Four hours working non stop on the cash register without a bathroom break. Not the best situation for my fifty five year old urinary tract. It's two-thirty in the afternoon. I have not had lunch. My blood sugar is dropping.
     Today is the first day of the company's one-day sale that actually lasts two days. Every cash register has twenty or more customers in line. The company slogan for this holiday season is 'Believe.' It's written in large red letters across every holiday shopping bag. I think about the slogan Believe while I fill bags with merchandise. What is it we workers are supposed to believe? How much money this company makes during the holidays? The one thing we do not believe is that we will ever be compensated for the two fifteen minute rest periods per day we rarely receive.
     Our department manager Bernard is missing. It was a mysterious transfer at the height of the holiday shopping season. A temporary fill-in manager comes by my register. I call out to her, “Amy, IÕve been working over four hours without a break. I would love to go to lunch.” “We go five hours without a break here,” she retorts as she storms off.
     There are many things this large retail company gets away with to exploit its workers, but California Labor Code strictly mandates the required meal times. The five-hour mark is fast approaching when the company will be fined hundreds of dollars if I don't clock out for my meal break. Shortly before the five-hour mark, Amy appears at my register and sweetly tells me, “Go ahead and take your lunch. Right now! ”
     Given the current state of the economy, I haven't had much work in the last year. I thought taking a holiday job would be a good way for me to stay out of debt. Ironically, part of my job includes encouraging customers to incur debt, by using store credit cards to obtain an additional ten percent discount. My register tracks the number of store credit card transactions I ring up and I will be reprimanded if I don't meet my quota. Nothing about this job is consistent with what I believe in. After work, I often obsess about events in my workday.
     At night the job follows me into my dreams.
     I am preparing Christmas dinner, a goose. The goose doesn't have feathers. It has a short curly tan fur on it. It looks like a fuzzy butternut squash. I chop the head off the goose and begin skinning it with a vegetable peeler. I hold the neck and peel it on its side from top to bottom. I look down and see the heart is still beating. I am surprised the heart can still beat after the head is cut off.
     Next I am back on the job working after my heart transplant. I am disturbed to realize that the heart transplant I have received is the goose heart. “You didn't tell me about this,” I complain to my manager. “What do I do if I have any medical problems from this?” He says, “Just go to your nearest emergency room and you are entitled to another heart transplant. Of course if something happens before the end of the holiday season, we cannot guarantee you will ever get your own heart back. ”
     I wake up in a sweat but my mind is clear. I know what to do. I call Amy. I have just two words for her. “I quit.”
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© 2009 Margaret Cooley
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