It’s not that I want to cause a fight or hurt people’s feelings; I just can’t control the truth at those times. It’s like I spend all my time and energy suppressing things and then all of a sudden I can’t do it anymore and I explode. I can’t explain it any better than that. So, no actually, I’m not just ‘being a drama queen’ thank you very much. If I had a dollar for every time you said I was, I wouldn’t have had to work at Surf Zone in the first place.
Anyway Great White Molly looked and sounded angry this time, so at least I wasn’t confused about that.
She said, ‘In case you’ve forgotten, Erin, I’m your manager and you have to do what I say.’
People who say ‘in case you’ve forgotten’ rarely believe the person they’re talking to has forgotten something, in my experience. I was demoted from the counter to change-room duty, but it suited me just fine. I am a lot better at tidying change rooms and fetching different sizes than I am at forcing a pseudo-environmental up-sell onto customers who have already been conned into spending way too much money on clothes made in a sweatshop where workers are probably paid five cents a week. Shocked that I know something about fast fashion and ethical consumption under capitalism? Surprise! You’re not the only one who has a conscience and pays attention in our family. I know a lot more about the world than you give me credit for.
There’s less face time at the change rooms, so it’s not as tiring as working the counter. I like to clean the left-side change rooms at quarter past the hour and the right side at quarter to. I keep the empty coathangers on the rack until I have twenty, and then I take them to the stockroom to be reused. I sort the unwanted clothes by gender, section, colour and size, and I return them to their places in the shop when I have five pieces for a section. Clothes can belong in:
women’s surf
men’s surf
children’s surf
women’s streetwear
men’s streetwear
children’s streetwear
sale.
There are also surfboards, skateboards and accessories, but those items don’t end up at the change rooms unless I confiscate them from someone trying to smuggle them into a stall.
At Surf Zone, if you have blonde hair you work in the surf section and if you are brunette you work in streetwear. That’s not really a rule, it’s just what happens. I’m starting to learn more about the rules no one will tell you but are definitely there. Rules like ‘when Rudy shouts it’s called “frustration” and when Erin shouts it’s called “acting out’’’.
I’d noticed the hair rule was happening when I first started working at Surf Zone and a girl was moved from street to surf when she dyed her hair blonde. So I worked in streetwear, never mind that my knowledge on skate hardware is zero; I was putting together set ups and gripping decks with next to no training and even less skill. I learned from watching a YouTube video. I feel sorry for the people stuck with me or eighty per cent of the other brunette, skate-illiterate girls in there serving them. A few of the brunette girls do know what they’re doing, but they always seemed to be working at the same time, which is bad rostering if you ask me. But Great White Molly never did.
I worked there for a year and a half you know—on average two shifts a week. Shifts are normally four hours long, so that’s 624 hours I’ve worked at Surf Zone. If only I could have lasted another ninety-six hours, and then I’d have worked right up until the end of school and had enough money saved for Schoolies Week. If only.
Schoolies has been on my mind since you started talking about it, way before I even understood what it was. Now it’s impossible to imagine not knowing about it, this prize every student gets for making it through thirteen years of education. It’s the big kahuna, the golden egg, the blue ribbon. If I can’t think of what to say to someone at school, I just mention Schoolies and we have a whole conversation around being excited about it. I like to think of it as a crash course in being a grown-up, because you try out living away from home in an apartment with your best friends, which is what I hope to be doing soon after Schoolies ends.
Like you need any introduction to Schoolies Week, Rudy. You WERE Schoolies Week, or at least that’s what it seemed like when you ended up on the news making faces behind the reporter. ‘YOUTH GONE WILD’ was the caption underneath. Were you trying to piss Dad off? He definitely thought it was personal. Mum told him you were just being young and thoughtless, and I agreed. Again with the thoughtlessness. And drunk, I added. That didn’t seem to help. Nothing has changed—Schoolies is still everything to everyone, Dad is still taking things personally, and Mum is still making excuses for you.
Change-room duty had actually been pretty perfect for me; my desire for organisation made sorting items to be returned to the shelves an enjoyable task and it meant I could avoid the torture of the random customer approach that was forced on the staff working the floor.
‘Welcome to Surf Zone, is there anything I can help you with?’ or something like that was mandatory as soon as a customer walked through the doors. A lot of them responded with the standard ‘just looking’, but others were more creative with their method of telling you to eff off. I don’t blame them; there is nothing that makes me more uncomfortable than insincere interactions with staff hoping to make a sale. The compliments, feigned interest in your weekend and insistence that no one has ever looked as good as you in that one thing that you just HAD to get. I don’t see the point in those conversations at all. If a staff member talks to me more than twice in the first two minutes I leave the shop. It’s a rule I made for myself.
I’m glad I don’t have to work on the floor at Surf Zone, because Great White Molly uses her most tanned and blonde employees at the front of the store. I think it’s because good-looking people make regular people feel like they could be good looking too if they just shop at the right place.
I didn’t love my job at Surf Zone, but I’d been there long enough to know the rules. The ones you could get in trouble for breaking, like those in the employee manual, and the important ones, like which section you are meant to work in based on your hair colour. Learning the rules is the worst part about a new job, and now I’ll have to do it all over again somewhere else.
I should have kept my mouth shut. That’s hard to do even when I’m calm though, and I was already building up to an outburst when I found the shit on the change-room floor. It was not like a little bit of poo had fallen out of a child’s nappy either, it was an adult-sized pile of faeces in the middle of a change room where the partition didn’t even reach the floor. I had been gone for maybe 120 seconds, returning items to their sections, and when I came back it was there, and the perpetrator was gone. An unimpressed customer brought it to my attention and I fled to the stockroom out the back.
Why on earth would someone do that? Is it an exhibitionist thing? An anarchist thing? A fetish? Was I supposed to clean it up? That didn’t seem like it should be a rule, especially not when I was only paid $16 an hour. I felt caught out and unprepared, so I flicked through the Surf Zone employee manual, but it didn’t have a chapter on what to do if a customer defecated in a change room, and I could hear Great White Molly calling my name. I paced around the back room, trying to think of what to do. I wanted to disappear, but no amount of pressing my eyelids closed helped. I could hear Great White Molly entering the code into the door and I wished there was another exit I could escape through. She was doing that scream-whisper thing Mum does when she wants to get angry with us but she doesn’t want anyone else to hear.