Two Years in a Greek Grocery Store

By Miss Holly Maguire

Disclaimer:

All of the following events are true. Names have been changed to protect the innocent and not so innocent, as have names of stores, towns, et al.

Introduction to a Job

When I got the job as a night closer in the bakery department of Grocery Bag, "More in Your Bag, More Than You Expect in Your Pocket", it wasn't that I hadn't worked before. I just never had a job that lasted more than two months. And it wasn't that I hadn't worked for the company before either; I spent three disastrous nights as a cashier in one of their smaller, "less busy" stores when I was seventeen. After that I had worked in a dry-cleaners under a woman who must have been Margaret Hamilton's stunt double in "The Wizard of Oz", she was that mean and that old. She was also very hard on people with neurological quirks like myself (At the time, I was diagnosed with dyscalculia and non-verbal learning disabilities, which has since been upped to Asperger's Syndrome. Ask me about it). And then the small chain that owned the dry cleaners folded and got bought out by ZOOMS, a nation-wide franchise that had delivery, something that Green's Kleeners didn't have. After that I stumbled through college courses at home and abroad.

So the fall that I was twenty-two, after the shattering breakup of my engagement to a guy I probably should never have been involved with in the first place, my mother decided it was time I tried getting another job. I say that my mother decided this because at that point I was too miserable to think about getting a job. I just wanted to find someone else to fill the void in my heart (To any devout, CLEAN Catholic gentlemen between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five, who have steady paying jobs and a college education, are drug-, alcohol-, gambling-, and attachment-free, and are height and weight proportionate: I still do.) and I honestly wished she would just leave me the heck alone and let me go find him. She insisted this was a good way to find someone.

So she started going through the newspaper want-ad section, looking for job ads. Now, I had tried this method before, finding a job in the want ads, and all I'd ever turned up was jobs for truck-drivers and surrogate mothers. I didn't have my driver's license (still don't), let alone a Class D license, and I'm just not truck-driver material: I'm too small and high-strung, and I stress out easily. On the bright side, I'd be notorious as the lady truck-driver who has the classical radio station blaring instead of the country station. And I consider surrogate motherhood to be a form of prostitution, as charitable as it may seem, since instead of paying a woman to have sex with a guy, she's being paid to carry his kid (It's also a form of playing God. If people who can’t have kids want a kid that bad, they should go adopt a kid from a third-world country, so the kid can have a better future, and that third-world country will have one less kid to worry about, and then everyone is happy. Excuse the rant, "It's just what I do.").

After about ten pages of medical technician and crane operator jobs, mom found an ad for Grocery Bag. They wanted night closers for the bakery department. We lived near about three different Grocery Bags, two of which had bakery departments. I still didn't like the idea, I don’t know why. It wasn't that I was lazy, it was just I didn't want to deal with people for a while.

But I gave in after my mother pested me about it. I took the bus to the store on the Cabot/Wicksburg line; I got the application, filled it out right then and there. Then the lady at the courtesy booth paged the bakery manager, Sandra Sealey, who spoke to me for a little while, showed me around the bakery, and briefed me on what a typical night would be like. Then, she took me up to the office to have a word with the store manager, Mr. Seamus Diocletian, an Irish-looking fellow who looked like what you might get if you genetically three-way crossed Liam Neeson, Hugo Weaving (he would later remind me of Weaving's most notorious sci-fi role), and Brendan Gleeson (the nightmare carnival owner in "A.I."). He seemed all right, a bit standoffish, but polite in a perfunctory way. After a few questions, a glance through the dress code (I was wearing a blouse and skirt and, since it was a warm day, I had my hair pinned back, so he just glossed through that) and a consultation with Sandra, he told me I had the job, that I'd start in a week and a half. Sandra gave me a schedule, drawn up on a chart on the front page of the Employee Code of conduct pamphlet, and told me I'd be reporting to her the first day that I worked.

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A week and a half later, Monday afternoon, I reported to the bakery. But when I asked for Sandra, I found she wasn't there, that, according to a very accommodating lady named Lena, who was the assistant bakery manager, she hadn't been able to come to work that day since she had unexpected problems at home. That didn't faze me in the least. Lena got me a white smock, a red apron and a maroon baseball cap, of which the uniform consisted. I put it on, rolled up my sleeves and set to work with the training process, under the watchful but very friendly eye of Stella, a girl who was just a few years older than I was. She'd later become more like a sister than a co-worker.

I wasn't the only trainee under Stella's wing that night. There was also Ngila, a very pretty little Filipino girl who had been working there for about a week and a half. My first job was helping package baklava, both the traditional kind and the fancier chocolate kind; a Greek family, the Pappadopoulouses, owned the chain, so there were a lot of Greek and Italian pastries in the bakery. Next, Stella briefed me on the names of the breads. After that, we moved on to the Bread slicer. The toothed behemoth spooked me a little at first, but I very quickly got the hang of it. One of our priorities was slicing and bagging all the leftover loaves of bread and stacking them on the wire rack in the middle of the aisle in front of the bakery.

Next came the breakfast case, learning to package up the pastries in there. We had to remove and pack in clear plastic boxes everything in the case except the turnovers which were packaged the next day. I never found out what was the reason for this, but I didn't trouble my head over it. I had enough trouble learning the routine, even though I was jotting down notes on everything. There was a procedure book we were supposed to work from, but it was limited and it didn't cover some of the finer points.

And muffins. Muffins obviously enough went in the six-pack muffin tins and were sealed in plastic wrap using a heat sealer. Stella warned me to avoid touching the brown hot metal bar that was used to cut the plastic sheet after we measured it off the roll on top of the heat sealer, but true to my at times accident-waiting-to-happen nature, I hit it with my elbow and got a 1.5 degree burn. I ran cold water over my arm, which took the worst pain away, but I would have a mark that didn't fade away for at least several months.

Next we cleaned out the doughnut and bagel case. Bagels were bagged in half-dozens, either a half-dozen of the same kind, or a mixed bag of ones that were similar (seeded ones together, blueberry/raisin/chocolate chip ones together, plain ones with most anything). Doughnuts went in boxes of six and were marked down to half-price. Bagels went on the bagel end of the wire shelf in front, doughnuts went on the counter where the senior citizens (read: old folks) could get them easily.

And cleaning! Paper towels and industrial strength glass cleaner for everything! Benches (the stainless steel counter tops we worked off in the back sections of the bakery), countertops, shelves of cases, case glass out front. The trays from the cases had to be sprayed down in the bathtub-sized sink in the back.

Then there was the coffee station, one of the perks for the customers. At the far end of the bakery, between it and the registers stood a small alcove with a couple urns of coffee and all the fixings you needed, sugar, stirrers, sweetener, cream in little thimble-sized single-serving containers in a bucket with ice inside its insulated walls; at the end of the night, we had to dump the unused creamers (if any) into the box they came in, which was stowed in the big walk in refrigerator, while the cooler container went into the walk-in freezer to refreeze overnight. We had to empty out to coffee urns, add a powdered cleaner meant specifically for metal coffee urns, and soak it overnight full of water.

Oh, and last but not least, writing on cakes. That was an art in itself, which took me awhile to master, Stella had me start out by writing on one of the large sheets of butcher's paper (baker's paper?) which was used to line the big white plastic trays for the breakfast case. The trick was to keep the tip as close to the surface as possible. I'd later get the hang of it so well, I could write better on cakes than I could on paper, but that wasn't until about two months later.

Then there were the other minor duties: sweeping, mopping up spills, straightening out the display tables, bringing the trash to the garbage compactor and the cardboard to the cardboard compactor, way out back in the main back room of the store. I would later learn merchandising, putting out the products that had come in pre-packaged. I was very surprised to find that not much of the stuff in the bakery was actually baked on site, just the bread, the doughnuts, the muffins, the Danish, the pies, and some of the cookies were baked on site. The rest came in pre-made. Even then, most of the baked stuff, except for the muffins, came in as frozen proof that had been made off-site and just had to be baked.

This, however, was just the routine. I would soon find out that working in an often rowdy Greek grocery store would never be anything even remotely close to routine.

More to come…