well...I worked in a place called Magazine City in Seattle in the late eighties. It's ok to use the name, they closed down years ago.
The owner was actually retarded. the manager was an alcoholic with liver problems and elephantitis. he was ok other than that though. but noone sane or even vaguely normal ever wanted to work there. so when I came in and asked for a job, the manager instantly gave me double shifts for days on end and basically made me the new assistant manager without paying me any more. he then fucked off to drink and I watched the entire store for 16 hours on end, day after day. the front part of the store was about 400 square meters of magazines. the back section was porn. the alcoholic manager would keep hiring people to help me do my double shifts, but they were inevitably stupid or also alcoholics or preferably both. two of my favorite co-workers were a 70 year old drunk who couldn't figure out how to use the cash register, and a human robot that apparently had some post-war trauma to deal with. I left the old drunk at the register once to go to mcdonalds (16 hours is a long time to go without food) and when I came back there were customers lined up around the block and others just leaving the store with armfuls of 'free' merchandise. he was just standing there at the cash register, frozen and mumbling, staring at the keys. the robot was even more fun. you'd think he'd be good at math, but no... he was too literal. for instance, I'd tell him to go turn around the back half of the magazine stacks on the racks (the spines are thicker, so if they're all upright they eventually fall down, so you have to turn the back half upside down for a nice neat stack) and he'd ask 'how much exactly should be reversed' and I'd say 'like, half'. then he'd ask how many there are and I'd say about 50, so he'd count 25 out. I told him to just estimate about half and that nearly killed him, like, does not compute error error, or something. sheesh. so I figured, let him count! only when someone had actually bought one magazine and there were only 49 left, he'd stand there trying to figure out what half of 49 is. for hours. just stand there. broken. stuck in a little counting loop. the most fun though was when a helicopter would fly overhead or a siren would go off, then he'd drop all the mags he was counting on the floor and clutch his hands to his ears and start moaning and screaming in panic and his robot eyes would dart around and then sink deeper into his head. he looked like a very sad retarded version of that guy from sparks.
anyway, then once in a while the actually clinically retarded boss's probably but not medically proven retarded wife would come 'sit in' to fill in for the lack of help available. that meant I had to work with her most of the time. she was huge and fat and smelled terribly of ass. when she sat on the stool behind the register, you couldn't use it for the rest of the day because it smelled so bad. you could barely get near enough to it to ring things in at the register. all the customers would glare at you with that 'take a fucking bath, ass-smell man' look. although she'd rarely ever sit on it for very long, because her idea of working was stinking up that chair for 20 minutes, praising elvis non-stop to no one in particular, filling her gigantic purse with candy and chocolate and then fucking off. she'd blame all her theft on the workers, but the alcoholic manager was able to convince the retarded boss that it was the fat smelly elvis-worshipping wife, so he didn't care. which meant we could steal whatever the fuck we liked. which we did. smokes, candy, mags, and lots of porn.
oh, and one of our regular porn customers turned out to be the Queen Anne Axe Murderer. just another guy (coincidentally he was also retarded) with spittle on his glasses and a thing for porn who ended up sort of accidently killing a few people in their homes on queen anne hill.
oh yeah, and the crazy woman who would snatch chocolate off the rack in front of the register and eat it in front of you with a wild grin on her face, and then if you asked if she was going to pay for that she'd start screaming 'YOU RAPED ME!' and pointing at you until the police came or you threw her out yourself.
another weird thing about that store was, they had a back section with all sorts of weird illegal books on how to make bombs and credit scams and change your identity and all those anarchist cookbook sort of things.
what a strange store.
those were strange times.
I think actually the worst place I ever worked was 7-11, but it's a far less interesting story.
(The owner was actually retarded. the manager was an alcoholic with liver problems and elephantitis. he was ok other than that though. but noone sane or even vaguely normal ever wanted to work there. so when I came in and asked for a job, the manager instantly gave me double shifts for days on end and basically made me the new assistant manager without paying me any more. he then fucked off to drink and I watched the entire store for 16 hours on end, day after day. the front part of the store was about 400 square meters of magazines. the back section was porn. the alcoholic manager would keep hiring people to help me do my double shifts, but they were inevitably stupid or also alcoholics or preferably both. two of my favorite co-workers were a 70 year old drunk who couldn't figure out how to use the cash register, and a human robot that apparently had some post-war trauma to deal with. I left the old drunk at the register once to go to mcdonalds (16 hours is a long time to go without food) and when I came back there were customers lined up around the block and others just leaving the store with armfuls of 'free' merchandise. he was just standing there at the cash register, frozen and mumbling, staring at the keys. the robot was even more fun. you'd think he'd be good at math, but no... he was too literal. for instance, I'd tell him to go turn around the back half of the magazine stacks on the racks (the spines are thicker, so if they're all upright they eventually fall down, so you have to turn the back half upside down for a nice neat stack) and he'd ask 'how much exactly should be reversed' and I'd say 'like, half'. then he'd ask how many there are and I'd say about 50, so he'd count 25 out. I told him to just estimate about half and that nearly killed him, like, does not compute error error, or something. sheesh. so I figured, let him count! only when someone had actually bought one magazine and there were only 49 left, he'd stand there trying to figure out what half of 49 is. for hours. just stand there. broken. stuck in a little counting loop. the most fun though was when a helicopter would fly overhead or a siren would go off, then he'd drop all the mags he was counting on the floor and clutch his hands to his ears and start moaning and screaming in panic and his robot eyes would dart around and then sink deeper into his head. he looked like a very sad retarded version of that guy from sparks.
anyway, then once in a while the actually clinically retarded boss's probably but not medically proven retarded wife would come 'sit in' to fill in for the lack of help available. that meant I had to work with her most of the time. she was huge and fat and smelled terribly of ass. when she sat on the stool behind the register, you couldn't use it for the rest of the day because it smelled so bad. you could barely get near enough to it to ring things in at the register. all the customers would glare at you with that 'take a fucking bath, ass-smell man' look. although she'd rarely ever sit on it for very long, because her idea of working was stinking up that chair for 20 minutes, praising elvis non-stop to no one in particular, filling her gigantic purse with candy and chocolate and then fucking off. she'd blame all her theft on the workers, but the alcoholic manager was able to convince the retarded boss that it was the fat smelly elvis-worshipping wife, so he didn't care. which meant we could steal whatever the fuck we liked. which we did. smokes, candy, mags, and lots of porn.
oh, and one of our regular porn customers turned out to be the Queen Anne Axe Murderer. just another guy (coincidentally he was also retarded) with spittle on his glasses and a thing for porn who ended up sort of accidently killing a few people in their homes on queen anne hill.
oh yeah, and the crazy woman who would snatch chocolate off the rack in front of the register and eat it in front of you with a wild grin on her face, and then if you asked if she was going to pay for that she'd start screaming 'YOU RAPED ME!' and pointing at you until the police came or you threw her out yourself.
another weird thing about that store was, they had a back section with all sorts of weird illegal books on how to make bombs and credit scams and change your identity and all those anarchist cookbook sort of things.
what a strange store.
those were strange times.
I think actually the worst place I ever worked was 7-11, but it's a far less interesting story.
zog why change it now?,
Wed 12 Nov 2003, 22:15,
archived)