Retailmare

Chapter 3 - Called into the Front Office

Not a very early day the next day—starting at 10am—which wasn't bad. That meant I would get off at a decent time in the evening—seven. Yeah, I know, nine-hour days. We only worked eight of those hours, though, because we clocked off for our lunch break and clock back on after. I was used to it, and it paid my monthly student loan fee and my phone bill.

But still no luck with finding an online job. I wanted to teach kids overseas, maybe kids from China or Korea. Teach them English. I could speak a little of both languages, enough to get by, since I had to take a foreign language in college. That was Chinese—I took Korean also just because I loved watching their TV shows and I wanted to know what they were saying without reading the subtitles. I still had to read them. I only knew certain phrases and introducing myself.

I started at check-stand 7 this time, right in the middle. That meant not a lot of customers since people were coming from either 10's direction and 3's direction and went to those check stands as well as all the self-check stands around them. I didn't mind, though. I wanted to fold clothes across the way since people always messed them up.

After half-an-hour, I had no customers. Then, finally, someone came through my line. It was a man who looked like he could be in his early-thirties and looked like he was in the logging profession, as was shown by his dirty jeans and orange sweater that read Smithing Logging in the corner of the chest.

"Find everything alright?" I asked him.

"I did, thank you," he said as he put a blue Walmart carrying basket full of things on the conveyer. He took a look at me. "You know, why aren't all the cashiers here as pretty as you?"

My heart jumped, and I tried not to grimace or look surprised. I didn't know what to say to that. "Oh, thank you."

"I'm serious, though. You're like the only pretty cashier here."

Okay... was this a complement to me or a diss on the other cashiers? "Thank you for the complement."

I finished ringing his stuff up, gave him his total, he paid, and he was off.

"Awkward..." I muttered, especially since that guy wasn't all the good-looking in my opinion. Well, kudos to him for having the confidence to hit on a girl like that.

More people came into my line, a surprising rush of people. They even had to call up back-up cashiers to the front, people from other departments who were trained as cashiers or who were cashier once but left to another department. My lunch break came, and I was late getting on it because of all the people. I sat down in the break room with my lunch and sighed in exhaustion.

"Busy, wasn't it?" asked Rita, and she sat down at the table. She was probably on a fifteen-minute break.

"Yeah, it was. You're not going to believe what someone told me. This creepy logger guy."

"What?"

I told her about that man and his "complement." "I honestly didn't know how to respond to that."

"I wouldn't know, either. Actually, if I were you, I would've said, 'Don't diss the other cashiers. There's a cashier here named Rita who's pretty hot.'"

I laughed. "Yeah, but I don't have your confidence."

"You should. As I've said—you're pretty."

"Thanks. I guess I'm still a bit shy. It was a real problem in high school. That's probably another reason why I got cheated on..."

Her eyes turned sympathetic. "Hey, that's not your fault. Whoever that guy was, he was a jerk."

"Yeah, he was. But I liked him at one point."