It’s 2 pm And I Just Woke Up

In order to prepare for a visit from one of the Eagle corporate heads, we cleaned the store.

When I say clean the store, I don’t mean walk around with some Febreeze and a vacuum cleaner and say ‘okie dokie, we’re all done’. No.

We swiffered the floors, the walls, the ceilings and the lamps. We vacuumed the hardwood floors, the cement floors, the fitting rooms and the storage rooms. We changed entire walls and how they looked, refolded every single polo and t-shirt within the whole store, and arranged all the women’s underwear in the proper order.

Every. Single. Article of clothing. Is now sensored, stickered, size labeled and put in size order.

We followed a series of visual plans that told us how everything needed to be, down to how the shirt is tucked on the mannequin to how a sleeve is folded on a polo.

From 1 pm till past 1 am, I worked. For over 12 hours, I folded, stuffed, sized, sold, rang up, returned, endured and put up with customers who walked into the store. The person who worked there the longest was Teddy, who slaved for almost 15 hours. He had reached a point of consciousness that made it possible to make him laugh if you rhymed words with the letter B.

As we all stood by the door, waiting for the security code to be punched in so that we could leave, no one spoke. Everyone was too tired to even open their jaw, nevermind form coherent sounds.

After about 5 minutes of this, Teddy looked down at the floor and said with a shake of the head, a matter of factly voice and more to himself than anyone else,

When I get home, my girlfriend is gonnuh tell me to take a showah, and I’m gonnuh have to tell ‘er to go fuck ‘erself.

We all just stood there with a frown and nodded.