Life as a Retail Drone, Part One

New mediocre moment: I got me a drone job. In retail. If I hang in there long enough I might rise to supervisor. Yus!

Work can be fun. Nothing interesting happened today, but there’s been some interesting stuff. I work with a pretty good crew. They’re all relatively non-stupid. One girl is really cute, which is a bonus. We were working with a gay guy called Raoul who I didn’t mind (despite his being a little bitch) but he opted to shoot through on Monday on account of breaking up with his shit-sack of a boyfriend. I’d met the guy when he came into the shop on occasion. Total fuckwad, gives gay guys a bad name. I’d advised Raoul to break up with the him, and he did. And shot through to Auckland, leaving the shop in the lurch. The interesting thing is the tills hadn’t been balancing for some reason and no-one could figure out why. Well, I guessed someone had busy fingers. Now Raoul’s shot the tills have balanced perfectly every day. Hmmm.
I’ll remember Raoul for one thing, apart from the bitching and backstabbing and reluctance to work. It was probably the only time we’ll ever agree on an assessment of a woman’s attractiveness. Picture this. I’m standing by the counter about four feet from the automatic door. This dude slopes in. He’s blond and shabby looking – one of the hillbilly types we get in fairly often. His smell followed him in about a second later. Then came his wife (sister? Both?) who was the fattest partial solar eclipse of a woman I’ve ever laid eyes on. Many obese women look a bit like the spinnakers on racing yachts but this one shamed even them. She blotted out the sun. Small objects orbited her. Parents screamed and clutched their kids close. She was almost perfectly spherical on account of her tits sagging around where her belly button would normally be. Rolls of fat escaped her already plus-size clothing. She was, of course, wearing the ubiquitous uniform of the hideously obese – trakkie daks and t-shirt. She heaved and snorted with each wobbling step. Her smell outdid even her husband’s impressive effort. Other customers swiftly began to leave. The entire staff of the shop managed to avoid getting near or making eye contact with the couple, in a lovely example of ignoring the glaringly obvious. The couple began to roam the now-empty store. I hid behind the counter.
Raoul, of course, needed to say a few words. The poor guy was almost dry-retching at this woman’s undeniable awfulness, and I was about as sick as he was. “God!” he said, sweating. “How could she wear that? How could she be like that? It’s so disgusting!”
Meanwhile, Partial Solar Eclipse woman and her hillbilly satellite were ambling over to where another colleague, Karl, was fiddling with the computers. Karl is a tech guru – he uses Linux, which should tell you all you need to know about him – and, while he remains a genuinely decent guy, he is not brilliant with people at the best of times. I watched, deadly interested, to see how this exchange would turn out.
Karl looked up and went white. Perhaps it was the woman’s gravitational field getting hold of his blood. Or it could have been the smell. Ever smelled rancid grease? Well, add a dash of Cabbage Juice, the stuff you get at the bottom of fridges, and a healthy smattering of Eau De Two-Week-Old-Dead-Possum, mix and marinade for an hour, and you’ve got it. Anyhoo, the freaks come up and ask him if we’ve got Microsoft Office (which is prominently displayed on shelves they walked past at least twice.) He answered in the affirmative and got the hell out of there. Then, thank the gods, they left.
Karl came up to me and Raoul afterward and told us that when the hillbilly dude talked to him, you could see fat lice crawling around in his sparse blond hair.
RIP, Raoul. You’re in a better place now, I hope.

Names have been changed because it’s cool to say “names have been changed.” Also, I’m not keen on losing my job.