Gracie Abrams is eking out a solitary existence, fighting day-in, day-out against the drain of working customer service and nursing two newborn kittens in her off time. Out on her own ever since her sister moved in with her boyfriend, the burden of...
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"Hey, uh, Gracie—you, you okay?"
With three heavy blinks—one, two three—I peered up from three large produce boxes to find my Service Coordinator, Amanda, staring at me.
"Huh?"
"You've got—" Amanda used large, sweeping gestures to indicate her face. The movements belied her grace as a dancer. With her long, dark-red hair and ovaltine face, she looked like every ballerina's dream.
"Except for the hips." Amanda had told her once, laughing off her fourteenth studio rejection. "I'm self-taught. In ballet, that's worse than being fat."
"You're not fat," I'd grumbled, protesting.
But Amanda had just whirled away, waving over her shoulder. "Yeah, yeah."
"Gracie?" Amanda's voice dug me out of my reveries once more, and my hands stilled, one hand cupping the Zebra device in my palm, the other on the cardboard lip of the one box filled to the brim with makeup supplies.
Before I could focus back on Amanda, a customer appeared in my line. Flashing to the other side of the Customer Service Desk, I glided into place with a small, hard-earned customer service smile.
"Hello!"
Moments before I typed my Employee ID number into one of the vacant registers to punch out, I stood, rubbing at my tired eyes.
Today, one of the General Merchandise Leads had brought over a giant vat of makeup. With Zebra in hand to scan up all of each product's technical information, it became my job in between busy bursts at the Customer Service Desk to sort through which ones had a current planogram and which ones would be boxed up and shipped back to—somewhere. A distributor facility? Surely one of the Meijer GM employees wouldn't have to sort out each brand and send them all off to their different manufacturers?
I shuddered. Surely not.
"Are you sure you're alright?" Amanda popped up beside me, and I clutched at my chest in silent shock. My SC laughed, leaning her elbows onto the flat surface of the register's turnstile.
"I can't believe Mav brought all that stuff up here," Amanda commented, her voice tinged with the slightest disbelief. "I mean, seriously, it's not like we don't have a million things to do anyway. What about when I'm on break, and you have to act as the SC? You can't be doing their jobs for them all day."
I nodded, my voice too thick to speak. Sorting through a couple boxes to help out the GM staff wasn't too terrible, but it felt like they saved all of them for whoever was at the Service Desk. Every time I disappeared for a break today, I returned by being greeted with another giant box to sort.
My mind couldn't take the monotony, mixed with the moments where those boxes got in my way entirely. The Service Desk was either dead or popping. There was no in between. Having three boxes of shit on the counter where everyone dropped stuff off could make even the least organized person feel claustrophobic.
