Ghost Lily
It's been a few months since I talked about my former coworker Lily. I met her at the Kroger grocery store where I currently work. During the two and a half years before Lily started working at a different Kroger, she and I became very close due to our very similar sense of humor. After we got off work on the last night we worked together, Lily, her best friend Maya, and I went skateboarding. While skateboarding, their other friend, Owen, met up with us. Shortly after that night, Owen started working at my Kroger, and he started dating Lily.
About two weeks after Owen and Lily started dating; I was out getting carts on my Thursday night shift. I saw a car pull up and park, then Owen and Lily got out of the vehicle. They were too far away for me to catch them, but they saw me when they came out of the store. We only talked for about a minute because I had to get back to work. As they went to the car, Lily called back to me, "Now don't you go and fade out on me, ya hear?" I promised her I wouldn't, but while I intended to keep that promise, I didn't.
On 1/3/2021, I will have worked at Kroger for three years. Over that time, my schedule had only changed three times, and only when my availability changed. As a result, I got into the bad habit of not checking my schedule every time my boss updated it! I usually work on Tuesday mornings from 8 a.m. to noon. So I showed up for my shift and tried to clock in. The time clock informed me that I wasn't scheduled for that day, but I went to one of my bosses and asked him if he could override the time clock because I still wanted to work.
"Who switched you?" He asked as he helped me clock in.
"No one?" I replied, confused. "I always work Tuesday mornings."
"No. yesterday you worked 8-12." He explained.
Because I was completely unaware of this schedule change, and I explained it to another boss that night over text, there were no repercussions on my job as a whole. The big issue was that at 10:00, the people who were scheduled for that day started showing up, and they didn't need me in the front end. My boss sent me to the produce department to help restock salads. A woman in her mid-twenties named Jamie took me to the back where we keep the new shipments. She pointed to a blue trolley and said, "We're going to take these boxes and put them on the trolley and then you can start restocking!"
We stacked the boxes on the trolley so high that they towered over me! When I got back to the produce department, I realized that some salad brands had been completely stocked, but others had not been. Just by sheer coincidence, most of the boxes that I had on the trolley happened to have the salad brands that were completely stocked!
To top it all off, customers started asking me where to find things because the produce department had been recently rearranged. Because I typically work in the front end, I wasn’t much help. Whenever a customer asked me a question, all the other people who work in the produce department were in the back getting more new product. The sudden responsibility of being the sole employee in the produce department, and the trolley situation stress, induced an autism meltdown!
I tried to cope with this meltdown by doing something I do a lot: imagine myself in the future telling someone about what is happening now in a joking way; unfortunately, because I was at Kroger, out of habit, the first person I thought of telling the story to was Lily! As soon as she crept into my mind, I flashed back to all of the adventures Lily and I had while working together. Her "ghost" filled my memory, and a wave of sadness fell over me.
To Be Continued…
No comments:
Post a Comment