Day Seven

            This morning was a flurry of activity. It’s a blur of photos going over counters, credit card slips and ms-dos debacles. I catch myself humming along to the Christmas carols, which makes me hate myself. It seems I can find a new exception to our sales procedure every twenty minutes, as expired discount cards enter us into 5-minute Internet searches and we have to shout codes across the store. I try not to look at the customers as they wait. Employing the same technique with Jane today proved fruitful, and she didn’t yell at me when I misprocessed the paperwork on a special roll of Black and White film.

Some guy passed through the employee gateway today to look at lens caps. I didn’t say anything to him but I darted up to him with a sense of urgency and glared at him like a protective mother. To any employee with a bar, desk or counter, this boundary is sacred, accessible only to invited guests, employees or emergency personnel. After a decent one-minute standoff punctuated by us having a non-confrontational discussion about the lens caps we didn’t have in stock, he instinctively backed off hovering just in front of the entrance.

            Sal is back today. He is talking to another seasonal employee, like myself. Her name is Sarah. He is trying to discern her background, looking for some Asian roots but she keeps telling him that she’s an American. Today I start to think that Sal has a better job than I do, because he gets to sit around in the store while I do work, and he probably gets paid more than me. But Sal is enormous and so I resign myself to having the job of an average sized man.

            One customer came in today with an early nineties plastic electric motor powered film camera. After some debate, because he didn’t know how it worked either, I put the film in for him, closed the door and heard the motor go. I don’t know if the film was wound properly, but I told him not to open the door because it might expose the film. I wish him luck.

            I’m finding that Paula is more personable than Marta. But, when she went to lunch I turned her Christmas music down to almost nothing.

In the waning hours of the shift I watch Sarah muddle her way through the sale of a small point and shoot camera. Like myself, she too is a misinformed salesperson. Mid-way through John comes through and takes over, dominating the conversation. I see Sarah looking relieved than ashamed, but I know she got the commission because I saw her doing paperwork for the next half-hour.

I take a late lunch and sit at the patio furniture of the Juice Shack next door to our store. Then I go to the adjoining supermarket, where one of the employees recognizes that I’m an employee of the camera store. Factotum recognizes factotum. Quoting the film “Supertroopers”, we both realize our “relationship based on professional courtesy and mutual boredom”.