Chapter Sixteen

The day of the meeting ended up being more exhausting than it should have been. I intended to do paperwork while manning the floor, but I couldn’t focus. Everywhere around me, a personal relations nightmare was taking place. Even though smoothing things over with enraged customers wasn’t my responsibility per se, I couldn’t pay attention to my paperwork while a cashier refused to even look in the direction of a customer loading groceries on the conveyor belt just so that she could have the excuse that she “didn’t see the customer there.” Half the employees at Fresh Face Co-Op had it in them to stand there and not acknowledge customers, while the other half were well on their way to a meltdown.

Sara was the perfect example of the second type of employee. Halfway through her shift, the eyes in her head went white from rolling back in her head and she fainted. I had been in the maintenance closet trying to get enough peace and quiet to finish in time before my work day technically ended when I heard about it.

I flung my pencil up into the air, not caring where it landed because my concentration was clearly eighty-sixed. Employees at the Fresh Face Co-Op claimed injuries all the time so that they could stop working, but it was out of character for Sara. I had to check in on her and make sure she was going to be all right.

I went upstairs to the second-floor office. This was Jaime’s domain. While working (when she was at work) she spent more time up there than on the floor. Why, you might ask, did I not use the quiet spacious office to work in and instead forced myself to cram all my paperwork onto the tiny desk in the maintenance closet? Because Jaime’s slovenliness proved to be too anxiety-inducing.

My entire life, I have proven to be incredibly ineffective at what I was doing if somebody was slacking off somewhere in my vicinity. I realize the hypocrisy of this and understand that it is simply an idiosyncrasy of my warped little mind, but I resolved to work on it in therapy when I had time for therapy. All this is to say, that I went upstairs to find Sara with her foot propped up on a chair.

“Is anybody manning the floor?” Jaime squawked at the security guard who had escorted Sara up to the office.

I understood Jaime’s concern; Sara was often the only one left at her register as her coworkers had the tendency to wander off regardless of the atmosphere or how busy the front end was.

“No,” Sara said weakly. “There was a long line of about twenty customers waiting at my register when I hit the ground. A minute before I knew I was going to faint, I looked around for help, but no one was there.”

Jaime frowned at this.

“Jaime,” I instructed. “Why don’t you go downstairs, take over Sara’s register and try to get the other cashiers back to their registers? I’ll look after Sara.”

If Jaime was frowning before, she outright grimaced at this. How dare I ask her to do one of the less pleasant tasks outlined in her job description?

However, since I was Jaime’s implicit superior by nature of my position at the Fresh Face Co-Op, she settled for making the ugliest angry toad face and slowly waddling out the door like a morose badger. I knew I could not afford to lose the loyalty of any of the major managers in the store than I already had, but the circumstances at hand seemed rather extreme to be playing nice.

I turned to the security guard.

“Would you mind getting a glass of water for Sara?” I asked.

Wordlessly, the security guard nodded and did exactly as I asked without question even though fetching water for employees was not in his job description. Fresh Face Co-Op hired security through an independent contractor rather than hiring them through their own process which explained the jarring level of competence most of the time.

“What happened?” I asked.

Sara’s face was as white as the unflavored kefir in the dairy section.

“This is just something I do every once in a while,” Sara admitted. “Sometimes, it’s a little difficult to determine when I’m pushing my body a little too far and by the time I realize it, it’s too late. My foot was a little sore today and I think I passed out from the pain.”

Sara lifted her icepack and gestured toward her elevated ankle which had swollen up to the size of a grapefruit. I’m sure my eyes must have doubled in size at that moment.

“Sara,” I asked with the tone that comes with heightening dread. “How long were you standing on that foot?”

“My shift was supposed to end at five today, but Shay didn’t show up for her shift,” Sara explained.

I failed to understand why Jaime continued to write out the schedule as if Shay were coming back. It had been weeks since she had actually shown up for her scheduled shift. At first, she had called in saying that she wouldn’t be able to make it, but the past few times, she had failed to show up at all. It was pretty clear to me that Shay had quit by virtue of just not showing up. It happened all the time in California, for sure. But Fresh Face Co-Op’s standards for employment dictated that an employee wasn’t fired until the fifth (fifth!) time they failed to show up for a shift without calling in. That was how desperate they were to retain employees.

“But you came in at ten this morning,” I said. “Am I right about that? Didn’t you come in at ten this morning?”

Sara nodded grimly.

“I said no at first, but they called everyone and couldn’t find anyone to pick up the shift,” said Sara.

She laughed a little bit.

“It’s sort of my fault,” she said. “I let them guilt me into taking the second shift.”

“When was your last break?” I asked.

I didn’t even need to hear the answer based on the look in Sara’s eyes.

“Sara,” I half asked, half pleaded. “Please tell me that you got sent on break at some point in the day.”

“They couldn’t!” Sara exclaimed. “Everybody was too busy going to the bathroom or leaving their registers!”

“What about Jaime?” I asked. “Isn’t she supposed to come down and relieve the cashiers when you’re short.”

My head was throbbing with rage from the answer I knew I was going to get. I didn’t even know why I asked; it was probably just so I could posture myself as given these people the benefit of the doubt they did not deserve.

I could see that Sara was doing the same. These people had treated her like shiitake mushrooms, in fact, they had treated her worse than shiitake mushrooms; at least Dora lovingly tended to her organic fungi so that they would not fall and risk bruising. However, Sara knew that outright accusations wouldn’t work for her when she had been mistreated; she was playing coy even though she didn’t need to with me. I already knew that she was not the sort of person to overreact or hyperbolize.

“Jaime told me at the beginning of my shift that she wouldn’t be able to come down today,” Sara said. “She said she was too far behind because of the new system you’re implementing.”

“Oh,” I said.

That was why Sara had been hesitant to explain to me what had gone down with her true feelings. She may have thought that all this was per my request. This couldn’t have been further from the truth. I had already given Jaime and the others a full outline of what was expected of them. Sure, they were supposed to read it and come to me with any questions, but by and large, they were not required to do anything about it until after the weekend. The packets had been comprehensive, yet straightforward enough that Jaime should not have needed to spend the entire work day looking them over.

“Is this your way of telling me that you have been working for the past ten hours and have yet to take a single break?” I asked her.

Sara shrugged.

I was left in total shock. First of all, Sara must have had a bladder of steel to go that long without using the restroom. Second of all, I had never heard of a more blatant disregard of labor laws. Technically, Sara was supposed to have received two half-hour breaks by that point. That was something dictated by law just to cover things, but if this sort of thing happened regularly at the Fresh Face Co-Op, this was an indication that the management wasn’t particularly concerned with the safety of their employees.

I sighed.

“How often does this happen?” I asked her.

“The fainting?” Sara asked. “About twice a year.”

“No,” I said. “I meant, how often do you go that long without a break, but do you mean to tell me you’ve fainted at work before?”

“Like I said,” Sara explained. “It’s difficult for me to know when I’m pushing my body too far up until about five minutes before it gives up on me and a lot of times, it happens because I’m working at a nonstop pace. And a lot of the time, I’m working at a nonstop pace because there’s nobody around to carry part of load and so there’s nobody to inform just before I go down.”

She was trying to not let it show, but it was clear Sara was upset. No wonder: I was upset, too. Sara deserved so much more than this. Even though she didn’t care for the Fresh Face Co-Op’s mission statement, she put her all in to deliver more than what was expected of her at the rate she was paid and was repaid with pitiful treatment.

The security guard returned with the water. I stood up.

“Drink that,” I ordered her. “I’ve got to gather a little bit of paper work from the maintenance closet.”

Sara cocked her head to the side, clearly confused as to why I had been keeping my paperwork in the maintenance closet.

“It’s a long story,” I explained without prompt. “I won’t be gone for long, but I’ll be back and when you’re ready, I’m going to drive you home. You will be compensated as if you had worked the entirety of the shift.”

The shock on Sara’s face was something akin to someone who had been slapped without provocation. She blinked twice in surprise.

“Thank you,” she stuttered.

“No need to thank me,” I said. “That’s actually standard per the union guidelines.”

Sara gave me a skeptical look which I took to mean that she had not been compensated in such a manner the last time this had happened. Of course, Jaime had failed to follow the union guidelines, even in such a serious situation. She wouldn’t be Jaime otherwise. This made me wonder, if the union was so ineffective at protecting their employees even while taking such a significant portion out of their paychecks, what were they good for? I resolved to ask Sara on the car ride home if I sensed she was up for it.

Needless to say, Jaime was not happy with my plan to take Sara home early.

“What am I supposed to do now?” she whined loud enough for customers to hear. “First, you give me all this extra responsibility with your plans and now you’re sending employees home left and right for the slightest injury.”

By this time, I had begun to realize that Jaime exhibited narcissistic tendencies. In situations like that, it’s best not to give people like Jaime anything to feed off of. I tried to just state the facts while seeming as uninteresting as the side of a cliff.

“I apologize the packets I gave you to read are that difficult to understand,” I said. “I thought I had written them at a fourth-grade reading level so that they would take less than an hour for the average adult to understand, but clearly I have not.”

I knew I had but based on Jaime’s poor grasp of the English language given samples of her writing in the past, I knew she was the sort who would struggle with reading the standard newspaper article. It was best to place the responsibility on myself while putting a passive aggressive dig in the process for my own sanity.

“Listen, you don’t have to do anything regarding the new plan until Monday,” I said. “Sorry I didn’t make that clear in the meeting. I’ll outline it for you again when we start implementing everything.”

I knew I would have to do that, anyway, Jaime was only marginally sharper than Dora.

“But if we make Sara go back to work, we are at risk of legal action,” I went on to explain. “Now, Sara isn’t the sort of person to take legal action, but so many labor laws were violated to get her to this point that if an opportunistic lawyer heard about this, I would not be shocked if Fresh Face lost millions and you would be held directly responsible.”

The probability that this would happen was incredibly low, but I did not tell Jaime this as the only way to appeal to her was through her own sense of self-preservation rather than morality.

In the end, Jaime had to concede to the plan. She wasn’t quick enough on her feet to think of an excuse alternate to the one she had before and the remote fear of being responsible for a major lawsuit weighed heavily on her. After all, the possibility that she might have to find a job where she actually worked was far more frightening than the wellbeing of another human being put at risk.

Like I said, it was always two steps forward, one step back at the Fresh Faced Co-Op.