When at Podiatry, I most enjoy doing tasks of a concrete, completable nature. “Help us meet the sales goal” is nebulous. “Vacuum the floor” is specific. I prefer the latter. Usually.
I worked the Sunday morning shift today, one that I've never worked before. Unbeknownst to me, Sunday morning shifts are the ones during which Podiatry sales associates hang up their heels for a couple of hours and don their janitorial coveralls. None of this bothers me, I just wish that I'd had a bit of notice so as to dress appropriately for my two hours of ass-busting cleaning.
I've learned to bring a pair of super comfortable shoes for the opening or closing hours during which customers are not around. For instance, last night, I ripped off my strappy, high-heeled sandals when the clock hit 9 and slipped my feet into the loving embrace of a good, supportive Chaco. I chose to forgo bringing the pre-open shoe today, assuming that I wouldn't be doing much walking for the first couple of hours...just putting clothes on hangers, moving minimally while doing restock, then chilling in the fitting room. Instead I just put on my 2 and a half inch-high leather wedges and clomped into the store at 10 a.m. ready to work. I went for the vacuum as usual (I do just a quick sweep of the fitting rooms before heading to work on restock) when Zebulon (a character I've not yet described) mentioned offhandedly, “Yeah, go ahead and vacuum the whole store before doing the fitting rooms. Oh, and mop them too.”
It's hard for me to gauge size, but just to put it in perspective a bit, I'd venture to say that Podiatry is housed in a warehouse-like space that is about a third (or more) of a football field in length and possibly about that in width. It's roughly the size of 8 boutiques put together or one small department store. I joke not.
So off I go, teetering about the store on my shoe-stilts wielding a great metal tube attached to a roving, gray pod on wheels that houses the bag in which a week's worth of Podiatry floor-refuse comes to rest. I vacuum and vacuum and vacuum. It sucks mightily. I vacuum more. It sucks more. Sometimes it makes a great, high-pitched squeal, and I turn it off and dig a clump of twisted matter out of the mouth of the tube. I switch it back on and vacuum more.
I regard my progress; an infinite amount of floor awaits me, it seems. I pull the gray pod along as I extend the tube into the darkest reaches of the establishment, sucking out gobs of dust, little fern leaves, stray coffee beans, buttons, hair, dried lentils?, a Subway club card, etc. The pod follows behind me as would an obedient dog, albeit a blind one, constantly bumping into obstacles as it tries to keep up with my crazy, sucking pace. If suddenly I can reach the tube no further, I check behind me, and it's indeed the dumb gray dog, caught on one of the hundreds of fixtures set up in the store. I proceed in this frustrating fashion throughout the maze of Podiatry, needing yet being impeded by the presence of this oafish, mechanical companion, frightened that at any moment it will smash into a table or rack, sending hundreds of dollars worth of breakable goods crashing to the floor.
I forge on, coming to a mirror that exists so that customers can hold things up in front of their bodies to test whether or not those items...would look good if held in front of their bodies. Instead of contemplating merchandise, I regard my disheveled self: sweating and hunched over, manipulating an industrial-sized piece of equipment while dressed in skinny jeans and heels. I look ridiculous.
To complete this gargantuan task took an hour and 15 minutes. And that was before I kicked off my shoes, rolled up the bottom of my pants, and got down and dirty with a mop in the fitting rooms.
As I pressed the lever that squeezes the water out of those mops that look like sticks with wigs attached to them, I had a violent flashback to my last-summer job in which my 10 hour shifts would culminate in a solo, restaurant-mopping extravaganza. (I was the equivalent of a night-manager and would end the days alone in the store doing the manual labor that the other employees were too annoyed to complete.) For a moment, the vision had a PTSD-like effect on my psyche, dredging up the hateful ire of food-service woes and bringing a bitter bile to my mouth. The nice, clean, soapy water I had prepared for the fitting rooms suddenly became the mop-water from my restaurant days; dark, oily, and mysterious, with bits of shredded lettuce floating around in it. I felt for certain that I smelled that sour, rotting smell of all different kinds of half-eaten food discarded in the same trashcan, much of the residue hitting the wall just behind the bin and sliding down to the floor leaving a crusty, rancid trail to a pool of congealed stuff at the base.
But then I realized that I was in a food-free area, a brightly lit, well-cleaned world where I was merely performing perfunctory upkeep of the small space. The dark phantoms from my past receded into my brain, and I finished my tasks with plenty of time to spare before opening.
I feel that a comparison between food-service and retail is in order soon, and not just because of my flashbacks. So far, in my work, there seems to be a noticeable difference in the amount of and in the kind of respect that I have received as a human being in these two different worlds. Coming soon...
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