So I’m sitting in my car at work on Thursday, harming no one, eating my bacon cheeseburger (health food!) and I hear my phone ring…’Rikki Don’t Lose That Number, It’s the Only One you Want (or Own, depending on what you hear), You can use if you feel better, when you get hooome’
Who the hell is calling me on my cellphone? Weird!
It was one of my mystery shopping companies asking me to do an emergency merchandising thing at a grocery store a few miles from my house. “Don’t those usually have to be done during the day?” I ask – I’ve been offered this job before and I always hold up my day job as a shield to keep from having to just say no. “Yeah, but we’re desperate, so you can do it Saturday!”
A completely stupid lightbulb goes off over my head. “Actually, I can do it tomorrow afternoon” at my company, we have 1/2 day Fridays off every other week if we make up the time, which I have done. Yesterday was my 1/2 day Friday.
Which is how I ended up in the stock room of a grocery store trying to assemble this huge, heavy DVD display. The unit was still in a cardboard box when I got there (the stockroom guys were kind enough to move about 10,000 pallets of Tide, cat food and paper towels so I could get to the damned thing). I had expected (like a dumbass) that the display unit would already be on the sales floor and that I would just have to restock it and the whole thing would take 5 minutes. Noooo. I write this last part because I want to explain why I had no box cutters or scissors or ANYTHING to use to open the giant box with the display in it.
In retrospect, if I’d had box cutters, I probably would have used them to slit my wrists after about 5 minutes.
Anyway, it all worked out. The end result is now on the grocery store sales floor. The manager was kind enough to help me out a little. I have a new appreciation for manual labor and a new “Worst job ever” story for when that is a topic of conversation.
I was already out the door before I remembered I’d left some very large, unwieldy pieces of cardboard on the floor of the stockroom. And, since it is 150 degrees in Cheesecake City (157 degrees, heat index) there was not a chance in hell I was going back in there.