After twelve years of retirement, I’ve landed another job at a grocery store. I was hired to bag groceries and make customers happy that they came. On my first day on the job I was to get training to do just that. This was what I had done for so many years at another grocery chain so I knew pretty much what to expect. The only thing about it is that it didn’t work out that way.
I was looking forward to something that was simple and familiar. If I could work twenty hours or even a little more each week, that would have been just fine. They had something else in mind.
I was early on my first day. It was important for me to be early. If I was on time, that would have been late. There was a situation at this store. Not enough workers were hired to change shelf tags. Eager to help, I was willing to step in and do anything they had for me to do. The lady who trained me was just coming off of an over night shift. That should have been a clue for me. I should have seen this a s a foreshadow of what was to come. Whatever they wanted me to do, I was ready to do it without question. Matching names of products and the number on the tags was not as easy as it may sound like it would be. It was a good thing that I had my glasses but even then, after four hours the numbers on these tags were getting harder to see. “Is this 548? No! Is that an 8 or a 6? Hang on! It is a 659.”
The next week I worked an early seven hour shift on Tuesday. I had to return again at eleven o’clock that night to work into Wednesday morning. Every day I worked I wore what I call my cruel shoes. It was the only pair of shoes I had that met the uniform code. Good old Dr. Sholls kill your feet till they are dead cruel shoes. Every step was like being hit by a sledge hammer just before each heal. I know that it was for arch support but it hit farther back on my foot than it was suppose to. When I get busy on the job I stay on it until my task is completed so I ignored the pain and pressed on. Each step was very painful and there were many steps in that thirteen hour shift. I was so tired by the time the store opened Wednesday morning that I was delirious and extremely dehydrated. The manager was alarmed to see me laying on the floor, changing tags on the bottom shelves. I must have looked like a drunkard. Imagine the way my feet felt and the difficulty of getting my two hundred sixty five pounds of wonderfulness back to a full stance after changing tags on all of the lower shelves!
When I got off work, my feet were hurting clear up to my knees. I texted my sweet to let her know that I was off work. It was too cold for me to sit on the bench out side. I hurt too much to stand inside waiting. I staggered to a hardware store near by. When I went through the doors I thought, “There has to be a chair, a bench or something in here.” I walked the length of the front of the store until I came to a stack of chairs. I pulled one down and landed myself in it.
I texted my sweet and let her know where to find me. A worker asked me if I was ok. With a voice barely audible I told him about the shift I just got off of. He said, “You are Iron Man!” I smiled and chuckled. “Great! Now I am tired and hurt beyond description with a Black Sabbath song stuck in my head.”
(STAY TUNED FOR PART 2)
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