Another day in paradise…that’s what my mother always said after describing a hectic day at work. It was indeed ‘another day in paradise’–not because I was having to do a lot of work, but because there was a lack of work to be done.
When you’re not at work, you imagine a slow day being a good thing. When you’re there and work is overflowing due to either a sudden influx of customers, a lack of help, or both, it’s hell. If you ever worked a day of retail you know this already. Customers could easily become unruly if they think their needs weren’t met, flipping their shit on a whim if something sets them off. Thankfully this almost never happened to me–customers tend to pick less on employees that have a ‘resting bitch face’. It’s one of the only benefits of having one. Couldn’t say the same for my ‘softer’ looking male coworkers or most of my female coworkers, who were easier targets. I’ve had customers be rude, but never had one yell at me or try to physically accost me. On the other hand, there were multiple times where I had strange people talk my ear off about whatever came to their mind. They were a perfect alibi if I wanted to slack off for a few minutes–it’s rude to not listen to a customer after all! They’re the ones that make this all possible!
Working in fulfillment, I usually was in the back. The only time I was on the floor was to pick orders or to deliver them to vehicles. I had no obligation to help customers at all–if they came up to me, I could always have someone else assist them if I was too busy. Most of the time, their questions were something simple like “Where is ‘X’ item?” or “What is the price of this?” Such questions could be answered quickly, since my Zebra scanner had information for both. It was easy information to pick up since it was easily available on the Hobby Lobby app. Of course, I could always tell customers this, and tell them how to download it, but that wasn’t my job. Tech support, while it was something I was ‘good’ at, wasn’t why I was here. It was one of the metrics that managers loved to see–they would potentially get a bonus if they exceeded the metric for ‘app downloads’. For me though, it made no difference if I got ten customers to download the app or zero. I still made the same hourly pay. How was corporate able to measure the metric anyway? We had no public Wi-Fi in the store–how did they know that it was our store they downloaded the app from? It’s not my problem.
The only good thing about busy days was that you always had something to do. Time passed by faster on those types of days. Your shift was over before you knew it, and if you were good at saying ‘no’ to managers that wanted you to work over, you could go home on time and relax until you had to do it all over again.
Today was the opposite of those days. It was dead inside the store–there were more employees than customers right now…and there were no orders to fulfill. In theory, work days like these would be the same as going to school and doing no work. That was the theory…in real life, this was never going to be the case. Just as the teacher could assign you homework randomly, managers could assign you someone else’s work if they felt that you didn’t ‘have enough to do’.
You might be saying “Then go hide!”. I would love to, but it was pretty impossible to do here. I hadn’t been here long enough to discover where the ‘hiding spots’ were, if there even was one. And even if I wanted to, my phone connection tended to get worse the further in Hobby Lobby I was, making it difficult to keep myself busy while hiding. You can only sit on the toilet for so long before getting bored. There’s also the risk of hemorrhoids, but that’s not important in this equation. It was difficult to admit, but doing work was more fun than staring at a wall. The problem with that was that I didn’t want to seek out extra work. That would set a precedent for managers to give me more work in the future, when I perhaps already had things to do. There was nothing they loved more than rewarding employees that finished their duties ahead of time with more duties. Fuck you for doing your job! That left me with only one option–pretend to be busy.
I was making laps around the store, tidying things up. If there was one thing customers liked to do, it was not leave an area the way it looked when they entered it. It made sense when kids did it, since they were kids. They’re messy and don’t understand that someone that isn’t their parents has to clean that mess up. Annoying, but it’s a fact of life. What got me was how many people my age or older didn’t know how to clean up after themselves. Part of this had to be the internal disdain they had for retail workers like me. Something along the lines of “if I have it hard, then everyone else needs to have hard as well!”. An infantile mindset that only brought others down. It was infuriating because it always happened when you weren’t around…and even if I was around, what would I say? I had no authority over them, nothing I could say would make them straighten up and not leave every area they touch with their stubby fingers while looking like a tornado went through it. In fact, confronting a customer about it would only make things worse. They could retaliate by either throwing a tantrum and making other areas messy or threaten to fight you. The latter hasn’t happened to me yet, but I’ve heard about the former occuring. Seen the results as well.
More commonly, the ‘Can I see your manager?’ line get uttered. It’s trite to poke fun at those types of customers, but it really was a type. I don’t know what their end goal was either, because it never ended with a coworker getting in trouble. Just ‘We’ll look into it.’ from managers and them immediately closing the case because there never was one in the first place. The complaint most of the time is something along the lines of ‘They didn’t drop everything and ignore the customer they were already helping to help me!’
As it stands, I was tidying stuff up. A good thing about working at an arts and crafts store was that you almost never had to fold clothes. We had T-shirts for sale, but they were all hung up in the back of the store, out of the way from civilization. That was the worst part about working at a place like JC Penney’s. Spending hours folding entire rows of Levi’s, ordering them by size and type, just for them to get messed up again once a customer wants to go through them. It was almost a pointless task, because to even find the correct size customers had to go through the jeans, which would make them look disorganized. Keeping that area pristine was futile. Shirts were a whole other mess. Basically anything that was set up on a table was a nightmare to keep neat. I originally thought that this was only a Men’s Department thing, but the Women’s sections were just as bad, if not even worse. I can only thank gender heteronormativity for getting me off the hook of ever having to clean the women’s changing room. You don’t know how many times panties had to be thrown out due to ‘leakage’...the closest thing to that I had to deal with was when I found a pair of jeans peed in the men’s changing room. That was a one time thing thankfully. Men tried on clothes less, which made the necessity of having to go in there and pick up clothes they decided not to buy (or put back up) less dire.
There was also the ‘issue’ of shoplifters using the changing room to do their business. That was less of a pain in the ass because I had to really only pick up tags and tell managers about it. The way I looked at it was that at least they were actually sneaky about it. The one thing I hated about shoplifters was when they were painfully slow and obvious about it…just take the shit you want and leave! You’re not even paying for it, so why be picky! You’re only building a case against yourself by going at a snail’s pace! Believe me, I don’t care, but I have to pretend to care at the time if you’re that obvious and a manager sees it. So annoying. Oh, and also, those tags on the back of the cheap jewelry can be easily ripped off. I did it so many times instead of turning off the sensor when I had to ship jewelry out. It’s faster and it won’t go off when you do it. It didn’t when I did.
Going towards the clock section, I stopped and stared at the biggest ones we had in stock. When I say big, I mean big. Like big enough where they could barely fit in a shopping cart. They were tempting to buy just for the novelty, but at $200, it wasn’t worth having a giant ticking object laying around. I settled with gazing at it–something I made sure to do every shift. It wasn’t quite as cool as a grandfather cloc–
“Hey stranger.”
Snapping out of my trance, I instinctively jumped back–that wasn’t who I thought it was, wasn’t it? Looking to my left, I confirmed it in fact was…
“What? Do I look like a creeper or something?” Michael looked somewhat puzzled. This was the first time I’ve seen him outside of our property–I was perplexed that he would be here. The random Minecraft reference had me thinking he was either playing it before he got here, or would be after. To be honest, he looked more like a slendey than a creeper with his lanky proportions.
“What’re you doing here?” I know that sounded mean, but I really wanted to know why he was here.
“What? can’t a friend visit another friend while on the job? You’ve seen my workplace, now I get to see yours.” Oh, I see…he was bored and didn’t have any games he wanted to play. Besides Minecraft I guess. “Besides, I’ve never been to this place before…” he looked around “You talk about this place like it’s a church, but it seems to have a little bit of everything.”
I had often made the refrain that this place was owned by fundamentalist Christians that really took their worship seriously. The good part of that was that I never worked on Sundays, a guaranteed day off every week. It was also the day that Formula 1 races were on, which was the closest thing I had to a ‘place of worship’. The bad part was that sometimes the founder got embroiled in scandal for allegedly buying ancient artifacts from ISIS for his ‘Museum of the Bible’. Buying stolen artifacts wasn’t the best publicity, but with the way business was trending, it seemed that the public forgave them. Or they never cared in the first place. All I got out of it was calling it ‘Wahabi Lobby’. Almost no one got the reference.
“Woah, Pironi would love these clocks” – Michael was referring to another of his coworkers, Ora Pironi–her concept was that she was ‘the master of time’, or something like that. I thought the clock thing was purely lore for her character, but I guess it isn’t uncommon for someone to collect clocks. There’s a reason we have a whole aisle dedicated to them. I didn’t know much about her other than that she was a bit of an oddball. You could say that about most VTubers, but she was something else. She had a knack for not having her room cleaned–often accidentally kicking her pile of energy drinks that were situated under her. I don’t know how much of it was her playing it up, and how much of it was for real–I knew the can thing was real though. I wonder if she was actually Italian…
“So…since you’re here, I can show you around.” I looked down at my Zerba device, looking to see if any new orders came in…nope, nothing. “I have nothing better to do.”
“That would be awesome–I need stuff for future handcam streams…show me where the fun stuff is!” he was getting too excited about this…I’ll play along for now.
“Right this way sir…”
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The first place I took him was where all the anime-related stuff was. Being a hobby store, of course we had to have some anime stuff. It was mostly gundams and a very small assortment of figures from currently popular anime. To be quite honest, I had little to zero knowledge of Gundam. The only one that I recognized was the ‘RX-78-2’ one. I guess that was like the Optimus Prime of the series popularity-wise. I had more interest in the other side of the aisle, where the model cars were.
Of course, all of the model cars were of the ‘Cool Cars’ variety, but there was one in particular that stood out to me. It was the Chevrolet Corvette C7.R model set. It wasn’t just any Corvette–it was the Corvette model that won its class at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 2015. It was based off the seventh generation Corvette that was new at the time. The cool thing about it, and all other GT (Grand Tourer) cars, was that it looked almost exactly like the road car version of it.
As I never have had the fortune to build a model car, I had no idea how hard it would be. According to the box, this kit was a ‘Level 4’ kit, which meant that it would require some painting and gluing to build. Apparently, the build time was estimated to be around five hours. The glue and paint sold separately.
Visualizing how sexy it would look once built, I took a box off the shelf and said “Hey, you should put together one of these on stream.”
“What is that?” Michael, more interested in the Gundams, walked towards me and took a gander at the box. “You want me to snap together a Ford for a stream? Wouldn’t that be a little bit too simple?” Oh that’s rich coming from a guy who had a stream with the theme ‘eating a hot tortilla chip’...
I bit my tongue before I uttered a snappy comeback at him–I took an internal deep breath and replied “It’s a kit that you have to glue and paint together. Kinda like those Gundams you were looking at. In fact, I think it’s a bit more complicated than this,” I grabbed a random Gundam box, “because if my memory serves me correctly, these already come pre-painted and with the decals…I’m not saying that this is easier to build–in fact, more people would be interested in you building this Gundam, but would you be the first one to build one?”
Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.
“No, definitely not.”
“You would more than likely be the first VTuber to ever put together a Corvette on stream. Think about it–it’s your own little niche. I know you aren’t interested in motorsports in anyway, but I think it’s a great idea. Plus, it’s not expensive at all.” I looked down to fact check myself “Only 38 dollars!”
“Hmm…I can see where you’re getting at…” he took both boxes from my hand “I’ll get both of them…” I forgot that he was Mr. Moneybags for a second–the price tag didn’t really matter.
“Now we’ll need to get some paint and glue for that ‘Vette. Follow me–you might get some other ideas for streams while we’re getting everything you need.” I started guiding him to our next destination, but remembering his mistake, turned back.
“By the way,” I said with the utmost of importance, pointing at the plastic model “it’s a Chevy.”
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The aisle with all of the paint wasn’t that far away. Thankfully there was a shopping basket abandoned nearby. There was nothing in it, so I nabbed it before anyone else could. We would need it for all of the paint.
Michael, seeing me with the basket, dropped both the Gundam and The ‘Vette in there and said “I’m going to look around while you get all of the paint.” Before I could tell him to get back here, he was in the aisle adjacent…he must have seen something that caught his eye.
Looking at the bottom of the box for the Corvette model, the list of paints required to paint the model as intended were:
* Aluminum
* Flat Black
* Gloss Black
* Gloss Red
* Gloss Yellow
* Graphite Metallic
* Gunmetal
* Light Blue
* Semi Gloss Black
* Steel
* Transparent Gray
…Jesus Christ, eleven different types of paint? Bob Ross used like eight to create his masterpieces. I know I shouldn’t use the Lord’s name in vain while at a place of worship, but that was a lot of paint to get for one model kit.
Thankfully, they were all in the same display and made by the same brand. There were about sixty colors to choose from, but picking out the ones he needed was simple. Thank goodness it was organized and that we had all of them in stock…all in stock except ‘Transparent Gray’, which we didn’t even have on display. Maybe I was overlooking it, but I couldn’t find it for the life of me. I didn’t know how important it was to the kit, but for the sake of being a completionist, I called an audible and got a bottle of clear paint to go with ‘Flat Gray’, which combined would hopefully resemble ‘Transparent Gray’ when mixed with the right consistency of both. Hopefully.
I’ve been to this section and have picked out this brand of paint numerous times while fulfilling orders. One thing I learned about Hobby Lobby is that they offer competitive prices in comparison to other retailers and even Amazon. I never shopped here before I started working at Hobby Lobby, but now I find myself occasionally buying things from here not because of a random urge to get them–but because they were priced the lowest here. The 15% employee discount helped with that, but sometimes it was lower than Amazon even without it.
Right as I peaked my head into the aisle Michael wandered off into, I saw him pick out a birdhouse and smirk. He looked to his left, where my head was peaking out, and asked “This looks cool doesn’t it?” It was a birdhouse with two entrances–a ‘Duplex Birdhouse’ it went by in the system. Birdhouses wasn’t my idea of ‘cool’, but I had to admit that it was one pretty fancy looking one. I thought the fun of one was building it, I highly doubt Michael had the woodworking skills to be able to build anything other than a box with a hole in the side, even if that. The shed might as well been locked off to him. He still hasn’t stepped foot in it.
“What’s that for?” I was genuinely interested. Michael never showed any interest in birds, so why get a birdhouse? It’s true that many birds do live and chirp near us, but the last thing I wanted was for them to have a home to make noise. I doubt Michael wanted that too, since they would no doubt distract him while streaming if their ‘home’ was too close to his room.
“Kotori’s birthday is coming up in a few weeks, so I thought painting this for her would be a good stream idea.” Ah, I see–I get it now. It actually was a good idea. Since the birdhouse he got was pretty complex as far as birdhouses go, he could go nuts with whatever design he decided to do for her birthday. As you probably guessed, he was talking about Kotori Hori, another of his coworkers. Being someone who watched Love Live! back in the day, I knew that ‘Kotori’ meant ‘small bird’ in Japanese. Her model was bird-like, using earth tones that made for an otherwise ‘normal’ design VTuber-wise. The gift made sense lore-wise as well, I guess. I still can’t wrap my head around the concept of ‘VTuber lore’. Why does a streamer need a made-up backstory?
image [https://i.imgur.com/M6Renbq.png]
Rough drawing of the ‘Duplex Birdhouse’ that Michael picked out. The colors don’t match what it looks like in real life–I got lazy after a while and used the same ten shades of tan to complete the drawing. Nevertheless you can tell how complex it looks for a birdhouse. It already roughly matches her color palette. I sure hope he mails it to Kotori after he is done with it, since it would be a pain to have even more birds on the property.
“Plus, it’s forty percent off.” Michael sounded a bit like me justifying a purchase…it was true that ‘Unfinished Craft Wood’ was 40% off this week, but it wasn’t like unpainted birdhouses were expensive in the first place.
He walked towards me, placed the birdhouse in the basket and asked “Did you get all the paint needed for that car?”
“Yeah, but you’ll need some more paint if you’re gonna paint that treehouse.” even with all of the different types of paint he was going to buy, he needed a separate set of paint for that treehouse and any other art project that wasn’t the Corvette. Would be very embarrassing for him if he ran out of paint while decorating Kotori’s birthday gift. Thinking about it, I didn’t know if we had any paint brushes to begin with–I’m sure there were some in the shed, but there was no guarantee that they were clean or weren’t beat up all to hell. “Oh yeah, we should get some brushes too, wouldn’t want you to buy all of this just to have to do finger paint.”
“Ahh yeah…finger painting seems like a good idea, but that’s something I want to put off for now.” I could understand that–finger painting with gloves on seems like it would be a nightmare. Even so, what would he finger paint? It would take for fucking ever to finger paint a treehouse. I sure hope he wasn’t seriously considering doing that.
Walking back into the paint aisle, I grabbed an acrylic paint set, “How about this? You could get Bob Ross with it with these paints.” This wasn’t the Bob Ross brand paint, but it was basically the same thing–down to the colors. The set I grabbed was a 10-piece set, more than enough for a birdhouse. It had:
* Titanium White
* Yellow Medium
* Permanent Red
* Phthalo Blue
* Grass Green
* Burnt Umber
* Crimson
* Ultramarine Blue
* Yellow Ochre
* Permanent Black
Gee, I wasn’t kidding when I said he could get ‘Bob Ross with it’... he probably wouldn't need a palette knife or the thing Bob used to ‘beat the devil outta it’–a palette itself would be useful the more I think about it, since using a paper towel would only end in tears and I don’t know how The Landlord would feel about us using one of her plates as one. She would find out somehow. I just know.
“Alright, now to the brushes–we’ll need to get a palette as well too.” I wanted to give Michael a heads up so he didn’t assume I was throwing random junk in the basket. At this rate, we would need to get a shopping cart.
“Okay…wait, what’s a palette?”
“The thing you put the paint on.”
“Couldn’t I just use a plate?”
“I mean…yeah, you could…but how would you explain to Jean how a plate became multi-colored if you couldn’t wash it off? You should know more than I do that she hates tacky looking things.”
“Yeah, but we’re the one living there…she’s a gazillionaire. Why would she care?”
You know, for someone who was very thoughtful when it came to his coworkers, he had no clue how to read women in real life…it’s a wonder that she didn’t evict him when his lease was first up. I got his point–she was rich after all. She could just replace the plates if it bothered her that much, but that wasn’t the point. She was someone who maintained her frugalness even when there was no reason to. I could tell those plates were there for years, if not decades. They likely held sentimental value to her. I wasn’t going to get chewed out by her because I let him mess up a plate of hers. I had to find an excuse.
“Look…what will happen if your chat sees you using a dinner plate as a palette? They’re gonna roast you to high hell. You’ll look silly. That’s why you need a palette.”
As the walk to the palettes was short, we were already there. I grabbed the first one I saw, “Also, you would look more professional with one. It would complete the look. Plus this thing is only like five dollars.”
“I see what you’re getting at,” Michael said while grabbing an assortment value pack of paint brushes, “This would work wouldn’t it?”
“Don’t see why it wouldn’t.” It probably wasn’t the nicest set of paint brushes, but it wasn’t like Michael was going to use these outside of streams. We put both items in the about-to-overflow basket. “Alright, this looks like everything we need. Are you ready to check out?” I was tired of carrying this basket. It was getting quite heavy.
“I think so…” he was pondering for a moment, “...wait. What about the Gundam? We need tools for that.”
God damn it, he was right. He would need separate tools for that Gundam he was going to get. Aggravated, I asked “Do you know what you need?”
“No, I don’t, I need-” before he could finish what he was saying, I handed him his basket.
“You hold this. Let me Google what we need and I’ll lead the way.” I had been with him for what seemed like a long time by now. I was surprised that no one had called me or that I needed something to fulfill. Just the way it goes sometimes…
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Thankfully, the list of stuff needed for Michael’s Gundam was short. We needed to get:
* Side Cutters
* Self-Healing Cutting Mat
* Xacto Knife
* Sanding Sticks
Thankfully, the first three items were easy finds. Xacto knives were a commonly bought item. Technically any razor would work, but I had no idea what other type of razors we had at home. So a Size 1 Xacto knife it is. A self-healing mat was probably a good idea, because the last think we needed was for him to fuck up his desk with the knife trying to build the thing. He could’ve gotten a bigger mat, but he decided that 12” by 12” was big enough. I agreed since anything larger would start to hang off of his desk. While I thought any old pliers were good enough, apparently you don’t want to use things with teeth when clipping off parts. So side cutters it was.
The hardest part was finding ‘sanding sticks’, which was something that Hobby Lobby didn’t have to my knowledge. We settled on ‘sanding files’, for all I know was basically the same thing. There were three types we could get–we got the 120/240 grit ones, since they seemed to be the best variation on offer.
“Okay–now we have everything.” I was very sure this time. Unless if he picked up another item while on the way to check out, we were good.
“Yeah, that seems like everything…you seem to be ready to get rid of me…”
It wasn’t that I wanted to get rid of him, it was more that I felt like I should be doing something else. I should be enjoying this, especially since I was just mulling around before, but I had a feeling that I was ignoring something. I knew I wasn’t because checking my Zebra, nothing still was in, but I couldn’t shake that feeling. It was strange.
Walking him to the check-out line, I got him to check out with Susan, one of the older employees…well, most people here were the ‘older employees’, but she had been here for more than a decade at this point.
“Here, you can check out with Susan,” I laid his stuff out on the conveyor belt. He had like twenty items in total–enough for three separate streams. “Susan, here’s my employee card–let him use my discount.”
“Why? Is he your boyfriend?” Susan asked…she tended to be a stickler for the rules at times.
I stammered, not expecting such a sudden question “Ahh, no?”
“Now you know that I can’t just give your friend a discount just because you tell me too.” Oh boy, here we go…
Michael looked at me and said “What happened to us? I thought we had something…” I had no idea what he was doing. He was only confusing Susan. I had to clear the situation up.
“Please ignore him…well, we do live together,” I scratched the back of my neck nervously, “but we aren’t ‘partners’. We’re roommates.”
“Well, if you aren’t lying about living together, then I don’t have a reason to not let him use your discount.” I didn’t know anything about the restrictions of my discount card, since I was the only one that used it up to this point, but if she was going to let him use it, then that was my part done. I didn’t even know why I was going through all of this. He didn’t even need the savings!
The total brought up once everything was scanned was $136.85–a good thirty dollars saved if my estimations were correct. When entering his card, I heard Susan’s walkie go off:
[“John, please come by the office.”]
Oh…that was me…wait, why wasn’t my walkie going off.
Looking at it, Susan remarked, “Oh yeah, they’ve been trying to get you for about five minutes now.” Well gee, I wished you would’ve told me that when you first saw me. I had no idea what they wanted…couldn’t be anything bad because they would’ve called over the PA if it was. Probably was something along the lines of wanting me to work an extra day next week or some extra hours.
“Well, in that case, I’ll leave you two at it.” Michael had all of his stuff bagged up.
“See you later then.” Michael remarked.
Depending on what they wanted me for, ‘later’ could be 7 hours from now rather than the 3 I’m scheduled for, “See you too.”
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image [https://i.imgur.com/hDu4XqJ.png]