Everybody’s Working for The Weekend Part 7 “Back to the Acres…”

After deciding my time at the city was over I was left in a bit of a quandary. I still needed to work in order to support the crippling debt from the crap shack and still enable my family to continue eating at the same time.

I know, crazy, right?

At the end of the summer, before I left the city, I started working weekends once more for my Dutch overlords at Meijer. After quitting the city instead of finding another job, I went full-time for ten months starting at the first of the year. Going back to a job you’ve quit is always a hard experience. I’d be doing it again in the future, just with my wife now a manager in the very same store it was even more chaffing to my ego. Not her fault though she was the consummate professional. She always has been, and she always will be.

My second stint at Meijer was very different from my first. The first time I hitched myself the Dutch handcart I was eighteen, more than a little naïve when it came to job politics and for me at least very friendly and outgoing. My second run through the gauntlet I was embittered, suspicious, and more than little resentful. Also, I was in the opening stages of my bi-polar disorder blossoming into its full glory.

In other words, I was a mess.

There was a guy working at Meijer when I went back who was a real gem of a person. Let's call him Butt-Face. Butt-Face thought his poop was made of jewel encrusted gold and that his farts smelled of vanilla. In reality, the jackass was a know-it-all, paranoid, right-wing extremist, conspiracy freak, and I suspect he may have been a meth head. Although to be fair I have no proof of that but damn the guy acted like a tweaker. Along with Butt-Face, there was a third shift security guard of questionable moral fiber. Let’s call him Ass-Butt.

Butt-Face and Ass-Butt were as thick as thieves. I’m not saying they were on the down low and hooking up in the security office but considering how much they hated “Faggots” I’m not, not, saying it either. I know that they couldn’t stand me and in a way, I started it. They hated me because after several weeks of Butt-Face trying to tell me how to do my job I informed him that I’d forgotten more about that job than he’d ever known.

Yeah, I was that guy.

So for several months the two of them made it their mission to fuck with me and try to catch me breaking the rules. How did they do that? They monitored my breaks, lunches, and restroom breaks. I’m not even kidding, there weren’t two nights in a row when at least one of them would follow me into the restroom and time me until I came out. Ass-Butt took special pleasure in demanding to see my receipts after I’d purchased items on my breaks.

Yeah, they were a couple of complete assholes.

So what happened?

I wish I could say we ended up in a Thunderdome-style battle with Butt-Face as Master and Ass-Butt as Blaster. That would have been a showdown of epic proportions. Sadly that was not how it happened. Instead, it was more like the end of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Much like Shredder they went down like bitches.

Ass-Butt was the first to go. One night his boss showed up unannounced and found him naked in the security office sleeping off a three-day bender. He was gone and never heard from again that night. What happened to Butt-Face took longer but was even more satisfying. Roughly six months after I quit Meijer for the last time the janitorial/building services department was contracted out even though they were union jobs. That’s a rant for another day, and it’s coming. The remaining employees in the department were transferred to other departments. Butt-Face was promised a management track position but whether that would have happened or not is irrelevant. Several weeks after the transfers he was caught being blown in the milk cooler by a woman old enough to be his grandmother.

My only question is: Did she have her teeth in?

I left Meijer in September of 2003 and promptly sold my soul to the second scariest corporate mascot in the world after the Burger King. I went to work at Toys R Us and Geoffery the Giraffe.