This month’s trip into the AJnet Archives: An unfinished article about a bad day I had.
I used to work with a guy who would always say “There aren’t any bad days, just bad moments.” That guy was a drug-addicted idiot who was usually hopped up on coke and boner pills. I get what he was going for, but it doesn’t change the fact that people do indeed have bad days.
I’ve had plenty of bad days in my nearly four decades on this planet. As I’ve gotten older I’ve had less of them, but some of the ones I’ve had still reside in my memories, waiting to suddenly resurface at random inopportune moments, like during Zoom meetings with clients or when I’m trying to fall asleep. Seriously, what’s up with that shit? I know I’m not the only one who experiences this. I’ll be laying there trying to sleep and suddenly I’ll remember the time my high school crush embarrassed me by putting me on blast in front of everyone, or the time I went for a handshake when the other guy was going for a fist bump. It’s weird, and I’m not sure why we engage in this bizarre form of self-flagellation.
Anyway, I’ve had a lot of bad days. This highly-exaggerated unfinished article was about one of them. I still remember this day fairly well, and it wasn’t the worst day I’d ever had. Hell, it wasn’t even in the top ten worst days I’ve had. I honestly don’t even know why I felt the need to write about it, I guess that’s why I never bothered to finish it.
Most of this “day from hell” took place at my supermarket deli job, which I was only about one year into. I hadn’t become a manager yet, I was just a young and stupid punk in his early 20’s whose only concerns were where the next drink and lay were coming from. While a lot of this was exaggerated for entertainment purposes, there’s enough truth to it to hold myself accountable for responding to certain situations like an immature idiot.
This is “My Day from Hell, originally started in September of 2011.
On a cold December morning, I walked to work while rocking out to some Iron Maiden on my brand new MP3 player. I was fucking jamming, stopping as I crossed busy streets to play some air guitar riffs, much to the dismay of some asshole who started screaming at me and honking his horn like I gave a shit. He called me a “Fuckin’ crackhead yo”. I responded with “YOU’LL TAKE MY LIFE BUT I’LL TAKE YOURS TOO. YOU’LL FIRE YOUR MUSKET BUT I’LL RUN YOU THROUGH.”, then proceeded to bang on his hood while screaming and headbanging. He didn’t do anything except shake his head and drive off like the fucking pussy he was.
So I walked through the front doors of the store I work at, now jamming to Pat Benatar. I guess my rendition of “Hell is for Children” was awesome, because everyone in the area stopped and stared at me in awe. This one hot chick looked at me, whispered something to her friend, and they both giggled. Aw fuck yeah man, today was going to be a good day. As I walked by them I did my best Fonzie impression. They giggled even harder.
I had about 15 minutes before my shift started, so I went to one of the employee break areas and continued rocking out. I’m about half way through Benatar’s killer cover of “Helter Skelter”, when some dumb ass fucking customer comes up and starts moving her lips while looking at me. Are you serious bitch? There’s like 6 other employees sitting right there, and you’re going to ask the guy with big-ass audiophile-ish headphones who’s lip-syncing song lyrics and thrashing his head around like a lunatic? And then, this bitch has the NERVE to get annoyed when I’m forced to remove my headphones and ask her to repeat her query for where the women’s restroom was (literally 10 fucking feet away). Way to cramp my fucking style, bitch. I swear some of these people just go out of their way to do these things.
And that was the start of the day from hell.
After clocking in and spending 10 minutes navigating through the crowd of slow-ass fat people to walk the 20 feet to the deli, I saw the department manager and a couple of corporate-looking suits. Desk jockies, probably looking for more impractical ways to change our operations. Fuck, now I actually had to do something productive and not putz off. So I began calling numbers. After calling 41 three times and receiving naught but vacant stares, I started calling 42. As 42 walked up to place his order, I hear a whiny voice yell “41! I’m 41!” As it turns out, 41 was one of the people standing there giving me a vacant look. Keeping in mind that those suits were still lurking somewhere, I responded politely: “I called 41 three times, m’am. You’ll be next.” Some accept that they fucked up and will wait patiently for the next person to wait on them, while others grumble a bit but still wait. This lady however fancied herself above such petty conventions as being civilized. “NO! I WAS RIGHT HERE! I SHOULDN’T HAVE TO WAIT! IT’S MY TURN!”
“M’am, I called your number THREE TIMES. Ask anyone else standing here. They heard me. You just looked at me. I’m sorry you didn’t hear me, but I’ve already begun waiting on this customer. You’ll be next.” She continued to prattle off with some bullshit about how I didn’t say her number clearly or slowly enough, and how she was “right there the whole time”. Jesus Christ bitch, calm the fuck down. “You just stared vacantly at me. How am I supposed to know what number you had?” You’d think I had just insulted her mother. “DON’T TALK TO ME LIKE THAT SIR. I SPEND THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS HERE AND-” “M’am, there’s no need to yell.” She began to squawk more. Surely the suits would take notice of this, and I would be fired and probably replaced by some crackhead or pill popper. But alas, another employee swooped in and saved the day, offering to wait on the evil monstrous hag. God bless you, Eugene.
One of the things we’re supposed to do is show the customer the first slice of whatever we’re cutting for them to ensure that it’s to their liking. Apparently, this is a “hallmark” of our particular franchise (and Walmart, and Wegman’s, and every other supermarket deli), and for some bizarre reason the store managers have been looking for every excuse to fire hard workers and replace them with drug addicts and ugly ghetto white bitches. While I have several other sources of income outside of my job, none of them guarantee me a steady paycheck each week. To support my expensive addiction of buying computer parts that I really don’t need off of NewEgg.com, it’s in my best interest to keep my job. As such, this means that I have to actually follow this rule and show that blind indecisive little old lady the first slice of her American cheese to reassure her that it is indeed wafer-thin.
Some people are just so ungrateful. I had four different customers express annoyance at me whenever I showed them the first slice of their meats and cheeses. The first and third customers said with exasperation “Whatever, I don’t care. Just cut it.” The second simply looked at me like I was an asshole and walked away. But the fourth person was perhaps the biggest fucking jerk-off of them all. He ordered four things: A pound of imported ham chipped, half a pound of beef bologna thin, a pound of American cheese thin, and half a pound of Swiss cheese thin. After chipping his ham, I showed him the first slice of his bologna. “Fantastic” he said while sarcastically clapping his hands. Resisting the urge to call him a prick, I followed the same procedure with the American cheese. This time he again sarcastically clapped his hands, then rolled his eyes and mumbled something to his girlfriend standing next to him. My tongue began to bleed, but until I knew those suits were gone, I still had to follow “procedure”. As I imagined myself standing over his mutilated corpse with a katana in my hand, I showed him the first slice of his Swiss cheese. This time, he yelled quite loudly “GOOD. GREAT. JUST CUT IT ALREADY.” I might have let this slide, if he didn’t follow it up with “Is he fucking retarded or what?” There are a few things you just don’t do in front of me, and calling someone else a retard while acting like an idiot yourself is one of them.
My first instinct was to tell him to go shove his cheese up his ass and get the fuck out of my store before I broke every bone in his body, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to provide justification for management to shit-can me and replace me with some junkie asshole who nobody will like. My people needed their brave and fearless leader. So instead I settled for cutting his Swiss cheese wafer-thin, and pressing the price tag onto the bag as hard as I could, guaranteeing that his Swiss cheese would be nothing more than a brick when he got it home. Wishing I could throw that Swiss cheese brick at his head, I handed it to him, put on my cheesiest (LOL BAD PUN) smile, and said “Thank you sir, have a great day!” He walked away mumbling shit under his breath. Fucking pussy.
I hadn’t seen the suits in an hour or so, so I went out from behind the deli counter to take a look around for them. I was distracted by two hot college girls looking at the pre-sliced cheese. As I fantasized about giving them a pound of hard salami, I was rudely brought back to Earth by some white trash piece of shit yelling over to his fat ass girlfriend. “HEY, COME CHECK OUT THIS HOT BAR!” Indeed, this meth-mouth piece of shit had not only procured a mate, but had already procreated with her. Stroller in tote, this bloated and corpulent heifer waddled to the hot bar. Knowing that food stamp cards don’t permit one to purchase hot foods, I became just a wee bit suspicious. I took up a position behind the cheese island, and watched them carefully. Sure enough, the meth mouth began “sampling” the hot bar items with his fingers. Fucking gross. As I prepared to pop out from behind the cheese island and physically subdue this thieving bastard, my saner coworker approached him and said “Sir, you can’t sample the hot bar.”
Man, this article is so full of bullshit that I’ve gotta throw on a nose plug.
This is Philadelphia. If I had actually banged on some random guy’s car I’d have been shot dead. My day did start with a guy almost hitting me in the crosswalk because he didn’t care to recognize that pedestrians have the right of way. I yelled at him, he stopped his car but didn’t get out, I told him to fuck off, and that was that. While he should have yielded to the pedestrian in the crosswalk, I was guilty of not paying attention when I started crossing, because I was too busy vibing to Iron Maiden. Two wrongs don’t make a right, even if pedestrians have the right of way when a car is making a right-hand turn.
I’m sure that I probably was jamming out to Pat Benatar when I walked through the front door of ShopRite. I had a bit of an obsession with her music at the time, thanks to an ex.
The part where a customer bothered me while I had headphones on wasn’t exaggerated, and that sort of thing happened constantly. ShopRite had a sit-down eating area for both customers and employees, located directly next to the entrance and the women’s restroom. I’d usually sit here before my shift started, as well as on break. It was amazing how many people would approach me while I had over-the-ear headphones on and try to ask me questions, usually “Where’s the women’s bathroom at?”. It was very fucking annoying. I got into so many arguments with customers over the years just because they chose to bother the one guy wearing headphones.
On this particular day, some people from the corporate office had decided to visit. I could probably write an entire article about the nonsense their visits usually involved. As I advanced up the company ladder I got the pleasure of dealing with them myself, particularly a woman named Carol. Carol was nice and well-intentioned (and kind of cute too), but she had a habit of not listening when we tried to explain why carrying certain products was a waste of money.
The thing with the numbers… Oh man, just reading that gave me PTSD. I have an entire article that I removed about the annoying things customers do at supermarket delis, maybe that’ll be next month’s AJnet Archives article.
The customer with the cheese ended up actually not being that bad of a guy, and we became cool to the point where he’d wait until I was available to cut for him. I guess he was just having a bad day that day.
People sampling the hot foods bar with their grubby little fingers was a recurring problem, and customers were prepared to fist fight you if you dared to call them out on it. When I became the assistant manager, I stopped saying stuff after the third time a customer screamed in my face and threatened to assault me. We had a loss prevention team, whose solution was always to “keep an eye on it”. Keeping an eye on the hot foods bar generally involved having Mario Kart tournaments on an N64 in the security room. Meanwhile my boss would demand to know why I personally didn’t go out and apprehend thieves. Sorry Mary, I guess I value my life? I really need to write an article about my time at ShopRite. I could probably turn it into a series.
A bunch more stuff happened that day, some of which I don’t readily recall. I remember getting caught checking out some guy’s wife, and a customer heard me curse on the deli line and told my manager right in front of the corporate suits. I wasn’t sent home, but I got chewed out disproportionately hard over it. Then after work I went to the liquor store to pick up a fifth of Captain Morgan, but the liquor store closed early for some reason (I think maintenance?). I ended up having to grab several 40’s of Miller Light, and after getting into an argument with the Chinese lady behind the counter over some nonsense law that said I couldn’t carry all four bottles out myself, I made it back to my friend’s basement where we got shitfaced on shitty beer and shots of Nikolai vodka. My shitty day ended with me puking my guts up, then passing out on my friend’s recliner.
So my “day from hell” was basically just a series of events that I overreacted to. I should have called myself “Knee_Jerk” instead of “Angry_Jerk”.
I’ll have to look around and see if I can find that article about working at a supermarket deli. If so, that’ll be next month’s AJnet Archives article for sure. I’m also considering starting a new series with stories from my time at ShopRite, so if that’s something you guys (and girls, we don’t discriminate here at AJnet) are interested in then let me know. Nine years in that dump has given me more than enough material.
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