Overthunk

The year was probably 1983. I, a 13-year-old rocker (or "freak" as we were known at my place of schooling), with frosted hair combed and sprayed into wings and a quarter inch of black liner beneath each eye, shuffled through the Target checkout line after my mom, who was likely slightly blitzed at the time. She paid for her stuff and I somewhat boldly but with no small amount of trepidation placed Ozzy Osbourne's "Diary of a Madman" LP (shown) onto the familiar red counter, fully prepared to pay all my week's babysitting wages for the thing. The checkout girl, who was probably only a few years older than me but considerably more mainstream in her level of conformity gawked at the tattered, blood-spattered Englishman on the cover, then at me, then at my mom, all in disgust. A sense of delicious rebellion flooded through me, multiplying with every second she disliked the album, and myself for buying it. A short time later, my father (who may well have been on ...

During my tenure of nearly a decade spent in the Crimson Limbo above Walmart and K-Mart and below, say, Macy's, I worked most of my time at the customer service desk. Working every single holiday of my life was de rigeur during that time, as was donning the horrid color combo of red shirt and khaki pants -- there's nothing like a pair of khaki pants to make me run (slowly) screaming, even now -- only black pants can camouflage flab effectively, which is why it is now de mon rigeur to wear black pants 99.4% of the time. To this day, you will never catch me, even if all my other clothes have been burned up in a fire, wearing red and khaki together. Ugh. At Tar-zhay in the 90's, there was a "no-hassle" return policy -- we accepted virtually any item we had ever sold at any time in the past as a return, as long as we could string a few numbers together to make that identifying number and some semblance of a selling price. I have personally refunded money on leaking ...

Back in 1988, "Ask me. I like to help." was printed on a white plastic card in large Arial script on a ground of thin red-lined grid. This card was fused in some fashion to the large, uncomfortably identifying name tag which is the universal badge of shame of the retail store employee. I would have preferred, as at the telemarketing job that I held for one day when I tried in desperation to quit the red-walled retailer, to have been able to use an alias emblazoned above the lofty plastic claim of undaunted helpfulness, but it was not to be. From the first time I pinned on that promise of unqualified assistance with ANYthing the customer might need, it galled me daily. I started my training far earlier than that first week of employment. As a kid, we took weekly trips to Target, complete with the obligatory two-foot tall bag of popcorn. Once, when I wouldn't obey my mom, I got my ass flat-out busted in front of the shopping carts, to the amusement of the whole store, it se...

Cashiering would seem to be the province of the swift, friendly, and accurate. Yet today, I was checked out at my town's new Super Target by a mostly silent older woman, name of Nadine, who likely lived a previous life as a good and moral sloth, and thus earned reincarnation into a higher, yet not any speedier, form. I felt like my blood itself might have turned to vinegar between the time that she asked me for my ID because I had dared to purchase a bottleful of Yellowtail Shiraz (pedestrian, I know, but it has a nice bite and does the trick besides of fuzzing and furring the sharp edges of consciousness) and the time when she finally, with a lethargic stuffing of bananas into concentric-circle-dotted plastic, completed my purchase. As she sloooooooooooooooooooowly scanned and dragged my merchandise across a filthy rectangle of glass, I had time to rate and rank every male person within a 50 yard radius according to level of attractiveness to my peculiar likings. I also had time t...