12 April 2012

Time to Start Thinking/Blogging About Other Things Besides Cancer


In an effort to continue moving forward, I will be working on writing about stuff other than cancer.

Today's Installment:  The Worst Job EVAR!

While I was in college, I worked at a Shell Gas Station/Circle K convenience store.  It sat a few blocks from campus, and located at the end of a downtown bus run, it was ideally situated for all sorts of shenanigans.

I worked there part-time for my third and fourth year of college, and full time for the summer between them.  I loved the early morning shift - 7:00 am - 3:00 pm in the summer.  It was pretty quiet most mornings and I did not mind the 'busy work', (stocking merchandise, pricing with old timey sticker guns, dusting ancient SKUs.)  I did not like the graveyard shift because it was boring and the dairy stocking had to take place then.  Working in the cooler sucked because it was cold.  But the worst shift was the late shift, 3-11 pm or 4-12 pm.

In addition to the after work rush from about 4 - 6 pm, where we were very busy, there was often what we referred to as the 'munchie rush' which would happen around 9 pm.  People just going out or those half-way through their night and looking for sustenance would flood in.  This rush could last up to an hour where we'd be cashiering the gas pumps as well as dealing with a line of customers demanding their Coke, cigarettes and Doritos.  Inevitably we'd be pulled to clean up a gas spill, or people would need the bathroom key, or we'd be making popcorn/hot dogs, cleaning/changing the tanks on the fountain machine or slushie machine or be doing cash drops into the time-lock safe.  We could easily deal with a hundred transactions in a busy hour and while it made the time fly, we often lost track of customers.  There are a lot of weird people in the world and all of them patronize convenience stores.

We had finished a fairly long rush and my co-worker, Rachel and I were cleaning out the till, wiping up fountain spills, and generally getting the store back in order when I took a bathroom break.  I walked in to the ladies bathroom and was greeted by a veritable Jackson Pollock of excrement.  There was shit smeared on the walls, on the door, on the commode, on the sink, on the floor, on the mirror and even a few flecks on the ceiling.

I walked back up to the front and told Rachel she had to check out the bathroom.  When she came back she asked me how I wanted to handle it.  (Yes, it actually was in our job description.)  We decided through a rather intense negotiation that we would flip a coin.  And the WINNER would pay the loser $40 out of their pocket to clean the bathroom.  This was 1984 and $40 was an entire shift!  I lost.

The first thing we did was raid the store for supplies: trash bags, duct tape, rubber gloves (two pair) a rain hat and a bandanna.  With these items we cobbled together a fairly effective haz-mat suit for me.  Rachel helped tape the trash bags together on me and got me into the two pairs of gloves.  Then we hit the store for bleach, lysol, and six rolls of paper towels.  Armed, I went in.

 The artist had been quite thorough, making sure to smear shit both inside and outside the toilet, on the seat and under it and all around the taps on the sink.  I took breathing breaks often and Rachel did her best to bolster my spirits.  By the time I had finished I had gone through a large green garbage bag of shitty paper-towels, two dish brushes (our entire stock out of 'housewares',) several car air fresheners and four pairs of gloves.  It took me about an hour to clean up the mess.

Rachel pulled the last pair of gloves off the shelf and helped cut me out of the haz-mat suit and we tossed everything into the waiting dumpster behind the store.  Then she did the paperwork for the 'store supplies' we used, and she also did our cash out.  I did the write up for the incident report.  I do not remember what I wrote, but I do remember the next day, when I came in for my shift my boss called me into the office and thanked me for taking care of it, and then proceeded to tell me some of her equally grotesque battle stories.  People are sick, I tell you.