Chicken Pity

I always feel more sorry for Dessie when there are unusual weather things going on. Today there is a big snow storm so I brought her home a head of old lettuce from the store.

The Day After Christmas At The Store

HOLY !@#% IT WAS BUSY!!!!!!

But different busy. It was milk and eggs busy.

See?

Even I bought some.

Christmas Eve Day At The Store

HOLY !@#% IT WAS BUSY!!!!!!

Lynch mob forms to the left.

The Old Days

I miss the old days when Jeremiah hung out at the registers and the gas pumps all day, just bein' Jeremiah and grumping at everyone and cracking his grumpy quiet jokes.

Jeremiah and Verne hanging out and being buddies back in The Old Days

Sometimes, if he was busy with something else, I would tell a customer looking for gas, "Go ahead and pump your own. Jeremiah might bite your leg though." And I am pretty sure they believed me.

So Many Changes

The same week as the meat counter disorientation...

... this is unbelievable...

the SAME WEEK

THIS happened...

Names have been changed to protect unprotected names.

Before... Full Serve... Jeremiah Johnson pumps gas for the gas crowd for 25 years.

Memorial Portrait of an Era Gone By.

Dismantling Jeremiah's World

Now it is just regular old self serve gas. People swipe their card, pump, and go. Unless you want to pay with cash. Then you have to come into the store and bug the cashier to preauthorize the pump for you and pay your money. We have to punch a bunch of stuff into a gadget covered with inscrutable buttons. And, of course, stuff likes to GO WRONG and we get all flummoxed and then the lynch mob starts to form as the line backs up to the dairy coolers.

And everybody is worried about poor Jeremiah.

Where is Jeremiah?

What is he doing? 

Does he still have a job?

Don't worry, he is just working inside the store now...

doing...

BEVERAGES!!!! 

(since STUPID VERNE abandoned us)

and other stuff.

Upheaval

It was a disorienting autumn at the store. 

Huh? What is the meat dept stove doing in the screw room?

Huh? What is the meat dept hot box doing by the blue bench?

It's complicated.

It all has to do with the source of the Slime-ish Sea.
(Remember the Slime-ish Sea? Refresh your memory by clicking here!)

Gross.

 The drain in the bottom of the meat case was the culprit.

Every Tuesday, when Betty "cleaned" the meat case, it would rain in the basement.

The floor was so rotten and buckled it was difficult to walk on.

 The meat dept ladies are S A I N T S
 (I love to shout "Yo! Deli Bitches!" when I walk by but I don't think they like that appellation all so much)
 to have worked for so long with that miserable floor under their feet!!!

So the meat case was finally replaced.

It was a BIG DEAL.

What will people do without their McWhits??

EEEEEEWWWWWWWW.

Unusual sight.

It is downhill from the registers to the front door.

The hard part is done.

Now replace the floor.

My underworld exposed. Now you see why THIS was not an ordinary day.

All done.

Install the new one.

Oooooooo! Shiny! I suggested that someone crawl in there and look corpse-like for a photo before loading it up but Verne wasn't around and  no one else would do it.

 

Woo Hoo!! Secret looks at our bods can be had!!

The Deli Bitches acknowledge Shiny, but ultimately withhold approval.

More Verne-Is-Gone Moping

I used to unload beverage deliveries with Verne. He would announce over the PA, "Coke party in the basement. Coke party in the basement NOW."

We would stick a ramp with wheelies all over it out the little blue window. The delivery guy would send the flats in.

Verne would catch the flats and put them on my dolly for me to wheel to the proper beverage area. He used to give me a turn at catching. I could catch everything but the 2 litre flats and the flats of glass Orangina bottles.

  

Orangina had a dirty nickname. 

 I really miss Verne.

A lot.

Requiem for Verne.

Verne is gone. He has been leaving for quite a while. His shiny new real job finally took him full time. Everything is different now. My world has gone monochrome.

The Coke and Pepsi products.

Verne was in charge of beverages. There were a lot of beverages for him to be in charge of.

Water, Vitamin Water, Powerade, Monster energy drinks

Oceanspray, Realtree, Snapple, Starbucks, Red Bull.

Beer

Polar Seltzer and some crates of D&W's label soda

And dairy. He was in charge of dairy.

The dairy coolers

Verne used to say, "I am the dairy MANAGER. I have MANAGER in my title." And then I would say, "Yeah. Well. I have BOSSY BITCH in my title so GET THE HELL AWAY FROM ME." Then he would throw something at me. And I would throw something at him. Once I threw a rotten strawberry at him and it hit the leg of his best beige corduroy pants. We spent a long time trying to de-stain his pants. He liked me better after that. Once he insulted a woman who works in the meat department in an unimaginably rude manner and I got so angry with him that I made a big black slash mark on his good Carhartt t-shirt with a permanent marker. He got so mad he stormed out of the store and went over to his apartment and played video games until he calmed down. I bought him a new t-shirt and he never used that language again in reference to the aforementioned meat department employee. We talked about that episode a lot. It was a pivotal moment in our relationship. He really liked me better after that.

The thing about Verne is that he is kind. He is just a kid, but he is a kind kid. Well, he was a kid when I first met him. Now he is 20 and has a big boy job. Damn him. I am an old lady and Verne is always kind to me. And he is always kind to the developmentally disabled peeps that populate Dan's social program disguised as a store. Don't misunderstand - Verne can rip you a new asshole with the best of 'em (hence the death by permanent marker of his favorite t-shirt.) But probably, if he was slicing and dicing someone with his Viper Tongue of Slashing Invective, it was becuase they deserved it.

And then, Verne's smile can melt a thousand teenage girlie hearts, any one of whom will be his when he decides it is time. I used to walk into the back room of the meat department while shouting, "NO NECKING AT WORK!!!" Just in case. You never knew with Verne.

The thing about Verne is that he got a whopping dose of charisma when he entered the world.

Alarm Clocks

 Behind the cowbells are the alarm clocks.

OSM inspired search

I went looking for my washboard in the basement. I couldn't find it. I did find the box of smaller jug band instruments we used to play in my class.

We could make some NOISE! See that plastic sack? It is full of combs. We used to play the combs every morning (with wax paper on them) after singing and recorder playing. We would play our favorite songs, even some rounds. It was big fun.

I used to think of my students as Les Sangliers Petits. I have been missing them a lot lately. I probably gave the washboard to one of them.

The Green Door

and it leads to...

The Conveyor

I love sending boxes up the conveyor. I used to be afraid of it but gradually my dread of carrying loaded boxes up the non-automatic wooden ramp by the wine cellar stairs outgrew my fear of the conveyor.

Bottle Returns

This sign hangs over the portal where the conveyor comes up from the basement, across from the blue bench. I answered the bottle bell once today. The returns were all Polar Seltzer bottles, different flavors. I try to follow the rules, but sometimes, when it is a really big eclectic bunch of  bottles, I get flummoxed, becuase I don't ever stock drinks and I never buy them either, and so I am not sure what we sell and what we don't.

The Blue Bench

The blue bench is in the paint room. It is a busy spot. Free food can usually be found on the blue bench. Plus, bottle returns take place there. (See the bottle bell rope in the right foreground?) Plus, the automatic conveyor ramp comes up from the basement right across from it. Plus, you have to walk past it to get to the green door. Another pic of the blue bench lives here.

String

Yesterday someone asked me where to find mason's line. I wasn't sure what he meant so I asked him, "You mean that line with the chalk that you snap?"

"No," he said, "it is just string, in neon colors."

I drew a blank on that so I walked out to hardware and asked one of the Hardware Gurus where to find mason's line. "Across from the beer cooler."

Me: "You mean the back of the beer cooler? In the Screw Room?"

Guru: "No, no. Out front. On the Floor."

Me: "OHHHHHHH!!!! You mean the String Department!! Under the sauces!"

I always wondered why it came in those vivid colors. I thought it was just for making little kids happy. I sure bought enough of it for my kids when they were little.

Sauces: hot, specialty, soy, steak

Not shown: BBQ, marinades, and rubs.

January 19, 2013 -- Special Note: I was poking around and I found this important hot sauce post still in draft status, so I went ahead and published it posthumously (who died, exactly?) since it so aptly illustrates the mercurial nature of the sauce endcap.

Stuff n' Things

The cowbell department.

Tabasco Crisis

I always have my camera at work and I got to talking to someone at the store about taking photos. I explained that my tremor has progressed to the point where it is interfering with my enjoyment of the hobby. I don't get too many good pics anymore. He lent me this awesome looking tripod, which he dropped off at the store today. He also gave me some other ideas about how to compensate for camera jiggle. He took this pic. He likes hot sauce. He is always asking us to track down one esoteric hot sauce or another. The other day he asked me why we didn't have any Tabasco on the shelf, which, he patiently explained, is the standard reference for most hot sauce applications. It turned out that we had some in the basement, but we had lost track of it during the Hot Sauce Coup when the Hot Sauce Manager was deposed. I brought some up, reclaimed the Tabasco shelf space, and now the world is safe for Tabasco once more.

Verne

Verne takes pride in his work. He experiences a fully stocked and rotated beer cooler as a thing of beauty.

Verne

Verne thinks outside the box, extending the usefulness of work equipment.

Verne

Verne is always willing to pose when I have an artistic concept yearning to come to fruition.

Why George doesn't care about the basement speaker being covered

  He doesn't care because the music, and more to the point, the announcements -- HARDWARE LINE TWO. QUESTION ABOUT LAMP WICKS. HARDWARE LINE TWO -- can still be heard. If you squeeze by Mr. Do Not Use,

then pass by the Special Empty Cardboard Box Storage Area, you merge into the next speaker zone and arrive at the Slime-ish Sea. I took this video on a special day: October 15th, 2012. You can't always look up into the meat department from the Slime-ish Sea. But that is a story I don't yet know how to tell.