A Walk in the Snark (18 page)

I should expect my personal whisperer in the next 3-4 hours.

Time passed slowly, as my daughter, clad in underwear and shower cap (blackmail pictures did cross my mind) sat watching
The Real Housewives of Embarrassing and Shameful Behavior
.

I didn’t care. I was drunk and scratching every inch of my body as I laundered our linens and vacuumed my floors, walls, ceilings, and son.

Finally, Marleigh, Our Savior Goddess from The Hair Whisperers, came to our rescue. She entered with a smile and a glow—our Holy Angel of Bug Removal had arrived.

Marleigh waved her magic wand (heat, actually) to check my family for bugs.

Isn’t that just special?

As I waited anxiously, flashes of how Nurse Ratched had unceremoniously kicked my 11-year-old radioactive daughter out of school for wanton and rampant lice infestation, something she felt was on a par with a nuclear holocaust, ran through my head.

We could not remove our daughter quickly enough for her liking, which she made clear by padlocking her door and donning her gas mask as we left with our Level 4 contagion.

Yet, I agreed with her there in wanting those uninvited visitors off of my kid’s head.

Could Lady Gaga make shaving one’s head cool like, yesterday? ‘Cause that would make my life
so
much easier.

Unfortunately, all I could envision was Dr. Evil. (Or this guy.) Not the best look for an 11-year-old girl.

Er, no.

Marleigh, The Angel of Bug Removal, spoke a few words in an ancient tongue (told me she used some mystery oil that the little suckers absolutely hate), and after doing a mysterious dance (er, combing out her hair) cleared my daughter for takeoff (school on Monday).

But what about the rest of the family? What about the buzz-cut twins—my five-year-old son and husband? Were they okay?

Actually, they were fine. Neither had enough hair for the disgusting louse (louse and lousy must have something in common—see? Just one more reason to hate that word) to hang on to.

I must take some credit for keeping the little guy’s hair buzz-cut short—mostly I just think it looks cute—yet it will now be this way for the rest of his school life. End. Of. Discussion.

Okay, good. They were peachy fine and dandy. But what about me?

With my long, flowing (okay, it’s a shag but just go with it) red locks?

DEAR GOD, WHAT ABOUT ME?

Angel Marleigh checked me (husbands are useless in this particular situation. They half-heartedly try, groan, and then leave) and... (vodka shot)...

I was blessedly, thankfully, lice free.

I celebrated with more vodka.

One day later, and my girl was truly, amazingly bug free.

I was hungover as hell.

Still, I was in full-on freak-out mode. I repeatedly shampooed and conditioned us all with the
Fairy Tales
products, repeatedly sprayed my house with their Repel the Little Blood Suckers Spray, and laundered every linen, bookbinding, pillow, and silk flower.

I also vacuumed every inch of my house, roof, neighbor’s carport, and my son (again). Repeatedly.

I plan to continue doing this for the rest of our lives, until we die. Perhaps even after. Repeatedly.

My friend (who told me about The Hair Whisperers) will be happy that I've come over to the paranoid, germophobic side.

My daughter will be lucky if she has a friend sleep over again. Ever.

As for my husband...after my initial disappointment in his lack of usefulness in handling this particularly perilous situation, I realized that when it comes to men and hair, he exhibited typical male ignoramus behavior and really can’t be blamed for acting in accordance with his species (see
The Mancode
).

In other words, I forgave him. After I made him fold a few (and by a few I mean lots and lots) loads of laundry, make dinner, and bring me pretty flowers.

So, life in the RachelintheOC house is back to normal. And by normal I mean the five-year-old is having his regular temper tantrums ’cause he can’t find that one microscopic red bead, my tween girl cries that her dad erased her extra special iCarly episode, and I’m sure there’s one more thing...

Oh, yes. Did I mention...the dog has fleas?

***

SECTION 4

MEN VS. WOMEN: THE WORKPLACE

INTRODUCTION

My kids are way luckier than we were growing up. We were on a much stricter budget, TV kinda sucked, and clothing options were somewhat questionable (let’s not discuss flare-leg pants and Wallabees, okay?)

So it seemed only natural that, given the fact that we were a one-income family, there were three of us girls, and my cheerleading uniforms were expensive, I needed to get a job when I was sixteen.

My dad worked for Longs as a store manager, so he sent me to chat with another manger at a store close to our home. I came home with a horrifically green smock and a job as a cashier. My older sister Caren already worked for them and didn’t seem to hate it (she even had a new boyfriend out of the deal), so why not?

Famous last words.

I learned many things, as most people do from their first jobs:

When people go shopping at drugstores, they’re usually sick…and therefore grumpy (especially in the pharmacy).

I quickly figured out that men and women are very different, especially behind the closed doors of a work environment when they think no one is watching. In retail, someone is always watching.

Men can be quite crude in large groups. Even around teenaged girls. Who are manager’s daughters. Oh, and stinky.

Worms grow in chocolate. Chips grow stale. And no one ever checks. (Buy your food at the grocery store, people.)

And yes, I ended up with a boyfriend out of the deal.

When I graduated from college, Longs asked me to go through their management training program.

I ran, quickly. Far, far away.

Into selling condoms, actually…but that’s a whole other story…

***

WE ARE NOT THEM

They say some women marry their fathers. Well, JP definitely did not work at a drugstore. He worked with dirt and bugs. Honestly, it’s shocking sometimes that we’re even together.

Dad was a Longs Drugstore manager for twenty-five years. He supported his wife and three girls on that salary. When it came time for all three of his girls to get jobs, where do you think we went to work (different stores, of course)?

Let’s just say I learned a lot about people from my retail days (and some of it ain’t pretty).

Dad’s best advice? “Kill ’em with kindness.” Both the easiest and hardest thing to do when people are yelling at you about the sale price of a can of freakin’ cat food.

One thing you learn working at the same drugstore for more than a few years (thus becoming, whether you want to or not, part of the long-term “tribe” of that particular store) is which new-hires are going to make it and which will be gone inside of a week.

Or in this case, a month.

For example, Ilene. She was a sweet, pretty (of course, given my manager’s penchant for hiring PYTs) young girl, if not the sharpest knife in the drawer. There were two incidences that occurred within her first month on the job that made me realize she wasn’t long for our store.

Right next to our time clock was a little chalkboard. One day soon after Ilene started, one of the night managers drew a little stick figure of a girl falling over with a little bubble that said “Help, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” with the name “ILean” beside it.

Get it? ILene/ILean. Play on words. Yeah, she didn’t get it either. (Seriously? She had gone her entire life and NO ONE had made that joke until now? Or maybe they had and she had already forgotten. This girl was the definition of the term
“airhead.”
Wow.)

It was cute and funny, though. And he was a really good artist. When someone explained it to her, she cried. And cried. And cried some more. Honestly. Not only was this girl a few beers short of a six-pack, she was also completely devoid of a sense of humor. Apparently.

Like most casual work settings, Longs was a place where the new guy/gal would receive a little lighthearted ribbing. Most of us were okay with it and knew it was part of the inclusion ritual known as
social bonding
. Some of the guys took it to the practical joke, “acting like an idiot,” level. Most of the gals just laughed it off. The target usually bought the beer, and we’d all have a laugh about it later in the parking lot after work.

Not, however, our Ilene. She was running on empty to begin with.

The other incident still makes me laugh to this day. David, the same night manager, had at that point made
ILean
Ilene his personal mission. This poor soul couldn’t figure how to be a cashier (this was back before UPC scanners, and you actually had to count the change back to the customer yourself, not just dump it in his or her hand) which was ironically, the position Jack, our manager, had hired her to do.

We didn’t have baggers, per se, as Longs is a drugstore, not a grocery store (well, with the exception of the hell that is
Christmas Eve in Retail
—but that’s a whole other piece). She couldn’t seem to work a pricing gun, hopelessly unable to figure out the store’s wholesale letter code conversion to numbers (something I can still do to this day —not a skill I’m proud of—just something I CAN do—in my sleep).

So, what to do?

David, in his infinite wisdom, asked Ilene to face the liquor wall.

Now, any of you retail babies out there knows what facing a wall means, right? (So you can imagine where this is going.) You basically fill any holes on a given shelf by pulling inventory forward so that the
face
of the shelf looks full. Makes sense.

Unless you are an airhead named Ilene.

After about ten or so minutes, I happened upon Ilene standing still in front of the liquor wall. Crying.

“What’s the matter, sweetie?” I asked her. I could not imagine what on earth had happened now. Had someone insulted her? Again? Had she cut herself on something? (We all carried box cutters—it
was
possible.)

Sobbing, she could barely tell me, “I don’t know what I’ve done wrong now. David told me to come over to the liquor wall and just stand here. Why am I in trouble?”

I was puzzled. No manager would tell an employee to just stand around. Then it hit me. He had told her to FACE the liquor wall. OMG, this girl just was not
for real
.

Stifling my laughter, I calmly explained to her what facing meant and then helped her get the job done. It wasn’t the first time that we had explained facing to her. You learn that on practically your first day working retail—kind of like one of those “even a monkey can do it” kind of skills.

Because she was pretty, Jack hired her. Skill set never came into it. Clearly. Perhaps he should have hired a monkey instead.

Soon after her facing the wall
punishment
, Ilene packed up her attractive green Longs smock and left. We were all definitely more relieved than she was.

I do wonder about Ilene occasionally. Do I feel we were too harsh with her? Do I feel bad?

No. None of us was mean-spirited. We treated her no differently than any other new hire.

Perhaps that was the problem—I was not her manager and couldn’t make sure that they treated her with the kid gloves I thought she probably needed. She clearly couldn’t handle this rough-and-tumble crowd, this (for the most part) uneducated group of (mostly) smug men who didn’t care that her feelings were hurt by their inconsiderate and crude jokes.