The Horny Creek Chronicles, III: Welcome to Hell, Now Pitch A Tent

The morning I arrived at the Horny Creek Warehouse location, my new boss was a full forty-five minutes late. I walked up to the front doors around 7:15 (an abysmally early time of day, in my opinion, that shouldn't exist unless you haven't gone to bed yet) and, given I didn't have a key, I was forced to sit around on wet concrete waiting for Her Highness to show up.

I was desperately trying to stave off smoking a cigarette; it's been suggested to me in the past that some people don't have the same appreciation for tar and nicotine that I have, and I wanted to make a good first impression. Keep in mind: this was a few years back, when I still gave a shit about things like that. But as time wore on and the sun kept rising, melting the morning dew on the lawn into noxious clouds of the Toronto ass-gas that passes for "mist", I eventually decided that if she was going to be this late on my first day, then it was she who had made the bad impression and not yours truly. So I lit up and was just enjoying my very first drag of the day on my sweet, sweet cancer stick, when true to form a beat-up Subaru pulled into the parking lot. There are few things that irritate smokers more than being interrupted mid-smoke and having to throw the rest away (those things are expensive), and so I was understandably irked by her untimely arrival.

"Shawna" came running up the walkway - smoking a cigarette, much to my continued irritation - and apologized profusely for her tardiness. I noticed that she was carrying a Tim Horton's coffee and bagel, and resisted the urge to point out the fact that if she hadn't stopped for breakfast (which I had foregone in the interest of being on time) my ass mightn't be as wet as it was now. She unlocked the door, disarmed the ADT system (which I would later discover was a complete goddamn sham - there was absolutely nothing worth stealing in this place) and immediately directed me to start moving large units full of shirts and pants outside and onto the patio that fronted the warehouse.

Al: Wait - outside?

Sh: Yeah, what's the problem?

Al: Why are we moving the clothing outside? Isn't that sort of inviting people to make off with the merchandise?

Sh: Oh no, see, you'll be spending the day outside, selling to passersby. So it'll be part of your job to see that no one steals anything.

What the fuck? "Selling to passersby"? What is this, the Agrabah Bazaar? Do I get a
megaphone?

Al: So how many of these units need to be moved out there?

Sh: We usually move about fifteen or so onto the patio for the day.

I paused at this point to take stock of the "units". Basically, when a retailer refers to a
unit, they're talking about those large, often cumbersome metal constructs on which you'd hang thirty or forty shirts, or pairs of jeans or whatever. They're usually round and have a T-shaped base to them. If they're good quality, the base has rollers to make moving them around a store easier and more efficient. Guess what level of quality these were?


Al: These units are falling apart. Half of them don't have arms to hang things on, and it looks like none of them actually have rollers.

Sh: Oh, I know. What you have to do is take all the clothes off the units first, put on the extra arms that we keep in a box in the back, move the units outside, bring the clothes outside and then put everything back on again.

She couldn't be serious. Arms in a box in the back? By the time I got all that finished it would be damn near time to bring them all back in again. Which reminded me:

Al: You know it's supposed to rain today, right?

Sh: Oh, that's okay, what we'll do then is put up the tent.

Al: Wait - the tent?

This is the Agrabah Bazaar.

Sh: Yeah, we keep a tent in the back so that if it rains we only have to bring the units in that won't fit under the tent.

Al: How many units fit under the tent?

Sh: About five or so.

Al: Let me get this straight. We're going to completely strip down fifteen units full of clothing -

Sh: And two tables. For the teeshirts.

Al: - And two tables for the teeshirts. We're going to move them all outside, where it will doubtless be raining in an hour, but that's okay because we can put up a tent that should cover about five units -

Sh: Minus the teeshirt tables.

Al: - minus the teeshirt tables, and then we'll have to take all the rest of it down again and move it inside.

Sh: Just until it stops raining.

Al: Until it -

Sh: Yeah, Head Office likes to see us have as much product as possible outside for the customers to be attracted by, for as long as we can in a day. It really bumps up the sales.

Al: But who's going to be shopping outside if it's raining?

Sh: That's why we wait until it stops and then we put it back!

Al: Right. Okay. So how many times a day are we supposed to do this? How long do we leave the stuff outside?

Sh: Well, we usually start moving things back in once it gets dark, but as long as there's a bit of light left Head Office wants those units out there and visible.

Al: So at the end of the night, once we've spent the day carting this stuff in and out, we have to take it all down in the dark?

Sh: Well, actually you have to take it down in the dark. I'll be gone by then.


There's this saying I heard somewhere once, something about the writing on the wall. If I was smart I would have told her to shove it and gone back home to my bed, where I probably could have caught a few more hours of sleep and woken up at a more reasonable time. But in my youthful naivety I decided that somehow, this would be worthwhile.

So I got to work, hauling what amounted to rickety-ass sharp metal sculptures out onto the patio - sculptures which had to be placed just so because Head Office had sent us a "floor plan" to follow - and then dragging out piles of discounted merchandise to hang haphazardly on these crooked fucked-up units. The trick was to make sure you balanced the unit correctly: too many shirts hung on one side would cause the whole unit to keel over, and Head Office apparently frowned on dropping "THE PRODUCT" on the ground. Here's a hint you dipshits: if you don't want your PRODUCT to make contact with concrete, leave it the fuck inside.

The really fun part was when an overburdened unit would fall over of its own accord when I wasn't looking, and then hit a second unit which would also fall over, hitting a third unit which would fall over, and before I knew it the domino effect had taken out my entire "floor plan". This actually happened several times in the first day alone. Twice, it was due to some asshole's misbehaved kids dodging in and out of the units and hiding in the shirts and whatnot until one of them tackled the other and took out half the storefront. The funny part was it was the same kids both times. I eventually got fed up and told their dad to get his fucking ankle-biters out of my hair, and alluded to the fact that he might have more luck controlling them if he beat them more regularly. He acted all offended and stalked off down the street. Whatever, good riddance.

My absolute favourite was when my earlier estimation of the state of the units was proven correct: about mid-day, the unit holding all the silly-ass wide-leg jeans (a pair of which weighs in around seventy pounds: and we wonder why these wigger's pants are always falling off) utterly collapsed under the combined pressure. Seriously, the metal arms ripped right off the main trunk of the unit and hit the ground collectively, nearly crushing some woman's Shitzu to death in the process. I was ordered to take the devastated unit into the back room, colloquially known as the Fixture Graveyard, and try to find some other broke-down piece of shit that looked vaguely sturdy enough to take the weight.

The other Head Office "requirement" which would serve to make a term in the funny farm look like a vacation compared to this job, was the need for music to "attract" patrons. While this sounds like a good idea on paper, there were two major problems with the equation.

a) The sheer size and magnitude of the speaker system. The warehouse was of course not fitted with an internal sound system like most mall stores would be, so the powers that be decided it would be a good idea to purchase the largest speakers in history to put outside our door and blast music through them at 9000 decibels to try to get people to come in and look around. I don't know enough about electronics to tell you what the wattage was or anything, but I can tell you that each of the two speakers stood almost as tall as me (I'm close to being an even 6 feet) and were significantly wider. Anyone that managed to make it to the door at all was a step ahead of the game: the speakers were so set loud that my rib cage would actually start to vibrate in time with the bass line anytime I happened to step into their event horizon, which extended about ten feet from the actual heads. I observed several small children stepping too close and being blown halfway across the street by the bald-faced power of these stupid things.

b) The utter shit festival of music we were required to play. I mentioned in an earlier post that Horny Creek used to sell to the mid-20s crowd, and at that time we were allowed to play mostly mid-90's alternative rock and even some classic rock from time to time, which is more than palatable to me. Not so at good old Beggar's Market. The Head Office pencil-heads decided that middle-of-the-road modern music didn't fit the demographic they were trying to target in this area, so we were given three CDs which we were allowed - nay, required - to play ad nauseum all day, every day: "Best of the 80's, Vol. 2", "YTV Party Zone, Vol. 3" and "Random Wal-Mart Gangsta Rap Mix" (I say Wal-Mart because all the naughty words were edited out - kind of funny when half the song turns into an instrumental that way). To this day, I'd rather plunge electric carving knives into my ears than listen to Soft Cell, 50 Cent or that goddamn asinine Hamster Dance. If I never hear "I Come From A Land Down Under" again for as long as I live, it'll be too fucking soon.

Needless to say, this musical ploy sort of served the opposite function to what it was intended: after enough people had been blasted in the face to the point where they incurred permanent ear damage from this aural Howitzer, customers avoided our mini-Block Party like the plague. Kind of good, kind of bad: less customers equaled happier me, but it didn't save me from exposure to this noise pollution each and every shift I worked.

Finally, around two o'clock, the sky clouded over and the thunder started. It didn't immediately start raining, but you could smell that fishy aroma in the air that signifies Toronto precipitation on the way. The shoppers all over the street scattered like cockroaches, trying to find shelter from the approaching March shower - it was kind of funny to watch, because really, I know that Toronto rain smells like shit and irritates your skin a little, but it's still just water falling from the sky. It's not as though we're about to be rained down upon by meteors or scissors or something. Bunch of wusses.

The smell of rain prompted Shawna to order me to put up the tent. After I hauled in all the units that wouldn't be sheltered, I wheeled out the hijacked grocery buggy that doubled as the tent storage unit (amusingly enough, the only thing in the whole warehouse that actually had wheels) and started yanking out random poles. When I spread the actual fabric of the tent out on the lawn, I had to laugh. It looked like the Ringling Brothers had a yardsale. It was white and green striped and covered the better part of ten square meters. Judging by the smell and the random stains all over the white parts, I was pretty sure that vagrants had used it as bedding at some point in its operational life. All in all I was fairly certain that putting this tent up would serve to drive patrons away, perhaps even more than the godawful music had, but then I remembered that fully half our customers lived in trailers that probably smelled like this on a good day. So I went about setting up this tent.

To anyone who has ever tried to set up a tent that size without assistance: I applaud your efforts. It took me goddamn forever to get this stupid thing to stand up straight without collapsing on me and wrapping me in Eau d'Hobo canvas romance. It didn't help that several of the key poles were actually missing from the set, which prompted me to makeshift additional supports using castoff broken arms from units and a healthy amount of duct tape. By the time I finished I was fairly convinced the Little Tent That Could would probably withstand the impact of falling space debris without significant loss of structural integrity. It looked hideous, but it was functional. I hoisted the whole mess and half-walked, half-crawled over to the main patio where I stood it precariously over the remaining units (which had doubtless been picked through by thieving hoodlums while I was busy battling the tent), and collapsed on the pavement.

Much to no one's surprise, it was at this moment that the sun came back out and the clouds started to clear. I'm not even kidding. It sounds like something out of a bad Three Stooges routine, but I'm one hundred percent serious. It fucking sucked, and I remember being violently angry about it for the rest of the day.

At the end of the night, once my boss had finished doing whatever the hell it was she did all day, I threw the units back in the door, not really giving a fiddler's damn where they landed. I just about had to kick the tent to the ground and stuff it back into its grocery cart, because once it was up that fucker wasn't coming back down if I had anything to say about it.

With everything finally finished, I looked at my watch and saw that I was a full hour late leaving my shift, an hour that (I would discover later) I would not be paid for. I stalked home, fuming, with every intention of calling Mary the following morning and politely requesting (har har) that she immediately move me to a more civilized location, because this shit was quite frankly not worth the minimum wage they were paying me.

And this was when Horny Creek truly started to mess with me. The Freak Parade continues.