As with every early morning shift, I approached the store door and rang the doorbell— a tiny black pushbutton on the side of the store.

And I waited.

Eventually, from my strangely compressed point of view in first person mode, I saw a figure move along the dimensional strip, toward me; behind me, I noticed the presence of another co-worker waiting to be let inside. Quickly switching back to cosmic view just to see what this actually looked like, I saw myself on one portion of the 2-D strip, a co-worker behind me, and a glass door separating us on the outside and those on the inside, just the woman who was letting us in, at the moment. In the background of the store portion of the dimensional strip, I saw shadows moving— other co-workers but people apparently unimportant to my current objective. My life.

Returning to first person, I saw the door swoosh open. I walked into the store— took a frequency trigger without even realizing it, and I took a left into the break room to clock in for my shift.

Before I knew it, I was in front of my kiosk. Or that is what I called my department, anyway, since one tiny little booth was all we had.

I worked at Augustford’s curbside pick-up department— Augustford To Go. Augustford was a large chain retailer in the supermarket scene; some percentage of the national dollar went through them per year, and it was crazy. But the store I worked at was small. Not ‘hole in the wall’ small, since the store was still a multi-department store, but all the same, small compared to some of the other giant buildings in the Augustford empire.

My To Go department consisted of but a single booth (kiosk, whatever you wanted to call it), and some adjacent shelving with a freezer box and coolers. That was it. A tiny operation by any standard; and the worst part? We were right next to the front end and we had no divisions between where our shit began and their own shit started; the net result? Lots of customers thinking we were an express lane. A headache each and every day.

But for now, the headache was minimal. When the store opened, however, was a different story . . .

In first person mode, the kiosk loomed toward me. But, as always, it seemed just to the side, as if it were slightly dented or on its side. I didn’t think I would ever get used to this partially dimension perspective. But I approached the kiosk, opened the unlocked drawer, and unlocked the locked components of the kiosk . . . and shit, I did this almost every day and it always got me how the keys to unlocked the locked shit was unlocked themselves. A wee little redundant; and yet, what were we to do? Keep the keys in some managerial or department office were they would be safe? Bold plan.

After opening the handheld scanner case as well as the kiosk terminal itself, I returned the keys to the drawer. The unlocked drawer. And I began my day.

There was not much to tell: I logged into the Augustford To Go computer; printed today’s order sheet; wrote down the order numbers from highest to lowest on the various whiteboards, so that the shoppers would have an idea of where to stage once a shopping tour was completed; and I released all of the orders from the dashboard that were ready to be shopped; as I released orders, I also printed off cut lists— specialized items wanted by customers that had to be completed in other departments— and delivered them to said departments. And, finally, I wrote on the BIG WHITEBOARD all of the orders for the time slow along with the total number of items so far today. As the day continued, more orders would drop. And I would review them, release them, and once fully shopped, take them out to the customer.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

Now I could log into my shopping device. Carefully entering my password, I was relived, when it worked; it wasn’t as if I thought it was wrong or expired, it was just the system was finicky and the tiny little buttons easy to mis-enter. And if you mistakingly entered the wrong password three times? Bam! A length call to tech support was in your future.

But since I logged in without a problem, I rounded a corner to the side wall of the department, grabbed myself a cart, and placed some bags on the cart. Looking at the first item wanted by the customer— a roll of paper towels— I navigated my way to aisle 12 and pushed myself and my cart all the way to the end. Here, about half-a-dozen brands of paper towels were in stock. Seeing that the brand they wanted was out of stock, I substituted that item for a similar item that was close to the desired item in function and price. I then placed the item in a bag, returned to the front of my cart, where a roll of stickers with barcodes was kept all nice and tidy, and wrote the order number on one of the stickies. Slapping it on the bag, I then scanned it, and moved on to the next item.

And that was pretty much my job. At a certain part of the day, in two and a half hours, give or take, I would need to begin doing the other part of my job, expediting. Auditing orders, making sure everything was where it ought to be, and that sort of fine detail price pointing. But, for now, it was just shopping. My favorite part of my job.

As I moved through the store, switching here and there between first and cosmic modes, I found myself surprised at how effortlessly the dimensional strip moved me from location to location in store.

Really, for as complex a location as a supermarket was, the flow of the dimensional strip accommodated my work effortlessly; here, the strip had many “bends,” as I were calling them, that were split-offs from the main strip, but only temporarily . . . it was odd, though. Looking at the area from my cosmic perspective, I saw that, like always, there was but a single dimensional strip that went from the left to the right, the world here slightly more compressed than usual. But this strip was complex since it had those bends in it: the compressed aisles were less alternative routes and more temporary indulgences; as I allowed frequency triggers to overtake me, I found myself grabbing the items requested, but doing so in a nearly robotic way. I did everything that I normally did— I looked at the handheld shopping device, saw the aisle, the location within the aisle, the UPC code, and made critical decisions from what was in stock, but it seemed more automatic now, somehow. As if the nature of how I now saw the world compressed my own cognitive faculties and sped up the process of work itself; entering bend after bend to retrieve items— always, for some reason, returning to the central aisle, the primary dimensional strip, right after, I essentially just moved along from the left to the right, shopping now being conceived as quickly jutting into aisles to grab the requested items. My cart remained just at the end of the aisle, which did require more walking, and yet, the speed of shopping seemed faster. Very odd.

Item. Walk. Walk. Scan. Walk with cart. Walk. Item. Walk. Scan. Scan. Walk.

Over and over the process of labor washed over me. I saw a couple of the shoppers come in and make small talk with me as I waited for their assignment. I sent them on their way and then returned to my walking, item picking, and scanning.

But like a chime on a clock, it turned seven and I found myself answering the call of a frequency trigger. I returned to my kiosk.

Time to expedite.