7--11 Diary

I wrote this over ten years ago. I intended to write a much longer memoir, but things happen. This, I think, is worth reposting from the molumbia.com site....

Two-Fisted Consumer Commando,

Sheikh of the Liquored Night,

Zip Gun Target,

My Life as a 7-11 Clerk

I first called the 7-11 jobline the day after a job interview in Chicago. That interview had gone reasonably well, so the prospect of doing a stint as a two-fisted consumer commando seemed strangely appealing to me. A hellish future as a career convenience store clerk was only a whiff of a possibility, rather than a black dog breathing down my neck. Besides, I have always loved convenience store clerks. They are like gods, those nameless disgruntled convenience store clerks under the weird florescent light at 3 am. They are usually from exotic lands like Sri Lanka, Jordan, Kenya, and South Korea. What a strange, dark fairyland of crackheaded shoplifters, and drunk rentacops must they navigate every night? I was not to be disappointed.

I was living in Denver, CO at the time. The city had such a strong economy in the summer of 1998 that low-end employers were scrambling to hire up every able-bodied looser and addled loner who registered a pulse, no matter what else was wrong with them. 7-11 job adds decked every bus stop bench and newspaper. As the Southland Corporation lost its best underpaid working stiffs to restaurant management, air conditioner repair, and construction, they dug deeper and deeper into the weird collective of lost souls that muddled aimlessly along Colfax avenue, promising seven bucks an hour for what seemed to be easy work.

My job interview was by telephone. 1-800-711-JOBS put me right through to an automated job interview system. I felt a brief flash of futureshock as I entered my social security number, years of education, and desired salary into the machine. I was briefly put on hold as its automated decision making process considered my qualifications. Hire an eccentric, out of work PhD, evolutionary biologist, with no obvious criminal record? By all means, yes. We'll make a man out of him. I was hired.

My first training session was about 20 miles south of where I lived, in a forlorn, White-Trash neighborhood at the Denver City Limits. I remember counting a dozen different 7-11's along the way.

The Southland Corporation liked to train in certain, "model stores" which were in particularly good shape. These places would get their pick of the new employees and, of course, remain model stores. That location was indeed stocked with the cream of the 7-11 crop. Clean-cut young people with nothing in particular to do with their lives, they worked 7--11 more out of ennui then anything else. All of them lived at home, I was to discover. These were next year's air conditioner repairmen and cellular phone representatives, but for now, they kept the cups stocked and the driveway immaculate.

I was entitled to free coffee and soda, I discovered, and immediately indulged in a 7-11 French Roast with hazelnut creamers. I sat under the pay phone and stared at the used car lot across the street. It specialized in vintage classics, and sported a 57 Chevy, and Edsel, a 62 Caddy, and of course, a '72 Charger. What might it be like to work the desk here for long enough to buy one of those cars? How many biweekly 350 dollar checks would it take? 40? My classmates started showing up ten minutes later. We were exactly the weird lot you might expect of a 7-11 training crew. There was a distracted young woman with bleached blond hair, a tough looking moustached man with leathery skin, an alert looking young man who could have been a boy scout, a young mexican woman with a smattering of gang tattoos, a pimply kid who rode up on a motorcycle, and myself, in a yellow bowling shirt and stubble. The eager young man and I set up a few long tables in the storeroom. It was just barely big enough to squeeze 7 places to sit, and even then, a person had the side of their head mashed into a box of cheetos or a case of toilet paper. The eager young man proffered a hand. His name was Damien. He had a firm handshake and was entirely too happy to be in a storeroom of a 7-11 at 9am on a Thursday morning.

Forty-five minutes later, we were shifting uncomfortably in uncomfortable folding metal chairs. Our trainer was the sort of woman who should be performing a child's puppet show for right wing single moms who want their children to love Jesus. I would spend the next three days trying to visualize how she looked topless.

There was a Byzantine amount of paperwork to be dealt with. Within a half hour, I had assumed liability for any conceivable civil suit, denied that I had a drug problem, agreed to let them fire me for any reason, on a moment's notice, and signed a document that seemed to permit them to implant a microchip into my head. To this day, I am probably on a watchlist for potential drug rehab clients. Halfway into the paperwork, the leather-armed man squinted and joked "so when do we piss into a cup?" We were cautiously informed that 7-11 does not drug test. Instead, there is a phone number to call if we need help.

We were not drug tested.

This came as an enormous relief to every person sitting at the tables. The question asked and answered, our shoulders loosened, and some people began to look relaxed. As a long-term and enthusiastic dope fiend, I was as happy as everyone else, though I had been abstaining from the cannabis simply for economic reasons. Too bad, Denver was a great town for cannabis.

Five minutes later, at our first break, I was to earn just how far people will go to avoid giving up drugs long enough to pass a drug test. Several people had come to the training session with small bottles of other people's urine, which they discarded gleefully in an overfull dumpster just outside the store. Others had dipped their fingers in bleach before arriving, counting on the remaining residue to foil the chemical assay. The Native American woman was a bleach dipper. She had once eaten Draino to foil a drug test. She seemed to think the technique was effective, but also confessed to spending three days in the hospital later, an event that seemed curiously uncorrelated in her mind. Someone lit a joint, and there outside the training session, we passed it around and confessed to a few of our vices. We all smoked pot. Without potheads, 7-11 would have to close its doors worldwide-end of story. Three of the seven were regular meth smokers, two smoked crack every now and then, "but never with the kids in the car". All of us drank pretty regularly. Damien and I were the only 2 who were not basically functioning alcoholics. I was later to learn that Damien had just gone off about six types of medication, including thorazine.

The rest of the training was three straight days of exquisite, pedantic, uncontrollable boredom. Sitting on those folding metal chairs, pressed up against a long table with a peeling faux-woodgrain finish, time passed more slowly than any other syllable of recorded history. Staring at one idiotic instructional videotape after another, I was reminded of Albert Camus' advice concerning "how not to waste time"

"Stand in long lines at the bank, take the slowest bus across town, wait for water to boil.." anything to slow one's perception of time massing to a bug crawl. Convenience store clerks waste less time than any other people on earth.

The training consisted primarily of telling us not do things that might get the Southland corporation in a lawsuit, and having us sign forms that would put all responsibility on us. We went over armed robbery scenarios, learned how not to sell beer to a minor or a person with slurred speech, and that the convenience store world was one big happy interracial family. This was all fine with us, because at the first sign of trouble, most of us intended to slip out the back door with a case of Milky Way bars and never come back.

I know this because, during cigarette breaks, I was indoctrinated into the seedy underworld of the retail underclass. The fresh-faced blonde woman with two children and a Meth habit had felt compelled to let her old boss feel her up every now and then. I tried to hide my enthusiasm as I imagined myself "supervising her", unzipping her green and black frock and sliding my fingers under her lacy black undergarments, all in the name of checking for shoplifted cigarettes and gum. She left her last job at circle K after her supervisor became possessive, imagining that perhaps the customers occasionally had easy pickings to the merchandise. She just walked out-with a case of 3:2 beer, and drank it in her car on the way home.

Not once during the training did we learn anything of practical value. Never did we step behind a cash register or restock a shelf. 7-11 had paid serious money learn to implement three important policies; never keep more than $30 in the cash drawer, keep the stores enormously well lit, and spend 24 hours on each employee to cover their asses from liability suits.

Next..the time I was almost robbed.