Our story starts when I decided to finally attend a post-secondary educational institute after a year of being out of high school. I moved from the little nowhere town in which I'd spent the past ten years, back to the city of Toronto and immediately started looking for supplementary work. For further background, see "The Horny Creek Chronicles, I".
To make a long and really unimportant story short, I used to work for a Horny Creek store located closer to that small Ontario town in which I grew up (but in which I must make absolutely clear I was not born). It was a boring, uneventful job that was not worth the money I spent taking a bus to attend. However, it was the only prior retail experience I had when I arrived in Toronto, so I figured, rather than waste my valuable time (har har) running around and applying for positions I'd likely have to work to maintain, I would just drop off a resume at Horny Creek (New Money Mall location) and wait for the inevitable re-hiring to occur.
It's a well-known fact that Horny Creek, like many retailers who hire under-age mouth-breathers to sell garbage to other under-age mouth-breathers, cycles through employees faster than some people go through clean underwear. There's a revolving-door policy in effect which stresses the hiring of bodies to fill positions on the floor, rather than hiring people who have some degree of competence - or at least an IQ level which comfortably exceeds that of the average goldfish. The result of this policy, of course, is the hiring of a continuous flow of sixteen year-old high school dropouts who smoke way too much pot and spend most of the time on the floor yanking their droopy-ass pants up from around their knees and talking to their loser friends on their Raspberries or whatever. These Darwinian exceptions are usually fired within two weeks of being brought on, to be replaced in short order by more just like them, and on and on into the annals of retail history.
Therefore, if a former employee who previously showed a penchant for following orders with a reasonable degree of accuracy (and who doesn't mind working for peanuts) returns seeking a job, and has not recently committed any federal offences they're willing to admit to, the policy is to basically re-hire him or her on-the-spot.
This is precisely what happened to me: I was re-hired by a District Manager called "Mary" approximately three minutes into my interview. I could have picked Mary out as a Horny Creek DM from a veritable line-up of corporate drones. It wasn't just her pasty face and hollow cheeks. It wasn't the way her mousey hair hung down in tired strands like defeated blades of grass. Mostly, it was due to her excitable (read: cocaine-addled) facade of a personality, and the light of false hope for advancement that shone in her eyes like Christmas lights from a redneck porch in July. An equal giveaway was her fanatical dedication to the company that would inevitably bend her over a counter, roll up the stock options she never did receive regardless how many times they were promised, and proceed to...to fire her. This dedication was easily observable by the sheer volume of prepackaged company propaganda that spewed from her well-meaning but ultimately vexing talk-hole. The conversation went something like this.
Mary: So you used to work *twitch* for Horny Creek at another of our sixty-five fine locations across Canada?
Al: Yes ma'am, I worked as a part-timer for store #(XXX) for six months.
Mary: (absolutely horrified) It says here *twitch twitch* that you voluntarily resigned from that position! Do you mind telling me why??
Al: Well, I had just finished high school and needed a full-time job, but at the time they weren't able to offer me those kinds of hours.
Bullshit. The assistant manager of that store was a meth'd-out psychosis poster-child who hated me because I was far more capable of doing her job than she was, mostly because I wasn't stealing out of the cash register every second sale in order to get out of giving blowjobs to large angry white men in exchange for powdered glass. She didn't have any real excuse to fire me because my three-month probationary period was up, and I was selling on average $400.00 worth of clothing every time they threw me the obligatory three-hour shift (did I mention I wasn't getting hours? More on the poor treatment of part-timers later), so she just made sure I came last on the list of people who got the budgeted hours per week, basically railroading me into quitting. But I wasn't going to tell Mary that. Particularly because at this point, Mary looked as though she'd hit the three o'clock wall and needed another line to make it through the next thirty-five minutes.
Mary: I'm sorry to hear that *snort, wipe*, but it's all right now, because you're back with the company! And I can't tell you how happy that makes me! Your sales record is extraordinary for someone your age, and we really *twitch arm shake twitch* look forward to you bringing your skills to our 'hood!
I wish I was joking, but she really said 'hood. In fact, I think if there was a comic dialogue bubble over her head, she might have pronounced skills with a "z". Did I mention this woman was whiter than an albino Stephen Morrissey?
Al: Great. Thanks. When do I get started?
Mary: Well, right now we don't have an opening at this particular location *eye twitch*but let me tell you something dawg - I'm going to have an opening for a third-key position here at the New Money store within about three weeks, so what I'm going to do with you just for now - just for now, mind - is place you over at the Beggar's Market location, 'cause we're really really excited about re-opening our warehouse store, and I want you to be a part of it!!!
Beggar's Market is a pseudonym for a stretch of warehouse outlet stores that runs the length of a four-block street not far from New Money. Most of the major-label companies have locations along there where they basically sell off last season's castaway shit and damaged products at bottom-rung prices, to predominantly white-trash families looking for a deal because they'd rather spend the extra welfare cash on cases of Molson Canadian and cartons of DuMaurier Lights than their children, or to recent immigrant families who either don't have the money to buy clothes off the shelf, or they think they're still in a country where bartering is an accepted form of goods exchange. Most of these places will let their employees get away with a little haggling, particularly when the product in question is a Nike-brand sweater that some careless part-timer sliced damn near in half with a box-opener, meaning they can't sell it on the shelves anyway. Yes, Beggar's Market: where fashion comes to die.
And this is where they wanted to place me: the Horny Creek Warehouse Outlet, located four full city blocks' walk farther than the bus stop for New Money, and conveniently right across the street from our parent company's Head Office. Fuckin' great.
Al: So this is only going to be a temporary placement, right? I'm not going to be stuck selling faulty jeans and misprinted teeshirts to Jethro and Cleetus for the whole year, right?
Mary: Oh, absolutely *shudder shudder* not! Trust me my man, I want you in New Money just as soon as I can clear the *jump jump* paperwork. In the meantime, you start Monday. Go see "Shawna" the manager at 7:30AM sharp! Kick it to the rhythm, Gee!
Apart from that being one of the most thoroughly ridiculous conversations to which I'd ever in my life been privy, I was now faced with the prospect of at least a month's worth of moving smelly returned clothing all over a poorly-ventilated, superheated warehouse for the express purpose of selling it off at five bucks apiece, piece-by-piece, to sweaty, deal-mongering troglodytes and pushy, obnoxious people that don't even speak English. But, with the promise of that magical third-key position (read: more responsibility, same pay) looming just within reach, I manfully accepted my new position and, at the crack of fucking Dawn on Monday morning, set out with my eyes full of hope (or at least sleep-goo) towards my first assignment.
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