Writing about Sonic caused me to dig up some other memories from my minimum-wage past. Well that and I bought some Eucalyptus the other day. You see my very first job was at Michael’s Arts and Crafts (and that smell you associate with it is, in fact, Eucalyptus).
I have plenty of horror stories about the place: the crazy craft ladies who bought beads by the hundreds, perverted men who wanted to find feathers and more crazy craft ladies who just wanted to load their carts with a bunch of crap. Oh, and I’ll also add that back in my day we didn’t have those UPC scanner things. We had to punch in the price and then punch in the department it came from. Half the time the price wasn’t on there so I would just make it up. It can take a long time to invent prices on a cart full of different-sized beads.
But anyway, I’m not going to tell you my horror stories. I’m going to tell you someone else’s. One day I was making up prices on beads and a woman of about 25 came through my line. She looked shaken and scared. I didn’t think anything was wrong until she only bought ONE pack of beads. This was unprecedented. “Is everything okay?” I asked. She then told me her story. Here it is in her words:
I used to work here and I haven’t been back in six years. This is the first time I could bring myself to walk into the store. I’ve tried to walk in before but that damn Eucalyptus smell just brought back too many memories. (By this time a crowd of other smock-wearing Michael’s employees has started to gather to listen to her story.)
You see, I used to work in wearable art (the t-shirt section). It was back when splatter painting was all the rage. We had this splatter painting wheel and I was the only one who knew how to work it. I would splatter paint t-shirts all day long. The line would go from my splatter paint wheel all along the side of the store and out the door! I splatter painted so much that I had nightmares about it—about the wheel breaking and the splatter paint just flying and splattering the whole store and all the customers.
Every day they’d get more and more impatient and take it out on me: “Hurry!! Can’t you splatter any faster?” they’d yell. So one day I just couldn’t take it anymore. The line was especially long and the people especially frustrated. Finally, when one woman approached me with a dozen shirts to splatter I just freaked out. I couldn’t splatter one more shirt. I looked at the splatter paint wheel and I started to panic. I couldn’t breathe. I started to hyperventilate.
And then I ran—ran to the back, the “employees only” section. I was scared they would chase me! I was crying hysterically and another employee had to give me a paper bag to breathe into. He called my mom and she came to pick me up. She put her arm around me and walked me out of the store and the whole time I was still breathing into the paper bag.
We had to walk past the line of angry splatter-paint purchasing customers. I tried not to make eye contact and just kept breathing into my bag. But just as we were walking out the door one of them yelled, “Hey, before you go, could you just splatter paint ONE MORE t-shirt for me?”
Now every time I smell the Eucalyptus I think of that poor girl. And I’m sure if I ever ran across someone wearing a splatter paint shirt, I would think of her too. Or I would just think they were really out of style.
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