MemeMachineGo!

Like any large organization, my Bradlees store had a wide variety of people working for it. Some were more pleasant to deal with than others. My manager, Janice, was a rather brash and stubborn woman in her early twenties, who seemed to get an ego boost from being able to boss around a few high school kids. I worked for her in the Men’s (clothing) department, and when nothing special was going on, I was tasked with keeping the “basics” (socks and underwear) area clean and well-stocked. Not too challenging for any advanced primate.

As I’ve mentioned before, Sunday was the start of the weekly sales at Bradlees, and that meant that Saturday nights were often busy as we got all of the sale items out to the floor, and prepared the signs for the next morning. I soon noticed that the Girls’ department, right next to mine, had some unreliable employees who were prone to calling in sick on Saturdays, leaving the manager there to try to handle all the sale preparation by herself. Sue, the Girls’ manager, was much easier to get along with than Janice, and several times I helped her out when she was swamped with work on Saturday nights. For some reason Janice didn’t like this, and thought I should be counting socks instead of working in another department. After a couple of arguments about this, we took it to the next higher manager, and I was told that since I worked for Janice, I should do what she told me to do and not worry about what was happening in the other departments.

Shortly thereafter, this became a moot point, as I was transferred to the “front end”, i.e., the cash registers. It was very strongly implied that this was because the managers wanted me to be where they could keep an eye on me in case I got any dangerous ideas about doing work that needed to be done instead of just doing what I was told.