cart

Recently I got a part time job as a clerk at the university book store. It’s a pretty good gig, because it’s only 5 minutes away from my house, and I only work 20 hours a week. I work from 7 in the morning to 11 in the morning, Monday to Friday, which is nice because it leaves me plenty of time to work on writing, or music, or other odds and ends.

I like waking up early now, which is funny to me because I never used to be a morning person. It used to be hard for me to wake up before 11 or so. Now, I wake up at 4 or 5 so that I can go running before work. Or normally I do, but my knee has been really fucked lately. I think I might have torn something again, so I only run twice a week and the other days I do strength exercises. I tore my meniscus 4 years ago but I didn’t have enough money to go to the doctor so I ate protein powder and did strength exercises until it felt better again.

But like I was saying, it’s pretty much a perfect job for me. When you think clerk you might think of someone that has to talk to people, but I don’t even have to do that really. I’m a cash accounting clerk, so basically I hand out bags of money to the register people in the morning, and I count the money from the previous day. I’m like the beating heart of the store’s cash cycle. I even have my own ribcage - I work in a locked office all alone that only I and a few other people have card access to. So nobody can bother me. Send an email. What other job do you know where you only have to work 20 hours a week and get your own office? Most of the time I finish counting the money for the main store and doing my reports by about 8 o’clock. It’s really quick and I’ve gotten really efficient with doing things.

Twice a week I send deposits to the bank via an armored car order. The company that does it is called CashMan. The first few weeks I thought “cashman” was a colloquial term for the people that came to get deposits, but it’s actually the name of the company. I think that’s kinda funny. Usually I don’t even have to do the dropoff, because they come after I get off. Last week, though, they came at 10:30 and the courier was a really hot girl, taller than me even, with piercings and short hair and a gun and a bulletproof vest. She was curt and kinda bossy. Maybe there for 45 seconds. She just had to sign a sign-out sheet for me and I gave her the deposit bag.

I see another courier twice a day. He takes and returns cash bags from our other locations because I count their money too. Jake comes by at 9 to pick up bags for the health sciences location. All I have to do is hand him bags after he signs out for them. Then I wait for another hour until he comes back around 10 with the bags from the previous day. Then I count those and do the reports for them. Then I finish up. On an average day, I probably work for about an hour and fifteen minutes of my 4 hour shift. Then I go home and it’s not even lunch time yet.

Nice, right? I have lots of time to read or play mahjong on my phone in the times between Jake coming and going. Sometimes I take pictures of myself in the office. This job has been fun because I basically get to cosplay as an office lady. I wear skirts and cardigans and sometimes I think I look really hot in them. I wonder if any of the student workers that I pass out bags to in the morning want to fuck me or think I’m cute or anything. There’s one really cute goth-ish girl that works in textbooks and I like it when she works because she’s the only one that says “good morning” back to me. I think maybe we could get along.

One day last week, I was drawing anime girls in my notebook while waiting for Jake to come back when I looked up at the cart I keep under the counter. I realized the cart was really old. It’s made of raw grey metal. A little crumpled. If I had to guess it probably was made in the late 80s? I’m ok at dating things because I used to sell vintage clothes. Not that clothes are made of metal but I think there’s some transferable skill in looking at an object and being able to tell about how old it is.

Maybe it was because I had been drawing but I realized that the cart wasn’t just a 2D projection on my retinas, the way a drawing of the cart would be a 2D projection onto the plane of the paper. The cart was a bona-fide 3D object, and was actually being percieved by other 3D objects, namely my eyeballs. I kept staring at the cart and I realized how different a 3D object actually looks from a 2D projection of the same object, and how I could never manage to render the cart with exact verisimilitude onto a piece of paper, no matter how good I was at drawing.

I kept staring and I started thinking about how the cart was made by actual people. One thing I try to remind myself often of is what Marx called reification. Where we see just objects or images, but they’re actually the result of networks of labor and time and social hierarchies. You can push the other way too, into the future, and see the cart in a landfill, not decomposing but maybe rusting, getting more crumpled, buried under other carts and other stuff that got thrown away. In 2 million years that cart will still be somewhere.

Anyway I was thinking about the first half of that, the reification part, and I started wondering about all the people that made the cart. Factory workers, somewhere, a delivery driver that brought it here, whoever the cash clerk was on the day the university bought it. I realized this cart was haunted by the ghosts of dozens of people, and for a moment I could nearly feel them all in the room around me. I like my job because I’m pretty much always alone, but I felt really claustrophobic then.

I looked around the room, at the desk, the computer, the cash counting machine, the machine that I roll coins in, etc. and I realized they all could be looked at the same way. Now I felt like there were way too many people in the room. I wondered what they would think of me. They worked so hard to make all the things in my office, and all I do is mostly sit there and kill time or think about things to write. I wondered if they had anticipated that their work would get used by a transsexual. I wondered if the people that made the desk would ever have imagined that I would press myself into it sometimes and feel good, rubbing into it under my skirt. Most of them probably made these things in the 1950s to the 1990s, so probably not.

The cart gets used for one thing. At the beginning and the end of the day, I walk about 30 meters snaking through the office with the cart to where the vault is. We keep a few tens of thousands of dollars in there as extra money, and for if I need to grab more 1s or 10s or quarters or something to fill bags with. The petty cash gets stored in there overnight. The cart’s wheels are really shitty and don’t turn well, so it gets banged into stuff a lot. Along my path to the vault, there’s so many scratches and marks along the corners of doors, door frames, walls, the vault door, etcetera, all at the right height and angle. So I don’t feel bad when I make a mark because I’m just the latest in a 30 year tradition of banging the cart into the wall.

30 years is a long time. Apparently Michael has worked at the store for 30 years. Michael is the highest-up guy at the store that I know. Chandler (who helps me verify the vault amount at the end of each day) says he’s retiring next year. I don’t talk to Michael really, but I see him in the morning sometimes because he has to open the store. It’s locked until he gets here but sometimes I show up first and I have to wait for him. I feel a little awkward whenever this happens because I’m a transsexual and I feel bad for waiting on people but he’s done this for 30 years so he’s probably seen it all. He always says, “close the door behind you” when we go in, because it has a tendency to swing open. People are bad listeners. I know because whenever I show up at 7:02 instead of 6:56 the door is usually swung open instead of clicked into place.

Michael carries two cans of Coke Zero in his messenger bag. I see them each morning when he’s later than me and he opens his bag to get the card that opens the store. Usually what I do after closing the door behind me is I turn into the break room to see if there are any Clif Bars there. They put them out most days but they get taken really quickly so I feel like I have to jump on them whenever there’s a chance. I always grab two. Mostly it’s the white flavor, which I never used to like that much but I think I’m being Stockholm Syndrome’d into having them be my favorites. I’ve been trying to eat more Clif Bars because I think they’ll help my knee heal. I’m vegan so I have to get protein whenever I can.

The username for the cash accounting software I use is smurdock. I think smurdock was the accounting director here a few years ago. I never met them. It makes me wonder if any of the jobs I’ve had in the past still use my logins or anything.

The thing about this job that I don’t like is that it has an expiration date already. My girlfriend and I are moving in June, which is a date we set after meeting with our roommates, so there’s not any wiggle room because the decision involves other people’s lives and money. My girlfriend wants to move to Seattle, but I don’t really want to. I like Seattle fine, but it’s really expensive and I don’t have a lot of money. I’ve also lived there in the past, so there’s a little bit of “been there, done that”. I don’t think I’ll put up a stink about it though. A year in Seattle never killed anybody.

It does make me a little sad knowing that I have to leave this job in 6 months though. I’d probably keep this job for the rest of time, and I might have to get a way shittier job in Seattle. The last time I lived there I was a prep cook and dishwasher at this Thai restaurant, which was great because my co-workers were all these 60 year old Thai alcoholics that taught me how to make good Thai food and we would listen to molam and phleng phuea chiwit and drink Busch Light in the kitchen together and they’d tell me about Thai boxing and other things from their lives. They even invited me to their family thanksgiving and I went and ate all this crazy Thai stuff they don’t have at restaurants. It was still the last time I ate meat because I was less vegan then and I didn’t want to be rude and turn down the food they had made. We were really drunk that night and one of my friends said “you know, the first few weeks you worked here we all thought you were a girl” and it made me smile.

One day I asked about a portrait of an old king of Thailand that hung on the wall of the kitchen, and my friend told me his wife had been able to psychically communicate with the king’s ghost. When she died he kept the portrait as a sort of link to her. I miss those guys and I’m going to take my girlfriend to that restaurant when I go back. It was hard work though. It made my legs hurt. This job is much nicer because I can sit down.

Lots of my friends work jobs that hurt them. My friend Bear works at a coffee shop and it sounds so ass to me but I think they’re making good money so at least they have that going for them. Bear and their boyfriend are moving at the same time we are, otherwise I would try to get them my job when I leave. They deserve to relax. I feel a little guilty because of how much I get to relax, but I don’t believe in defining my life through negative space, so I try to think about how I can use my position to make life better for me and others instead of worrying about negative stuff.

That’s another nice thing about being a clerk - I have lots of time to think in a normal setting. I feel like touching money and office supplies and desks and wearing skirts and cardigans is making me more normal, and that’s good. I was really neurotic in the summer before I got this job. I feel like I get to microdose reality every day. Sometimes I think “when I get off work I’m going to sit on the couch and get high and play Dark Souls 2 all day”, but I never do. Usually I write or make music. I think that’s a good mark of my normalcy.

Sometimes I think about the reification ghosts again, but about myself. Clerk me, and Cook me, and Clothes me, and Neurotic me and Normal me and Seattle me and Minnesota me and all the other ones that could haunt someone. Sometimes I wonder how many people have clothes that I sold in their closets. It’s probably a lot actually. Tens of thousands. I wonder if the person that bangs the cart into the walls after me will have bought any of my clothes. Or if they think about any of this stuff. Maybe I’ll come back one day and ask them about it. I probably won’t though.