2004-09-24 - 12:12 p.m.

I've had plenty of low-paying jobs in my life, and most of them have been pretty okay. In fact, I'd recommend that everyone take a full-time, low-paying job with no room for advancement at least once in their lives. Not only are your fellow co-workers generally cool people, but it teaches you valuable life skills, like how to work hard, how to budget your time and money, and how to realize that you're total crap and deserve to be treated as such be humble.

The IGA, however, was *not* a "pretty okay" place to work. The only reasons I stayed there for nearly a year were that 1) I needed to pay for food and shelter and 2) There weren't really any other jobs available, especially for someone with few marketable skills. I could write a huge, Dickensian novel about how rotten it was to work at the IGA, but no one really wants to read that.

Anyhow, here's an example of the kind of "management" that went on at the IGA*:I worked in the deli portion of the store, and usually worked the 12-9 shift, 9 being when the store closed. Now, in most grocery stores, the deli closes shortly before the rest of the store, because the deli workers need to wrap all the meats and cheeses and clean and sterilize the slicers.

However, we were not allowed to close the deli section early, because "people complained." So, if you take into consideration that it takes 10-15 minutes to properly clean and sterilize a slicer, it follows that if someone asks for sliced cheese or meat within 15 minutes of closing, the deli workers will have to stay late to re-clean the slicer.

We got yelled at every time we stayed late.

So: we got in trouble if we didn't wrap and clean, we got in trouble if we didn't serve people up until closing, and we got in trouble if we stayed late. Usually, we would stay late, because even primitive mammals know you don't leave food just lying around, and if we were going to get yelled at, we might as well get paid overtime as well.

It has since dawned on me that our manager wanted us to BEND TIME. No one can serve people in a deli right to closing and also be ready to leave right at closing as well. What he didn't realize is that if I could BEND TIME, I'd be a frigging billionare superhero, and wouldn't *have* to work at a deli, not even to maintain a secret identity.

What really bugged me is when people would bust in at 3 seconds to closing yelling "I need a pound of cheese!" No on in the history of humanity has ever *needed* a pound of cheese, let alone a freshly sliced pound of American Cheeselike Food Product.

*For those of you unfamiliar with the IGA, it's a chain of supermarkets where each franchise is independently owned and operated, so pretty much the only similarity between stores is the store-brand merchandise. It's pretty much like working for a local grocery store, except you get to read the boring corporate newsletter in the break room