Never Been Employed

I had rocked up to the store a mere two weeks prior on the behest of the employment agency tasked with keeping an eye on me. My clothes were a mixture of cheap department store fare and a well-worn blazer I had bought from Vinnies back when I was a much skinnier teenager. The blazer was faded because I did not know how dry cleaning works, and the clothes in general smelled stale and dry because they hadn't been worn in so long.

It turned out that rather than a job interview, I just walked in with one other guy and briefly spoke with a pleasant but indifferent woman who checked our vibes and gave us a brief description of how stocktake works. I don't even remember saying anything. But she liked our vibes.

Now the same old woman, who is of course the manager here, shows me through a large and alien store, telling me in brief detail how to use the PDA to count stock. Most of the shelves are the height of my shoulders and stacked with either kitchenware or home décor, but the shelves on the walls rise well beyond my head. The only sounds that rise above the radio are beeps and the occasional low voice. She takes me to a small enclave full of venetian blinds.

"Make sure to count everything once and only once." Her demeanour is more comforting than the task she leaves with me. "Come and let me know when you're finished."

The walls block most of the noise, such that it sounds like someone put a high-frequency filter on the radio. The venetians fill up eighty percent of the small room. I will need to remove twenty percent of them before I can even hope to both scan the products and keep track of which ones have been counted, and which have not.

As I begin to remove some of the products, just hoping that by taking it one step at a time it will all fall into place, I offer up a vague prayer of thanks that I am alone here. The mere thought of talking to people fills me with enough dread and insecurity as it is; I have no idea how to actually do it. Worse than that: I have never had a proper job, and I know every question I ask a real employee reveals my ignorance. The closest thing I ever had to a proper job was ghost-writing some random guy's novel. I let myself down there too, and I'm a trained writer. Here in a retail store, with no training and barely a word of direction from the manager, I am a straight up dunce.

It does not take long to realise that venetian blinds are heavy. Turns out that of all the weight I put on in my years of undiagnosed depression, none of it was muscle. I will discover in a week or so that I have also never learned to lift a heavy object safely. For the time being, I just hope that thinking to myself "I'd rather not hurt my back" is enough to make my body do that.

Every now and then a customer comes up to me and asks me a question. It doesn't matter the nature of the question, because I know nothing about the store. I haven't even shopped there. I am always afraid that I'll respond in the wrong way, that I'll appear confused and awkward. Customers are the only people who consistently and almost exclusively confirm those anxieties. In the coming two years I will cope with this anxiety through a dull resentment. But for now I just feel as dumb as I look.

I do not keep track of time, but after a blur that could have been one hour or half a day, I finish. I search the store until I find the manager.

"I've finished the venetians," I say.

"Good." She sounds sincere but otherwise indifferent.

She leads me through the store, back to a place not far from my first task. We pass employees, who not only know what they're doing, but also understand my own tasks better than I do. I feel small, which I know comes from my posture, not my height. I do not know how to fix it, so I suppose I'll just be small.

She leads me into a room that is much longer than the previous one, but a little skinnier. The left side of the room is lined with roller blinds, stacked on top of each other. The far end of this tunnel is home to scores of the longest roller blinds. The walls are stone and even the smallest sounds bounce off every bare surface. I breathe in stale air and dust as I try to calm my heart, which beats faster as I realise that there will be no way to do this job safely, let alone comfortably.

She leaves me once more, knowing that I understand my task, but having neglected to tell me how to do it. I begin with the hardest part: the monster blinds at the far end. The only way I can think to do this is to line most of them up on the bare side of the tunnel with their bar-codes facing outwards. It is a genuine challenge to balance between the roller blinds on the left and right now, but it's what I'm being paid for, and I've been unemployed too long to be picky.

I can hear scraping, and I can see that I have not stood the tall blinds up perfectly straight. Gravity is pulling them over. It's almost imperceptible, but my body can sense it happening. The human mind is particularly good at sensing things when you're in danger. I try to grab them and correct the angle, but there are too many, and they are now all angled incorrectly. All I can do is jump out of the way before they come down. I jump in the wrong direction, and although I avoid being hurt, I am trapped until I clean it up.

Now the manager returns.

She looks dispassionately at the mess. "You shouldn't have anything blocking your way out. If there was a fire, you need a clear path to the exit."

I apologise rather than pointing out that the entire room is a textbook hazard. I am reluctant to ascribe ill intent, but the lack of instruction meant that even though there was no way to do the task both safely and within the expected timeframe, it was technically my choice to do it this way, because I was left with the task.

She leaves me with an elderly man. Another temp. He is far more cheerful, and I lead him through the process that I had decided on. The task is not so bad with two people. Handing roller blinds back and forth makes it far easier to keep track of everything.

The old man tells me about how he takes odd jobs in between travelling the world. He lives an interesting life, and I listen because I do not know how to make conversation. In fact, in my seven years of adult life, I have spent very little time around others. It's been hard to see my closest friend, who was poor and tasked with the care of his infant son, and my other closest friends had moved away from Hobart many years earlier. Throughout my university years I had not made new friends. I didn't know how. I kept my head down, too embarrassed at myself and my life to even participate properly in the discussions.

Because I had no replacement for my lost social life, and no real workplace experience, I feel now that I can't really connect with others. It kind of feels to me that, if I were capable of it, it would have happened by now. Even after the two years that follow this day and all the immense mental recovery that I go through in the time after, somehow I believe it even more now.

Needless to say, I do not tell the old man about my own life in return, though I do tell him of my passions for writing, film-making and music. The only parts of myself I respect. After working with him for an hour or so, I do feel more comfortable here. He does not seem to care that I am clueless. I suppose everyone deserves to start off with low expectations, and perhaps I should allow that for myself.

We count the rest of the room without incident. I walk out, paying little attention to the small room opposite this tunnel, blissfully ignorant that I will have to count the stock inside it tomorrow. Blissfully ignorant also that I will have to not only keep track of which items have been counted, but also keep track of where every single item began, and put them back perfectly. And thank God I am blissfully ignorant that the room is cramped, and those items are stacked high.

For today, the manager leads me to another room, with another temp who seems to be my age, or perhaps younger. The room includes boxes of bedding, somewhat spaced out and a little easier to count. However, the other side of the room is full of loose cushions. As tall as my head, it is a mountain.

I suggest that we move the boxes then create two cushion piles: one pile of counted cushions and another of yet to be counted, with a thin line of bare ground to separate them. He agrees, and we take our time. Cushions slip down the mountain so easily that this job is perhaps the easiest to screw up in the entire store. Taking it one step at a time with an eye for quality rather than speed turns out to be an effective choice.

I worry, as we work, that I am too quiet. When I speak, I worry that I am too talkative. He is not inclined to make conversation, and the rational part of my brain reminds me that being quiet is not unusual and does not make me seem weird. However, the rational and emotional parts of my brain don't really talk.

Half way through, the manager comes in with another woman. She once again dispassionately surveys the scene, but offers a much more meaningful gesture of reassurance: an offer of further work. She considered the task difficult, and was pleased with how we handled it. With the benefit of hindsight, now that I, two years later, am one of only three permanent stock people, I realise that the other tasks I was given were important and would be challenging to anyone. I suppose someone did notice after all.

The manager reveals that the woman standing at her side, and who was also observing our struggles to count "The Cushion Room" would become the manager in two week.

"I'm the one you'll have to suck up to." She giggles, excited.

Perhaps I'd be dispassionate too if I had only two weeks left, and they were spent counting every item in a chaotic store.

Before I know it, we've finished. The sense of accomplishment overwhelms the sense of uselessness and ignorance. I feel a brief sense of belonging. But it is only brief.