Help My Job Is Liquidated

On the way to work this morning, I ran a yellow light and the car in front of me slowed down, leaving me in the intersection as the light turned red. A cop did a U-turn to pull me over and give me a ticket. Just as I was thinking I was starting to get caught up on expenses. This has happened every time I get caught up since I moved to Dallas! Always with the tickets, the towedness of cars, the wreckedness of cars, doctor bills, losing my job, losing my roommate, investing in potential roommates, getting sick, having to cut my hours at work for one reason or another, blah blah blah. It just keeps coming. Something there is that doesn’t love a Michele in Dallas.

Then again when I had decided to depart, I spent about three months with one thing going rotten after another to the point that I stopped even telling people I knew that I was intriguing, just put my head down, and got the hell outta OK-City. Maybe something there is that doesn’t love a Michele.

I had my first day of liquidation at my home store. The family we’ve formed is being blown to the four winds, or possibly the four nearest extant locations. Or possibly not. I don’t mediate they can handle that many displaced employees right when hours are being cut without mercy.

We took off all the sale tags, all the mark-downs, until everyone’s fingers were hurting. All the “180-and-outs” that we had so conscientiously marked down correctly, all the clearance sales we had carefully noted and stickered. All of them peeled off and wadded into a sticky ball of purples and oranges. A store carefully kept now no different from a store where these tasks acquire ignored. We all worked so hard getting it lawful, we all cared so hard, and none of it really mattered.

The liquidation people are very nice, and it’s not their fault we’re closing. It’s not the district manager’s fault. It’s not anyone’s fault, really. There’s no one to blame. There’s no The Man. There’s nothing that anyone can really do about a dozen displaced workers who got along better than a family, without any cat-fighting, and who all did their jobs without having to be told or directed or forced or watched. There’s no reclaiming the hours of the labor of worship it takes to keep a store like this one up to code, with every T crossed. But I suppose that’s the nature of futility. It’s not unpleasant, it’s not anyone’s fault, it’s not anything. It just is.

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