Jon Cogburn's Blog

Mr. D (part 1)

In many ways Mr. D was the ideal retail management guy. He worked something like 80 hours a week and always had his nose in everything. Some aspects of the ideal retail management guy are morally problematic though. Mr. D's true genius was at enlarging his organizational turf and then tenaciously holding on to it. For example, even though I was technically a K-Mart Apparel employee and not a K-Mart employee (they are separate companies both owned by Kresge, and the apparel manager runs his or her third of the store with nominal independence from the store manager), on my first week in the receiving bay Mr. D grabbed me by the arm and said, "You apparel people need to pull your weight. Here's a broom. There's the floor. Every day at 4:30 I want you sweeping that floor until this whole bay is spotless." Now there were janitorial staff at night to do that, but by getting away with dictating 1/16th of an Apparel employee's work hours, he gained more power over the Apparel manager.

And Mr. D constantly did stuff like this. Several times a week he would preemptively order some employee to clean the bathrooms, and he periodically put you on a register for a day as your normal work piled up.

After impromptu janitorial detail (which often involved cleaning up after astoundingly vile, unsanitary customers), the worst thing you could get drafted to do involved the upstairs storage space in the receiving bay. Every single time one or two days before the fire marshal's visit Mr. D ordered a few hapless employees to spend a few days rearanging tens of thousands of  pieces of excess merchandise in the attic. Then, on the morning of the inspection the storage space would be up to code (I guess Mr. D had a contact at the fire marshal's office; the visits were supposed to be surprises but if my memory is correct we always knew). In Summer it was well over one hundred degrees up there and the task was Herculean. Then, often as not, the afternoon after the marshal's visit, you'd have to move all sorts of stuff back to its original non-code place. I once spent an incredibly hot July day moving a floor-to-ceiling stack of window blinds (which we never sold the whole time I worked there) two and a half feet to the left. It was so physically taxing that I cried at the end of the day. How do assembly line workers do it? Then, at the end of the inspection I had to spend a day moving stuff back. I felt like an un-cool version of Cool Hand Luke. I still do sometimes.

possibly the worst thing I've done yet

If the angel Gabriel could come down and show each of us the worst thing we've ever done, none of us would be proud.

You could just look at C-- and tell that something was off. He had buzz-cut hair and these really big plastic glasses with the two ear pieces attached by string like some skiers wear. He was over six feet tall and carried his weight around his hips more than his waist. As a result, he looked more like a giant, tubby six-year old than a man in his twenties.

C-- was a loser and not very good at his job. He had initially applied to work in the automotive garage on the premise that he'd ordered a set of VHS tapes about how to be a mechanic. Instead, they put him in receiving with the rest of the misfits. But he was convinced he was a mechanic and would confidently volunteer for any task involving machinery. This always ended badly. For example, when the accordian-like metal wheeled conveyer belt got stuck in its shut position, C-- went at it with a wrench, hammer, and screwdriver, taking apart about two feet of the belt. But then he couldn't get it back together. It just lay there like a dead octupus. When something like this happened C-- would get really angry and start nodding his head "no," while moaning "uuuunh"  and flailing his arms in time. His face would turn red as this one vein on his forehead popped out. If there was machinery involved you just had to get out of the way. During that particular rainman freakout he beat the hell out of the dissassembled conveyer belt with the hammer.

I got very good at baiting C-- just short of one of his freak-outs, and the other employees loved me for it. This, I think, is probably the white trash version of bullfighting- see how many insults you can throw at the most emotionally deranged person in the workplace without getting seriously injured. Example- every day at lunch we all watched the soap opera "The Young and the Restless," and C-- took it far more seriously than the rest of us. I quickly found out that I could get him upset by interpreting the show in non-standard ways. In the storyline at the time, the rock-star character "Danny Romalotti" (the actor was a one hit wonder in real life, having recorded perhaps the worst version of a song that many people covered). In storyline, someone had left a bag full of six pounds of cocaine in Romalotti's dressing room and called the cops on him. Then for weeks all the good guys had to try to establish Romalotti's innocence. Now this is transparently absurd. For an intent to distribute mandatory minimum of ten years, the suspect need only be caught with 500 grams (1.1 pounds). Which idiot-boy drug lord is going to waste 4.9 pounds of coke? None, if you wasted that much coke in short order you'd get wasted yourself. Moreover, at that time the same sentence kicked in for only 5 grams of crack! So the Young and the Restless criminal masterminds used almost four hundred times the amount of coke necessary to send young Danny to the big house. Give me a break.

But instead of pointing out these and similar plot idiocies, during all of those weeks I pretended that I thought that it might really have been Romalotti's cocaine. This caused C-- to become unhinged. Weirdly, instead of pointing out to me that in every episode they showed flashbacks to the Snidely Whiplash characters putting the coke in his dressing room, C-- would yell about what a good man Danny Romalotti was. I'd say something like, "I don't know C--; those rock and roll musicians all seemed to be caught up in drugs. I think maybe it was his coke," and C-- would turn red, bang his fist on the table and say something like, "Danny Romalotti does not use drugs!" Again, just like the real thing, redneck bullfighting requires grace and finesse in order to avoid getting gored and/or trampled. I always knew when to pull back, in this case when he looked like he was going to start nodding his head "no" and moaning I'd admit that he was right, that Danny had showed himself to be an upstanding man in his relationship with his girlfriend "Crickett," and that his music was uplifting unlike those other rock and roll bands.

C-- was such an unpleasant person to work with, that it never occurred to anyone that what I was doing was cruel. We all played the insult-game with each other, and if you couldn't play the game well then in the Darwinian world that is retail employment, that was your fault. The weak get eaten by the strong.

However, one day my social worker friend V-- looked up C-- on her computer. At her job, there was a list of all of the mentally retarded and mentally ill people registered with the county. It turned out that C-- was in both lists. He had also been in mental institutions more than once after assaulting people.

C-- was irritating and dangerous, but the fact is that for a period of a couple of months, I had picked on a retarded guy. And unlike C-- with is messed up brain, I was fully responsible for my behavior.

I'm convinced that V-- is an angel of God. She actually broke the law and jeopardized her career by telling me about C--'s record, but her doing so radically changed my life. 

Most people are doing the best they can in pretty difficult circumstances. The next time somebody is rude, aggressive, selfish, or just massively incompetent try to remember that. Given the ubiquity of greed and ignorance, we need to remember this all the time. Almost everybody you interact with is in the midst of some difficult battle and is also doing the best they can.

C-- did the best he could. His brain didn't work very well and he was trying to hold down a job that he'd gotten without help from any state services. He deserved better than us.

near tragic misunderstanding with the underwear lady

One of the many important life lessons I learned during my three year tenure at K-Mart was just how systematic and pervasive misunderstandings can become.  I also learned to hate Freud.

As apparel receiving supervisor my tasks were: (1) unloading the apparel trucks, (2) entering all the apparel merchandise on the computer, (3) hanging up or folding each section's (e.g. girls, mens, etc. ..) clothes onto roll-bars or carts in the back receiving area, and (4) calling sales associates to come get their full roll bars and carts (I had to process a lot of non-hanging or folding things such as window blinds, hair accessories, cameras, watches, jewelry, rugs etc.) out of receiving and onto the floor.  Sometimes I got to announce blue light specials.  Also for some reason, I had to stock the diapers in the morning.  This was a lot of work, and our store manual said that I was supposed to have one full-time and one part-time employee under me helping me with the stuff.  But it was just me in the back with the non-apparel receiving person, the four mentally retarded people who did non-apparel pricing, and for half the day the social worker who managed the mentally retarded people.  The receiving area was cavernous and we didn't interact very much.

K Mart and K Mart Apparel are two different companies both owned by the S.S. Kresge corporation.  The store employees belong to one or the other.  I was the only male working on the apparel side of the store.  The other employees were two elderly white women, a middle aged Thai woman, two Vietnamese women, and five African American women.  We were a noble sisterhood, but as the only guy I came in for a lot of teasing, which was generally fun and made the day a lot less boring.

Unfortunately, one of the teasing tropes could have been dangerous to my health, as it involved a sales associate with a very large and perpetually angry security guard boyfriend.  The associate (call her "V--") was the woman in charge of stocking the part of the store including women's underwear.  Possibly due to my puritanical upbringing, it always embarrassed me when I had to call her on the intercom (something like "800 to receiving, 800 to receiving") and V-- came back to collect all of the folded and hung up undergarments. 

Unless you've worked retail, you have no idea how much merchandise goes through one of those big stores every day.  It's a staggering amount, and I'd process hundreds of large boxes each day.  This translated to I don't know how much underwear each week.  So I'd be standing back there at my station in the dimly lit receiving bay folding and hanging box after box of women's underwear.  If my colleagues came by while I was folding it, they would say, "Ooh you better watch out he don't steal it" or "What are you doing back here in the dark with all that, Jon?" 

I don't think at that point in my life I gave off the vibe of someone who would steal or otherwise deface women's underwear.  I think they were just teasing me.  But I'd still get horrifically embarrassed, turning red and stammering as if I'd done something wrong.  And then when V-- came back to collect all of the folded and/or hung bras, panties, and lingerie I would still be visibly embarrassed.

After I'd worked at K-Mart for two or three months, the hazing let off, and no one joked about me stealing or otherwise defiling the underwear.  But my embarrassment while making the daily underwear hand-off to V--  continued, and somehow out of this all my apparel colleagues began insinuate that I had a crush on V--.  At first they were joking I think, just having fun telling me about her boyfriend.  But somehow the joke morphed into accepted wisdom throughout the whole store, and there was nothing I could do to dissuade anybody from it.  This affected every aspect of my day.  For example, since V-- was African American, the non apparel receiving employees would do things like sing "Brown Sugar" sometimes when I went in the room.  My apparel colleagues would take me aside and with complete seriousness say things like, "Jon I know how you feel about V--, and it's not right that they tease you about it.  But you need to watch out about that boyfriend of hers."

Let me say this clearly- Anyone who thinks Freud hasn't poisoned public consciousness has never had to be the only male working the Apparel side of a K-Mart.  Whenever I protested that I wasn't attracted to V--, my colleagues just took that as more evidence of my attraction.  It was like some dumb analyst who won't believe you when you say the woman in your dream last night was not your Mom, and he just arches his eyebrows and says something like.  "If it is not your Mother, then why do you feel compelled to insist that it is not?"  Well, duh.  Maybe because it was not my Mother.  But as we all know, for Freudians the vehement denial is just more evidence that it is in fact your Mother.  You can't win.  Just give up.

I don't know how this denial trope entered popular consciousness, maybe Phil Donahue, but it sure did ruin a couple of months at K Mart.

I could not win, and of course all of this made the daily underwear handoff even more painfully embarrassing.  Note that before I found my inner Angus and learned to just generally rock out at stuff, I was so shy that I would hyperventilate while trying to speak in public.  When you put Freud up against shy, Freud is going to win every time.  It's the story of my adolescence.

That this went on for four months or so is good evidence that being a retail associate isn't sufficiently mentally stimulating for the average person.  If V-- hadn't gotten ballistically angry when the store manager made her rearrange the part of the store with all the carpets, it might never have ended.  I was dragging a big carpet to the stack when I saw her screaming obscenities while throwing door mats at the apparel manager's head.  I actually don' t think they would have fired her, but the next day she gave her two weeks notice.  Dealing with the weird guy in the receiving bay with the underwear was one thing, having to rearrange carpeting was just too much though.

At V-'-s going away party (which the manager attended) all of the apparel associates made sure that I had to sit across from V--.  This was O.K. until the pituitary case boyfriend showed up and sat next to her.  He kept pulling her close for a kiss and rubbing her arm and stuff while staring at me.  When she'd move back over to her seat he'd raise his eyebrows and kind of nod at me, like "what you going to do about it?"  Once again, I couldn't explain that I'd never been attracted to her, and I had to just sit there and try to be casual and friendly. 

I feel defensive writing this now.  Look, I really did not have a thing for V--.  Why doesn't anybody believe me about this?  Stupid Freud; I still can't win.

most vile aspect

I think my worst memory of working at K Mart was the constant fear I'd be put on impromptu janitorial detail.

At the store where I worked the professional janitors did their thing during the night.  While this was efficient it also meant that whenever something broke or spilled one of the regular associates would have to go to work with the mop and bucket cart, wheely trashcan, and chemicals.

If we only had to clean up merchandise destroyed by the customers it would not have been a problem.  Unfortunately, customers are capable of infinitely worse.  At my K-Mart somebody would poop on the floor at least every other week.  And unfortunately for me, they usually did it in the window dressing section (I have never been able to figure out why), which was one of the two sections I had to stock.

You can't imagine the feeling of having just walked down the stairs from the attic/stockroom with a two armfuls of Martha Stewart brand window shades only to be confronted with the end product of the adult human being's digestive system.  It always lay prone and corpselike on the linoleum floor, inspiring deep metaphysical unease in all who gazed upon it.  The epileptic flicker of the cheap overhead flourescent lights greatly increased the horror movie feel, and the shock would sometimes make me drop the window dressings

It shames me to admit this, but on more than one occasion I just turned around and brought the blinds back up to the attic, retiring to the receiving area to do something else until I could be sure that no trace of the poop remained.  The only consolation I have for my cowardice is that I am sure that several other associates pretended not to notice it as well.

We didn't resort to this chicanery just because of normal human being's healthy disgust with poop.   It went much deeper than that.

Invariably, at the point the store manager became aware that there was poop on the sales floor he would angrily walk towards the nearest male employee, grab that person's arm and take them over to the poop and then point at it and yell, "You clean that up now!"  And at that point we had a poop deputy and the rest of us were safe.  Strangely it was always a guy, I guess on the theory that if women have to bear children the very least men can do is clean up the poop in aisle seven.  The weirdest thing about this is that while the Store manager was pinching the employee's arm, the employee in question always got this sort of atavistic looking guilt on his face, as if he were somehow responsible for the poop.   I'm sure you've seen this before when one dog responds to another dog's poop on the floor.  It was exactly the same.   

And then, to add insult to injury, all of the rest of the employees would treat the poop deputy pretty shamefully for the rest of the week or so, affecting to not want to touch any merchandise the deputy had handled, saying things like "Jim, what's that brown spot on your shirt," or "Do you guys smell something? I'm sorry, that's Jim," etc. 

Nobody said that retail is nice.

K-mart memory

For about three years on and off I worked at a Washington D.C. area K-Mart.  Some day I'd like to pen a memoir about it. . .

I remember that we had a manager who used to throw huge temper tantrums.  His favorite retort was, "Oh.  You are useless!"  This uttered usually before some act of violence against an inantimate object, e.g. throwing a hand held computer unit against a wall.  One day during inventory the manager was just having a fit.  We'd all been working 12 hour days to label and account for everything in the store, and each department kept coming up way shorter than they should have been (something like a million dollars of merchandise ended up being unaccounted for).  During all of this there was some kind of altercation in receiving with one of the truck drivers (at this point in history, some combination of deregulation and monopolization forced lots of truck drivers to snort crystal methedrine to push through the impossibly long hauls, I don't know if they still do that, but ever since K-Mart I walk on tiptoes around truck drivers).  Anyhow, to stop the loud argument between the truck driver and one of the K-Mart receiving rats the manager stormed into the receiving area and started beating on the metal conveyer belt that went from truck to the processing areas, screaming "Everybody's useless! Everybody's useless!" over and over again.  It was really miserable for a few minutes.

But then something very beautiful happened.  The oldest employee in the store walked up behind the manager and grabbed him.  Before anyone could say anything Walter (the old man, who usually just joked around affably with everyone) said, "Listen!  One afternoon fifty years ago I ran across a beach covered with three thousand dead men."  Nobody knew what to say, and the manager was dumbstruck.  Walter let go of the manager and said, "You go outside and count your blessings.  Don't come back in until you get to twenty."

The manager actually did go outside and then left us alone for the rest of the day.  I wish I could say the manager never lost his temper or bullied anyone after that, but for that day at least we all calmed down, even the tweaked out truck driver a little bit.