired!” Cold sweat poured out of my pores as I struggled to find words to defend myself. How could I tell her that I had seen the bathroom left in worse conditions and that my fellow coworkers’ bathroom checks were a lot worse than mine? How could I tell her that there was actually s**t on the floor, which I cleaned up off the floor right before she showed up? How could I tell her that if she jiggled the lever on the paper towel dispenser, the full roll that had just been loaded into it would have worked and given her paper? All of those explanations were congealed in my throat when I barely heard my manager speak.

 

“We have no Jane at this store, ma’am,” my manager said calmly. “As you can see by our list of employees from each department, we have no one by that name. You must be mistaken, because we don’t have anyone here named ‘Jane’ on any of our records.” I gaped at my manager before the lady went off the handle again before the security guard came in and escorted her out. When the door closed again I turned my head back to my manager after watching the lady get shoved out of the door. My manager could have pulled out the security tapes and she would have seen that I had indeed bumped into the lady by the bathrooms. I knew I was scheduled to do a bathroom check for that hour and so did she. I tried to speak.

 

“She’s a b***h anyway,” my manager said. “This one time, she clobbered me with a gallon of milk when I tried to help her get it out of her cart and told me to watch what I was doing. Good riddance to her.” My manager never bothered me about wearing a nametag before, and I knew she wasn’t going to after this incident either.

Reviews

[DarkAngelWriter]

LMAO!

Oh my God! That's amazing!

But ew... if I ever come to your store, you're driving me to the nearest gas station to pee :D

[Crystal Lynn]

OMG. Love it. I can definitely relate to the narrator and her voice just not being heard. My science teacher in eighth grade called me Cheryl (my name's Crystal) for a year straight. It's in my yearbook that way >_< My driver's ed teacher called me Sybill and/or Courtney all year and half the time I was Brittney to my math teacher, so I get it. It was amazing they way you wrote it. I've dealt with bitchy people like that, too. I'm a server, and trust me, it's way worse when they're hungry ;)


You can really tell a story. It was captivating and hilarious and such a real life piece of writing. I like your voice; you seem to tell it like it is with a very simple view of the world. Like I said, love it; simply love it. Great job.


Oh man. Soap dispenser? Gnarly >_< (and probably true)