Posts Tagged ‘7-11’

Shantel was a middle-aged black woman who for some reason developed a sort of matronly affection for me. She always told me that I was her favorite person to work with, but I don’t know why and the feeling wasn’t mutual. I didn’t dislike her, but she was a lot less fun than the employees who were closer to me in age and/or maturity (most of the middle-aged men who worked there were just overgrown teenagers). Frankly she kind of gave me the creeps.

There was a huge ice machine in the back room that occasionally spat out batches of frozen cubes into a giant vat. Once per shift, every employee was supposed to shovel the ice into plastic bags, tie them off, and wheel them up into the front to stack them in a display cooler. It was one of the most hated tasks in the store because it was boring, repetitive, and relatively hard physical labor. Usually you needed to hack at the ice with the metal scoop because it all got frozen together, then you had to spoon heavy scoops of the stuff into a bag whose opening was barely larger than the scoop itself. After a few bags, your fingers would be too stiff with cold to tie a good knot, so from time to time a big would spill and then you’d have to clean that up too.  Read the complete post...

Our manager was in the store mornings almost every day, but even then he was usually in his office. Store policy was enforced on employees not through regular supervision but by the threat of surprise inspection by Carl, the manager at another branch owned by same person who owned our store. Carl would do his best to sneak into the store unseen and spring himself upon an unsuspecting employee, asking to count how much was in each register (we weren’t supposed to have more than $50, or $20 overnight- everything else was dropped into a safe) and to see the checklist that every employee was supposed to keep. I called him Rat Man Carl both because of his function in the company and because of his rodent-like appearance.

I was one of the store’s best employees, though it’s hard to overstate just how low the bar was set. If I called five minutes before a scheduled shift to say I wasn’t coming, they were just impressed that I called. I was a friend of the owner and his daughter, and once in a while old ladies would go out of their way to tell the manager how much they appreciated the nice young man who knew how to count their change back to them. There was zero chance of my being fired or reprimanded in any way, and I knew it. Consequently, I couldn’t have cared less about Rat Man Carl and his surprise inspections.  Read the complete post...

Bear wasn’t an employee, but he was one of our most colorful regular customers. I mean that both figuratively and literally: he was a hulking biker dude covered in ink from head to toe. Rose bushes encircled naked women on his arms, and his shiny bald head was decorated with the snearing face of a bear. Bear was a tattoo artist himself and the proprietor of a tattoo parlor called The Bear’s Den.

Bear was easily 6’6, rippling with muscles, and, as I’ve said, covered in tattoos. Under no circumstances would I have gotten on his bad side, and it’s a testament to human stupidity that anyone ever did. He told me a story once about a customer of his who requested a custom-designed tattoo. They negotiated a price, and Bear spent a couple of hours inking him up. When he was finished, the guy reached into his pocket and said, “Oh, shit, I’ve only got eighty-seven bucks.”

They went back and forth for a bit, but the guy insisted he couldn’t get his hands on any more money and pleaded with Bear to accept much less than the price they’d agreed upon. Bear finally relented and told the guy to leave a warm, wet compress on the ink for 24 hours.  Read the complete post...

Gary was a tough guy to work with. He had some mental disabilities that prevented him from engaging fully in the idle banter that generally passed between co-workers. Most of the time he did his job just as well as if not better than the other employees, but his strength in this regard was also his weakness.

Gary was a real stickler for directions and procedure. As you might imagine, the operation of a 7-11 is designed to be pretty idiot-proof. There are simple instructions for operating everything and a checklist that every employee is supposed to follow on every shift. Of course, most employees neither used the checklist nor diligently completed all of their tasks, particularly the least popular ones. Gary, however, did everything just as it was supposed to be done every time.

That was all well and good when things were running smoothly. The problem was that Gary had no capacity for troubleshooting or adaptation. He was relieving me once at the end of a shift on the Fourth of July. When doing a shift change, each of the two registers needs to be closed down individually and its contents counted and verified by both employees. Generally this is to be done at a time where there is no line in the store.  Read the complete post...

Mark was our youngest employee. I knew him first as a customer who came in nearly every day and talked about how badly he wanted to work in the store. Sure enough, he started work on his sixteenth birthday.

The 7-11 was just a stepping stone for Mark, though. His real aspiration was to be a police officer. Even before he was working with us, he got to know all of the officers who frequented our store. Once he was working there, it was even worse. If there was a cop in the store, it was nearly impossible to get Mark to do any work. There could an empty cooler and a line a mile-long, and Mark would be over by the coffee counter hounding the officers.

Mark was generally pretty law-abiding himself, but I did once see him sell cigarettes to two girls who were no older than fourteen. After completing the sale, he stepped outside and returned a minute or two later. “Did you sell them cigarettes?” I asked, more surprised than scolding.

He grinned. “They showed me their boobies.”  Read the complete post...

Norman was in his early thirties when I worked with him, and in retrospect a giant fuck-up. He was a lot of fun to work with, though. When we were bored, which of course was quite often, Norman would sporadically break into a verse or two of a self-invented ditty. His most commonly repeated riff was “Noooooooobody loooooooooves old Normannnnnnn,” though he’d sometimes substitute my name or that of another employee. I called him “Stormin’ Norman” because he was the kind of guy who needed a nickname.

I don’t know the full story of how he ended up working at a 7-11, but over time I learned a few tidbits about him that suggest a more thorough explanation. He’d lost his driver’s license to multiple DWI’s, for instance, and had to take the bus to work. I lived just across the street from the store, so generally I walked to work, but once I had a car with me for some reason and offered him a ride, which he declined.

From time to time he would recount a ribald tale from one of his recent exploits. Being a teenage boy, I was usually eager to hear more. I asked him if he’d ever been with two women at once. He sighed. “Yeah. Couple of times. It’s not all it’s cracked up to be, believe me. It’s very difficult to attend to two at once. A lot of pressure. I couldn’t keep up with them.”  Read the complete post...

Bear wasn’t an employee, but he was one of our most colorful regular customers. I mean that both figuratively and literally: he was a hulking biker dude covered in ink from head to toe. Rose bushes entangled themselves with naked women on his arms, and his shiny bald head was decorated with the snearing face of a bear. Bear was a tattoo artist himself and the proprietor of a tattoo parlor called The Bear’s Den.

Bear was easily 6’6, rippling with muscles, and as I’ve said, covered in tattoos. Under no circumstances would I have gotten on his bad side, and it’s a testament to human stupidity that anyone ever did. He told me a story once about a customer of his who requested a custom-designed tattoo. They negotiated a price, and Bear spent a couple of hours tattooing him. When he was finished, the guy reached into his pocket and said, “Oh, shit, I’ve only got eighty-seven bucks.”

They went back and forth for a bit, but the guy insisted he couldn’t get his hands on any more money and pleaded with Bear to accept much less than the price they’d agreed upon. Bear finally relented and told the guy to leave a warm, wet compress on the ink for 24 hours.  Read the complete post...

Hatty was about my age, maybe a year older, but very much a teenager. The 7-11 where we worked was in Baltimore County, but it was just over the city line on Edmondson Avenue. Thus, it was quite accessible by public bus, which was how Hatty got there for her shifts.

She was the first person from a vastly different racial and socio-economic background with whom I’d had to interact regularly, but we actually hit it off quite well. She was fun to talk to and laughed at my jokes. Sometimes we played little tricks on each other

When her pregnancy started to show, we talked about the child’s father. He was a few years older, but still in the picture. Her man wasn’t working at the moment, which was why Hatty carried her unborn child thirty minutes each way on the bus five days a week to a 7-11 out in the county. He was looking for work, though, and she was sure they would get married one day.

Hatty asked if I had a girlfriend, and I fabricated a long story about how I was dating a divorced forty-year old mother of two. I let it slip that my little lady was currently locked up at Jessup but confessed that we had great sex during the bi-weekly conjugal visits she was permitted. I had Hatty going until I tried to tell her that this woman was black. She scoffed and replied, “Pfft, you couldn’t get no black girl.”  Read the complete post...