owlrigh

Myself and a colleague were working in an aisle in the morning, capping, when I heard someone call out --

"Do you live here?"

I looked over at the customer, chip bag in hand; he was apparently talking to me.

"Me? Ha, yes, I think so sometimes."

"Whenever I come shopping you're here! Morning, afternoon, night -- you're here at midnight!" He waved the chips about in emphasis. I would have sworn myself blue in the face that I'd never seen him before in my life.

"Yes, that's about right," and he was, was so dreadfully right.

He shook his head, laughing, and walked away with his goodies. I, however, then spent another seven hours, right through to noticed afternoon.

It's funny when customers don't expect you to recognise them later when they're being wankers -- or perhaps don't remember you, despite trying to help them? And on the other hand, the quiet customers you don't notice, who laugh when you nearly run into them and say things like -- "Nearly got me this time!" and you never remembered the first time, and you feel guilty, bad.

"Did you hear about what happened?"

"...no?" said I.

"L.C. came in the other morning, in full work uniform, and V. was on checkout 1. She walked up to her, tapped V. on the shoulder, then punched her in the face! In front of the line of customers waiting to be served, calling her a slut! It was all caught on camera; the managers were watching it in the general office earlier."

( And why did this happen? )

Last week we were made to watch another of the demeaning training movies the supermarket produces. This one was on safety and compliance, along with skits of supposed employees performing in "So You Wanna Dance?" style, and other things so horrible I have since blanked them from my mind.

In fact, I watched so little of it the night captain kept barking my name because of my unsuccessful attempts to slide around the doorway and leave.

Around the time they started in on compliance and workplace safety a terrible poem appeared next to the finger scanner. It goes along the lines of:

I could have saved a life today
I saw someone doing something dangerous
I could have told them not to do it
but I didn't
and now they're dead
I could have saved a life today, rinse and repeat.

( And so I couldn't resist... )

Sometimes I wonder what people are thinking when they come up to me while I'm at work.

As an example, today a little old lady came up to me while I was shelving Coca Cola.

"Excuse me, would you have more Earl Grey tea out the back? There's none on the shelf."

"Maybe. What brand?"

"Earl Grey tea. There's none on the shelf."

"Yeah... what brand? Twinings? Lipton? There's more than one brand of Earl Grey."

"Oh." It must have been a revelation for this lady, who I swear must have been in her seventies. "Just Earl Grey."

"Show me," said I, and went to the aisle, weaving between trolleys to get there. The little old lady never appeared; she must have felt daft at not realising there are more than one Earl Grey, and more than one type in any brand! Loose leaf, teabags, how many teabags?

( Read more... )

Any customer who came into the supermarket I work at today would have wondered at the sombre mood and the red-rimmed eyes. There were few happy smiles in the younger contingent and amongst most of the ladies.

"Are you okay?" I asked a fellow grocery worker when I glimpsed her watery eyes. She nodded, but then later --

"Has the manager spoken to you?"

"No ...?"

"Jesse died last night."

The store was hit hard.

( Read more... )

Ben thought I was dead once, dead and left lying on the road after an accident, or perhaps attacked by some man and thrown onto the rock wall along the riverside. This was when I was working nights at Mackay, when I'd leave the store shortly after all the clubs had closed and drunken people roamed the streets at will.

I would usually finish between midnight and 2am, and took the dinghy ashore with me, leaving Ben stranded on the boat until I returned. This time we had a huge shipment arrive, and nobody else wanted to stay to finish it off except for me. I put off sending Ben a message saying I'd be late, as I didn't want to wake him up. The hours flew by, and the next thing I knew the day staff had begun arriving.

"Phone call for owlrigh, line one," came over the P.A. at around 7am, and when I took it, Ben's mum was on the line. She was visiting at the time, and she passed me onto Ben.

"Oh, you're alive," he said. "When are you coming home?" In the midst of my apology for not sending a message.

I answered, hung up, and thought no more of it. When I returned to work my manager told me off for not sending him a message to let him know I'd be late.

"At least it shows he really loves you," she said. "Make sure you send him a message next time. Use the phone here if you need to!"

When I got home a bit over an hour later, however, I found things had been going very different to I'd imagined.

Ben was silent, lying in bed and not responsive to any cuddle. His mother was shooting me meaningful looks, and as soon as he could get up and go to work, he went.

"He was frantic," she told me. "He thought you were dead and he couldn't get ashore! He was going to move the boat downstream so he could swim ashore and go looking for you. Luckily I thought to ring the supermarket when I did. He calmed down when he heard your voice."

I felt bad. So that was why he didn't talk to me when I got back, and only said, "send a message next time."

After that he insisted I always send him a message just as I was leaving work, so he'd know I was arriving fifteen minutes later. After a month or so of this I began to think it a bit excessive, that perhaps it was time he got over being worried I was going to cark it, and then berate myself as being callow and mean-hearted for thinking that.

A year later and a change of scene: Ballina, and Ben was busy building the shed every day, so that the catamaran could get started. He was onto the roof stage, up a rickety, unsafe and too-short ladder every day.

I was busy keeping myself occupied and looking for work during the day, returning to the boat for the evening, making food or just reading and waiting for Ben's call to pick him up. It got darker, and before I knew it night had arrived and he'd still not called. He'd always before arrived before dark, so I wondered what he was up to and rang.

No answer.

Perhaps he was in the shower.

I rang half an hour later. No answer.

Bah! Maybe he was still busy doing something. I rang again, a niggly worry beginning to creep up my spine, remembering the ladder. No answer.

I imagined the ladder finally folding in two, Ben crumpled at the bottom, neck twisted and eyes glazed, his phone ringing in his pocket, him dead.

I tried to put this out of my mind and I hopped in the dinghy and crossed the suddenly interminable river stretch, wondering whether to call the cops to come to the yard just in case. The yard would be locked, I thought, but I could climb the barbed-wire fence all the same. I didn't have anybody's number from anywhere in the area, and he was the only person in the yard all day long. He could have been there all day. No, I wouldn't think about that.

I pulled the dinghy up, impatient with the time it took to lock it up, and jumped on my bike for the 20-minute ride to get to him. I pulled out my phone and tried ringing as I rode, but there was still no answer. Shoving it into a pocket, I crouched over for more power and speed and headed off.

Rrrrrrrrrrrrring.

It was Ben.

"Sorry! The phone fell out of my pocket and I was talking to Damo," a chap from a nearby yard, "and didn't realise the time."

"I thought you were dead," I said starkly, and began to cry. "I was riding to come find you."

"Sorry sweetie! I'm coming home now! I'll meet you at the dinghy!"

He must have driven fast, because he was there shortly after me, screeching to a stop, jumping out of the car and running up to give me a hug.

"Sorry, darling!" he said over and over. Finally I stopped snivelling on his shoulder and just a wobbly lip remained. "Well, you know how I felt that time then."

I did, and I felt worse than ever about the time before. It took a week or so of images of him dead to go away, and I found myself teary-eyed for no apparent reason during that time -- and all over the possibility of him being dead, nowhere near an actuality! Poor Ben'd probably gone through the same thing back when at Mackay and I'd not been sympathetic!

Every Sunday there are two grocery staff -- Max and I. We start at the same time, although usually she's a little late, and up until a few weeks ago she had full responsibility in scanning empty shelves (non-local) to find stock, do food safety checks, all the things that managers do during the week. Three weeks ago the grocery manager said to me thus:

"From now on I want you and Max to swap roles every week, one of you doing food safety and the other non-local, and then work together to fill." The empty shelves, whereas I used to spend all day pulling stock down off capping. Very boring.

So this morning I rock up and, at 7:15, Max still hadn't made an appearance after I'd done the food safety, so I went on to non-local stock. Shortly into it she appeared.

"What are you doing? I do this every week."

"Um, Nick said that we were to swap roles every week."

"What? No, I do this, this is what I do on a Sunday. It's what makes Sunday different for me, I look forward to something different, and they told me this is what I'm to do."

"Well, Nick said this three weeks ago," she didn't make appearances the past two Sundays, "and you weren't here at 20 past, so ..."

"He didn't tell me any of this!" and so came the melodrama. How he was rude was in not telling her this, that she might as well go home because there was nothing for her to do, she didn't want to do capping all day, she was sick of this job, and on, and on. What she says just about every day, only this time with venom -- and directed at me.

She came down an aisle a short while later.

"You don't care about anyone's feelings, do you?" she accused.

I blinked at her. "I don't care about anyone's feelings?"

"You don't care about anyone. You just have your partner and your boat, and you don't care about anybody's feelings. You just come in and take over and don't care about other people's roles and jobs."

Now, if you only have one person in your life, one would think you'd feel very strongly about that one person, so not caring sounds just strange.

"I knew that you would take over on the Sunday. I know that's the type of person you are, coming in and taking over. What do you think, just come in and take someone's job and don't care? You're just that sort of person. What do you think when you come in every day?"

"I just do what the manager tells me to," I said wearily. "I don't care." Take over ... scanning shelves? Huh? What on earth was she talking about?

"I knew this was what you were like, and I tried to work with that. I don't like working with you. I want to be here by myself on a Sunday. I don't know why they put you on. I want to be here by myself. You just came in and took over. They gave you full-time and they still haven't given me more hours."

And so the tale goes on and on. Why can't people see that they're the cause of their own grief, their own self-fulfilling prophecy? If you carp on to managers about how they're doing things wrong, if they see you chatting to your friends in an aisle for half an hour instead of working, they're not going to give you extra work, are they? This supermarket's employees are weird. Ever since I've worked for this company -- and it's been years -- I've always had someone complaining to me that I am receiving extra, undeserved hours ... notwithstanding I actually work and don't stand around bitching about managers, hours, or whether I get to scan the shelves or not. She went on in a personally attacking way for about 20 minutes.

Eventually I pulled out the trump card: I cried. "I'm sorry," I said to her, sniffling. "I didn't know that this would hurt your feelings, that he didn't tell you what he wanted, that I had to be the one to tell you this."

She relented a little and gave me short, one-armed hug.

The rest of the day went uneventfully; she got over her hissy fit, only now I can't forget her personal attacks. I'd gotten the vibes she didn't care for me much anymore, from when she swore at me the other day when my hearing was funny from blocked ears and she didn't think I could hear her.

When I returned home and related this to Ben and a visitor, the other chap said,

"Is she white?"

"What?"

"Is she white? Because you're dark, have an accent ... it could be that, you know."

I stared at him in disbelief. I never would have thought of that, thought that any of the troubles I've ever had with coworkers could be down to race. I mean, if enough coworkers (women) start giving off I-hate-you vibes you tend to assume that there's something fundamentally wrong with yourself that all these women, single mothers I might add, would like nothing more than to throw you down a well.

These women are bitter, Max a perfect example of things going wrong in their life, living hand to mouth and with nothing else in their lives except ... well, Max obviously having in her mind that she's a demigod on Sundays and playing at manager, usually ordering me around. I don't take orders from co-workers all that well. Having that little thing taken away from her made her go around a bender!

I get over these scenes, and there's been a couple in the past year, by thinking: you loser. You'll be here in this job you hate, whinging and carrying on about how you're being passed over, and I'll be gone soon and sailing off and having fun and doing the things I want with my life. You're stuck here, paying your mortgage, paying for your children's ipod and mobile phone bills and drugging it all away with pot and speed to make the choices and lack of choices in your life better. So I'll smile at Max tomorrow, like I smiled at the last person who did this, and the person before that, who wished me dead -- in full seriousness -- so they could have my work hours.

People are just so afraid ... except of me, the local kicking-dog, obviously.

Ever since I got back from Brazil I'd been working during the day, doing grocery instead of nightfill. On casual rates, 38-hour weeks meant oodles of money, and so just recently they added me to the full-time roster of employees. Trying to get full-time hours from this company is difficult, especially with no strings attached, say a one-month contract; I held out and so I got what I wanted, and then a week later my boss calls me up.

"We're going to have to cut hours to grocery. How do you feel about going back to nightfill?"

I bet he regretted caving in and giving me full-time hours now, and the company is stuck with me! Ha-ha! So now, for three nights a week, I'm back on the night gang, filling as I have for the past couple of years.

I had a sort of falling-out a while with one of the louder ladies, the more stronger-willed. She'd wanted days and felt she was more entitled to it, most vociferous in her annoyance that she'd not gotten days even though she was, she felt, available ... and so now I'm getting the cold shoulder from a good half of the nightfill team.

Mostly what I hear all night long is the neverending complaints from her and a couple of the other ladies about everything to do with work, the company being shite, and all that sort of thing. I don't understand how someone can stay with a job if they hate it so much -- there are other jobs out there, and seeing that they're already employed, can't they make an effort to find another job, more suitable to their temperament, without the fearful worry of the jobless? I wish I were deaf at times.

The atmosphere's different at night. There's more camaraderie, from those not in the friends-camp of the lady annoyed with me, which is lacking in the day. More laughter, joking, and general playfulness which makes nightfill a joy for me, and always has. Ben remarks on my departure from work at midnight -- "you're happy" -- and I am, because just about everyone's jolly and amusing and can be counted on for a smile.

Last night it was a group of people singing and whistling -- when the store'd closed. It's the carols time of year, guaranteed to drive you mad, but their singing of old pop tunes overtook the bad Shmackoes ads and carols, and gradually others joined in. One young man sings all the time when he's at work, and has a good voice. He's younger than me, and yet will greet me in the evenings with a cheery, "hello petal!" in the manner of an avuncular old man.

The customers are different, too. During the day, especially morning, it's usually little old ladies. Some of these ladies you see every other day and they must have a memory problem as they constantly ask where things are and then exclaim "they're always moving things around!" except they haven't, not really. Nobody seems to read signs, either, and everyone's always looking for stuff located in aisle nine (dried fruit, eggs, flour, oil, spices), not that anyone ever walks that far.

Most especially horrible is the Norco milk lady. This horrible customer came up to me one day and asked, "do you have any Norco 3L milk?"

"Sorry, I don't know. If you ask at the front desk they'll get the guy to find you some."

"Surely even YOU can check if there's any milk out the back," she said. "I've worked in grocery. I know how things work."

This was said with such venom that I blinked, and a big lump of hurt appeared in my throat and I blinked back tears.

You get so many queries from people throughout the day that if you stopped and went to find things for them you'd never get the things you need done finished, so usually if I know where things are I'll tell them the exact location (eg maple syrup, aisle 3, top shelf along the left hand side down the back of the store just above the icecream cones). If another department, I have to walk to the service desk to call for that department, so usually I just direct the customers up there so they can do it themselves (as they follow me up there anyway).

So I went to have a look, found the manager for the milk department, and left her in his hands. I had a complaint about my rude, unhelpful behaviour the following day -- first and only I've ever gotten, I might add, and probably because I didn't look at her after that, just pointed at her from afar when telling the milk chap who wanted help.

Norco milk lady is famous for being a cow, I found out later, and every dreads being the one she picks out to "assist" her in any way. She once berated me loudly for some batteries being put in the wrong place ... which customers often do, going on and on about misleading prices and advertising when half the time it's some customer who's picked something up, put it down somewhere else, and then it's not noticed until hours later (or some horrible cow chewed your ear off about the possibility of being ripped off 10c).

During the evening it's usually a younger crowd, people coming by after work, just wanting to get their shopping done and then go home. The folk in the day stretch out their shopping, and so have nothing better to do with their time than harass the workers. I like the evening customers much better, with their focus on getting out of their quick.

You get to notice certain customers. Some have particular, noticeable handbags; some amusing kids who run around, some who always gets particular items, some who are always by one day of the week, at a particular time. One elderly guy on Wednesdays, during the day, used to always grab my arm and pat my hand. "Got you up the ladder this week!" he'd say, or "Safe on the ground today!" always with a smile, and friendly.

Nightfill staff don't understand that I like the nights better, though. Nobody seems to believe me when I say that; I've always liked night work better, where I can spend the day reading, cooking, whatever I will, and spend what is usually an unproductive time of day for me doing things and getting paid. Being surrounded by amusing coworkers, a veritable singing troupe! What could be better?

Ben and I were on the wheelhouse of Trekker one night, finishing off our drinks outside of the view of the customers, when I looked over the aft. There was a dinghy not very far away, going with the tide.

"That's not our tender floating away, is it?" I asked.

We looked again, and hopped on down to deck level. I kept an eye on it the whole time, and that's when I noticed the red glow.

"Wait, Bob's --"

Ben jumped in after the tender before I could finish saying that Bob was smoking his cigarette in the dinghy. I could hear their voices after he finished swimming his way to the rescue.

( Unnecessary rescues and the necessary ones. )

The cook clambered up the bowsprit and I realised I was going to do that: climb to the very tip of the yacht, balance carefully, and tinker with the sail while trying not to fall off. A week later it was me tere, fitting the sailcover on in strong winds and ploughing into a vigorous chop, with the trial cook I was training staring at me with big eyes.

These last three days were truly the only ones where the skipper and I were the only crew aboard. When paid work started for me I began to train another ... whom I took a misgiving to after one look and when she opened her mouth.

Now, she was a perfectly amiable sort of girl, and good in the galley -- washing up came out clean and she could cook and on deck she was a quick learner. It was just that she never shut up. Ever.

This sort of thing I deal with okay when I can get away from the person -- but from her I could not! She followed me around, babbled nonsense, and had unfortunate verbal tics.

"Cheers, big ears!" she would reply to any request -- if not "no" just before she complied. But really, the offensiveness of her coming up to say "penis rooter" at me randomly took the cake.

She had warned me she would do it ever so often, but at intervals of 15 minutes it entered the realm of excessive.

She got the boot. There was an argument with thet skipper and he is the one to okay new crew. I got the okay.

Here was an underhanded benefit I had: my ycht. When he found out that I became more than okay -- he was, on more than one boozed occasion, going on about how he would help me in any way he could. Being a woman solo sailor gets me instant credibility, and it is amusing that people put so much stock by it.

The next trip I was training someone again, but this time a skipper in training as well -- a husband and wife team. A galley not my own, and I was driven around the bend by the woman putting everything away in the wrong places and not washing up properly. The man's inability to anchor and go up to a mooring made me wonder whether he added bumfph to his resumé too.

Days are full; I wake at 6:30 to catch the weather report, begin breakfast, and it keeps on until I go to sleep at night. Amidst burned pots, burned food, improvised upon dishes, and the occasional cosmetic surgery to the meals I bungled, I am in a constant state of dish washing. Passengers at times hang around and offer to do things. Some even run the water and do the dishes!

The really fun part, though, is sailing. The yacht I was working on was only 16m or so, gaff rig schooner -- learning the lines on her, how a gaff rig works, all that -- excellent. Reading the theory never got me far. I have even learned the distinction between schooners and ketches, something which eluded me all of my yachtie life. (And it wasn't that one had even masts and the other had uneven masts -- the schooner has its main mast to the aft and the ketch has the main mast to the bow.)

My skipper is that classic yachtie solo sailor type for whom sailing is something profound and shows distinction of character. I guess yachties like to think of themselves as something other than wandering bums. It's funny when he gets the booze into him and he starts laying into the guests.

"You just have to keep your head. As soon as you lose it that's when things go to shit. If you keep your shit together and do it right the first time you live, otherwise you've got no control, and if you don't have control, you die." A great believer in shipboard disclipline, he is.

The best part is that he has long hair. It only took me three days to suggest braiding it, and now he sports a couple of neat braids ending in a neat pile at the nape of his neck, rather than the haphazard knot he was sporting. He also has a long beard. My suggestions of braiding this also has gotten me long looks from him -- a champion of the meaningful look. One day, however, he will be drunk, and I will be with beads, and he will awaken with a look he has never sported before. I'll have to tie myself down to the deck that day, or perhaps make a break for the rigging and the top of the mast.

Passengers have had a ball watching me do his hair. ("Yes, he's my bitch, sit down!" one evening...) Much laughter has resulted from the whole event. Everyone has suggested I do his beard as well. I cannot resist such force of suggestion.

The Whitsunday area is very lovely. I am jaded, however, and a lot of it feels like a lot of the other lovely places I have visited in my life -- only those were better since they didn't have a hundred other yachts in the anchorages, without the other hundred people on the beaches and walks and doing all the same things. Everyone wants to go to Whitehaven beach, and therein lies a problem -- you can only really go there in good weather.

Whitehaven beach is a long expanse of silica sand, a big glowing white strip you cannot mistake. Everyone peeps "Whitehaven!" when they come on board, and if there is some wind you get a roll in there -- and a roll means nauseated people. Even when the roll is so tiny I barely even shift as I walk on deck. But you have land people aboard. The past trip was mostly strong wind warnings, and in spite of this everyone piped "Whitehaven". So, just to show them, we went to the most sheltered part of it -- Tongue Bay -- and watched their green faces when they found out we had to stay there a couple of hours before the tide came up enough for them to go ashore. It was then a unanimous decision against.

It's funny how people just don't realise how long it takes to go between places on water, even when steaming along at 8 knots on a large yacht. They don't realise a lot of things, like when we say that you have to pump the toilet a lot or it gets bogged that this is not merely a suggestion. That it takes time with marine loos -- it's not a button press and you walk away. Or that you have to sit down if you are a bloke, or piss goes everywhere and cheers, yours truly has to clean it up and then go back to food prep. Some guys appear to have the idea that they would not be men if they sat down, that we are calling them girls saying that they've to sit. I am going to present men with sponges and tell them that if their dick is clean enough that they don't have to wash their hands after pissing then they can just wipe up their urine as well. Maybe that will sink in where all else fails.

Two weeks upon the first schooner, Windjammer, and now I move to another yacht -- Coral Trekker. At least now I won't have people trying to get past me, or people seated nearby as I cook and watching as I botch things and then have to quickly fix it all up. At least the end result they all see is edible and tasty, but if you were watching me scrape the pot you would be inclined to think otherwise. Burning pots is my specialty.

Despite being told when I started the job that the skipper would make sure I was in for mealtimes so that I could do the cooking while at anchor. This is utter tosh -- instead I am peeling, cutting, and boiling while the yacht is pitching away and sometimes while at a 45° angle. I am used to these things, but it's somewhat misrepresentational of reality, and makes for interesting times when the pot pitches off the stove when we heel just that little too far. All in a day's work. Back to it for me, to cook for 19 people.

You can't walk down the main street of Airlie without coming across "Help Wanted" signs. They're only there for a day before they are gone -- help presumably gotten -- but some other store pops up quick enough with a similar pasted sign.

There are plenty of jobs to be had in Airlie.

Years ago there was a segment on some news show of a couple of Sydneysiders, a brother and sister, who couldn't find work. They made much of the fact that they had looked and weren't finding and so couldn't be, in all earnest, be called dole-bludgers.

Come the hotelier of one of the islands around here -- he contacted these newspeople and offered them jobs. The brother and sister said no. Why? Quite simple, really: appearance.

I was in one of the employment agencies when I was shown the Hayman Island standard employee contract. It looked about as stringent as the Woolworths one, but better: they put down what you could and couldn't wear on the island, where you could wear certain things, hair length for men, and the death knell for me: no piercings, except for one in each ear, and very discreet at that.

( Eventually, I get a cool job. )

Did you know that there is a small grub, a caterpillar or a worm or some such, which is a translucent white and which feeds upon the skin of cucumbers? That they turn an ever darkening green depending upon how much skin they've consumed? No? I didn't, either, until this morning.

My mother came back to Australia last week, and it only took me five days to pack my bags and check into a local hostel. I remembered very fast why I decided not to travel with the family -- in addition to which, a bored brother is a horrible thing to be cooped up with, for he does not know how to entertain himself and so joins the legions of annoying people who press for my attention when I am reading -- merely so that I can entertain them. And so I moved out.

For a moment I thought of camping under the nearest bridge, but decided against this for the weather has been uncertain of late, with bludgeoning rains one day and heatwaves the next. No thanks. To a hostel it was, and they asked me as I checked in whether I would like to work. Would I like to indeed! Put me on the roster, said I, after filling in taxation forms in triplicate and waiting expectantly for 8pm to roll around to see if my name was on the work sheet for the next day.

I checked late last night and did not see my name. I went to bed, tossing and turning throughout the night because I stupidly forgot to bring the two most important things for hostel staying: earplugs and eyemask. Six am rolled around and I was eating breakfast and eyeing a harried man searching for someone.

( Guess who he was searching for? )

"You're a good worker," said my new boss, whom I shall give the moniker of Raz. "I'm looking for more work to give you," he went on.

He's always "looking for more work" to give me. I'm doing over 30 hours of work a week with the guy at the moment; more work is spiffing to do if you ask me, although it's very unfortunate that it's all night work. And that it's cleaning. But better than a kick up the rear end.

"You're such a good worker I'm giving you a raise. I'm going to pay you $13 an hour."

Woo. A raise from $12.88 per hour. Bring on those diamond necklaces! I was so terribly thrilled by my newfound riches.

"When you get better I'll pay you more." Yes, I can see it now: $13.10 an hour! Oh boy, I better stick around for that one.

Later on that night he sat me down and waved a hand in the general direction of the store, showing what had to be done and what not.

( Obviously I'm meant for a career in cleaning ... )