High School Work Flashback

[kybearfuzz]

I love working a day out at the feed mills. They're short visits and generally you get to see really cute, furry farm boy types, like today's object of lust -- brown hair, reddish-brown goatee, chestnut eyes, fur rolling out of his tee-shirt collar, broad shoulders, hairy arms, and dirty, ripped, tight jeans around a butt that was used to squatting to pick up those feed bags. Sigh... :)

While back at the office, I was talking with a co-worker about how I worked retail Thanksgiving Day and the day after while in high school. It was such a bizarre mix of people working there and I recalled that for my first actual job, it was something of a madhouse...

My senior year in high school I started working at Roses Department Store as a stocker. Think of Roses like a KMart, one that pretty much got wiped out by the Wal-Mart invasion in the early 1990's. They were mostly in the Southeast of the country, so if you've never heard of it, I'm not surprised.

Over the next year, I moved up to salesperson, service desk, and even the coveted office person/layaway guy. All in the evening shifts. The people who worked there were right out of Saturday Night Live (back when it was funny). We had one young married manager who was screwing nearly every girl in the place. We had one girl who was screwing nearly every guy in the place. Occasionally, they screwed each other. We had people who stole, people who cheated, and people on dope. And these weren't just the college and high school students, but the day shift folks as well.

The stories I know of could literally write themselves: the vaseline in the hair of the office pothead, the cashier in electronics who literally wet herself behind the register, the lesbian love affair of the layaway girl and the chick in cosmetics, the horror of cleaning the women's restroom (I suffered that one more times than I care to recount), the cashier who found herself pregnant after a brief affair with an underage stock boy (no, not me! ewww!), the Tammy Johnson Maybe Baby (it ranks up there with Bigfoot and Nessie -- no real photographic proof), the manager who was fired for stealing money from the cash register bags because "he needed to feed his children," the guy who lost his cash register bag somewhere between the office and the front of the store, the associate who stole a boat by walking it out the front door (like it stuck to his shoe), and the mystery of the perpetually missing name tags (a secret I shall take to my grave).

Sadly, the store went out of business and sold several stores to private owners. One still exists in Somerset, KY, I have pictures. The two in my hometown (yes, we had two!) are now a Kroger's grocery store and a JCPenney's. In looking back, I'm not so sure that Wal-Mart was the major cause of Roses demise so much as the people who worked there.

Comments

[kybearfuzz.livejournal.com]

It was a strong influence to go to college after working there for a year, that's for sure.