Parcel Pickup
I had a punch card. A punch card, for chrissakes!
Every day at work I would have to clock in. And every night I was leaving I would have to clock out. I think I joined a union. I may have just thought about joining the union. But I think I may have joined it. I’m actually not sure I was old enough to join the union.
I was 15 years old and it was my first job. While the preceding paragraph may sound like that job was in the 1910s, or maybe the 1960s, I assure you, the year was 1996. The setting was Heinen’s, a higher-end grocery store in Ohio.
At the time, I cared about two things: Pearl Jam and parcel pickup. The latter was the pinnacle of my work life at that point. You see, if you worked parcel pick up, you got tips. Off-the-books, cold-hard-cash. When you’re making $4.25 an hour, this was like being handed bricks of gold.
“Parcel pickup” is a fancy way of saying “car loading” — that is, it’s the job where you would load groceries into peoples’ cars. It was a pretty easy job (slightly less fun in the frigid winter and when people would buy multiple 50-pound bags of salt) and again, quite lucrative. One dollar tip here, two dollars there, sometimes you’d get a fiver. And during the holidays, people would be very generous. Hundred dollar days were not unheard of.
One day, I had just gotten done loading someone’s bags into their car when I noticed a wallet left in the shopping cart. Inside the wallet was a few thousand dollars in cash (I didn’t count it, but was told that after the fact — I just saw the big wad of money). I turned it in to lost and found. A few coworkers thought I was crazy. When the woman came to pick up her wallet, she left no reward and offered no thanks. But one of the cashiers gave me fifty dollars on the house for doing the right thing.
To this day, I’m still trying to figure out what the lesson was there.
Being a bag boy was fine. In a way, I enjoyed it. Packing bags was a bit like an elaborate puzzle that you couldn’t actually solve but won with style points. There were a few rules — bread and eggs always go on top so as not to be crushed, cold things should go together so they keep each other cold, etc — but every bag boy seemed to have their own style.
My style was to create a perfect brown bag brick. I wanted to pack a bag as solidly as possible, while making sure it wasn’t too heavy. “Heavy” tends to be subjective — some people can lift more weight than others — but in this case, “heavy” meant the bag handles would be under too much pressure and would be on the verge of tearing. Not good. As a bag boy, you literally have one job.
The people who would ask for plastic would really piss me off.
Occasionally, I would stock the shelves as well. This was beyond tedious, but you could zone out while doing it. My favorite was the cereal aisle. So much variety. The worst was the spice aisle. The containers were so small.
During my breaks I liked to hang out in the upstairs employee room — a room not much larger than a closet — and read the stocks page in the newspaper. I would watch certain technology stocks day-to-day and dream about a day, far off in the future, when I could invest.
Then I’d clock back in and cross my fingers for parcel pickup duty.
