The Exploits of Eleanor (Pt. 2)

At home, using a bit of register tape she'd taken before clocking out, she began to work on The Book. The Book of Rules, which she hoped would provide hope and illumination to cashiers the world over. Okay, definitely not that far—she had no idea how to distribute it, for one thing—but she could do something for herself at the very least, and doing something was better than nothing. There was no organization in mind, but she wanted it to be for cashiers and customers alike. Advice and hard truths all in one—rather like Murphy's Laws of Combat Operations but for this new field of war. She was hardly the first cashier to compare the positions of retail clerk and soldier—though like all things in talking about this stuff it had to be delivered with a little tittering laugh at the end. No one ever died in retail, not really. But soldiers die in more ways than just in the body, and many cashiers died the same way. They still stared those thousand yards. They still came home broken and lost with almost nothing tangible to show for it. And there were still tops to go over.

She hesitated only briefly, then wrote:

Rule #1 – If you think you're better than someone because of the difference in money you and that someone make, don't ever leave the house.

Not a bad start. She was worried about the wording at first; maybe someone could turn it about, and use it as an argument against poor people. They were always doing that—assuring themselves that EBT folks, WIC folks, were proud to be poor and living in squalor, doing secret, unnameable, example-less things that subverted the comfort of the middle class. People could easily take these words as an excuse to try to keep the poor shut up in their houses.

She sighed, and knew she had to trust in the intellect of her audience. No—it wasn't a matter of intelligence. She was too old now to believe in prioritizing intelligence over kindness; or blending heart and mind. This was feeling, pure feeling. No matter how smart someone was, if they were stabbed in the gut they were gonna get pissed...and now The Gap was so big that any violation of class norms was seen as a stab in the gut. It was downright Victorian.

“Victorian”—they didn't deserve that harsh of an insult, not after so few months. She was just spitting out malice. Making waves, rocking boats. (They played “Don't Rock the Boat” on the radio at the work and she rolled her eyes as she wondered why that was.)

But she still had to try. (“Try what?” “Just try.”) She closed her eyes and leaned back in her chair, remembering the old texts. Walden. Notes from Underground (wait, there was questionable sexuality there, bad example—a relic opinion from before she'd read the actual book). B. Traven, then, writing Socialist works in the middle of the First Red Scare, hiding eternity behind their pseudonym. She was never going to fully mimic them but they were those little slivers of ideas that kept her going. Shards of the past. A very distant past now.

It was very much like those old masters were as far away as Socrates and all the other creaky irrelevancies. Half-buried statues, Ozymandias idols in the sand. She viewed their works on sparking, half-working gadgets built a lifetime ago, which provided a light that only a poor imitation of the now-absent sun...

That wasn't true. The sun still shown, but this was the Midwest. Winters were long and cold and gray. No wonder she was here, at this point in her life, scratching her pen on an old piece of receipt paper.

Rule #2...

Oh God. There were so many rules and half-concepts for rules buried in her mind that she always put away at the end of her shift for the sake of her own safety. She knew that, even outside of the insults which called her overdramatic and weak, she did have a tendency to push things to their extremes a bit too much, and so it was healthy to get those ideas out of her head when she still had a chance. But in that drive for extremity, she had difficulty seeing the lines between pet peeves and systemic problems. She'd have to parse them apart, and that meant writing. No more numbers, then. Except Rule #1. That was special.

The bullet points first. “No storytelling unless you have a long-process transaction in which to tell stories.”

“No checks, WIC, exact change, or other long-process transactions on Express.”

“Calm the fuck down.”

“No, seriously. CALM THE FUCK DOWN.”

Most of these so far were for customers...so much for Murphy's Laws. But she was on a roll. She wrote down a few more, knowing she'd have to flesh them out later.

She thought again about the ones she wished would never come back.

But then another incident from the day: twenties. Fucking twenties. She had to write something about that. Extensively.

Regarding bills over $10 – most drawers do not open with twenties in them. Do not use bills larger than tens before 11 AM. Do not use bills larger than twenties before 1. Do not use large bills for small orders, especially during the holidays. We will be accommodating if you do not have a bank account but if there is a debit card in your wallet, you have a bank account, and you should break your big bills there.

Also, while many stores offer a cash-back function, don't use it. Ever. It is a pain. Again, if you have a debit card—which you will need to get cash back—you have a bank account. Go to the bank. If it's a pain for you, plan your schedule better. It costs stores to bring in change, and because they have to port in change from outside it means there is not unlimited change. Stores run out of tens, and, God forbid, they run out of fives and even ones, and then we are screwed. Bank.

If you ask to break a hundred for tens or something similar, you deserve to be treated suspiciously, even if your bill comes up clean, even if the manager says yes. Fuck you.

She wondered how many times she would write “Fuck you” while doing this. She would get rid of all of them, of course, in the final draft, except maybe when she finally nailed down whatever the Worst Customer Sin was.

Oh man, would that be a quest to discover. The answer was rather obvious: those who committed traditional crimes, those were the worst. The child-abusers, the rapists, the assaulters, the thieves. Why they still came in she had no idea. But she took on that burden when she started in grocery. Even the wicked needed to eat.

In fairness, she didn't really care too much about the thieves. Some of her friends were thieves.

There were different types of thieves, but that was another debate for another night.

Unscrewing the bottle on her sleeping pills, she looked at the orange sky and watched the dead leaves scrape along the street. She knocked back the pills, having been unable to find the moon, and climbed into bed.