Friday, May 17, 2013

Nothingness


Has there been established a predetermined life-cycle for the American who has been without, it is true that a specific percent of the population is detained to be a part of this life-cycle generation after generation, specifically those who have no money, I believe so. It seems that if an American tries but cannot pull himself out of the muck of nothingness in this country he and his children are destined to be a permanent part of this nothingness life cycle.

Money does make the world go round and some of the population of that world have to be the ones who are pushing it, thank God for electricity, gas, water and the rest of the energy used  to spin things around, but it wouldn’t be nothing, nothing, without a human.  

Some percent of us must remain behind the wheel, while the rest of us are under it, squashed into a permanent state of nothingness lest the driver will have to share the overabundance of security he enjoys.

The Deserving and Undeserving


I hear politicians use the phrase, “The deserving and undeserving homeowners”,
Why is there a division of deserving and undeserving? 
Doesn’t the buyer determine if they deserve to buy a home for themselves? People buying homes do it because they can, because they choose to. Or does someone actually decide if they deserve it or not? 

Are you saying these people who bought homes did not deserve them because due to the immoral behavior and money making schemes on Wall Street with their derivatives market, they now need help keeping their homes?

If they are deserving to own a home and can pay for it they are good, meaning, if they avoided being touched by these vultures and can pay for these homes they deserve them and those who have a home and can no longer pay for it are not deserving.

Perhaps the undeserving are those that lost the income they had before this greedy action blew a hole in the pot and drained every drop of juice they had when they bought it, they do not have the money they had and the ones who would be deserving are the ones who still have their incomes and can still pay their mortgage.

Should these deserving ones be allowed to refinance for a lower rate?

Why do some people always want to take advantage of what they don’t deserve.  They had the jobs, they bought the homes, they got bank loans for businesses and homes before anyone else, they were already ahead of the game, they got whatever they felt they deserved while others have never or rarely gotten what they deserved. 

When others were able to own homes it was a first for a large number of our population and if able to pull it off, are now being put off their jobs, out of business and pushed back to the end of the line. They should be given what’s deserved, like what would be equivalent to forty acres and two mules. 

Some people always want to get in where they don’t belong, they are all time selfish and all time greedy and all time undeserving, while staying ahead due to a united effort to keep it that way.

Why can’t they be more like others, whom, if it is not needed, don’t go running out to get it anyway?

Many of us would rather starve then take handouts, we would rather not have if we have to cheat, steal or lie to get it and keep it. We don’t jump ahead in line in front of nobody and we let people with less than us go ahead of us, why can’t they be more like us. 

They stand up and scream, "we want the same thing others are getting", they are not remembering the tragedies of the past that others have endured and are still enduring, like taxation without representation, like not getting to vote and getting killed if you even thought about it, like when slavery was outlawed by the government but continued anyway for another 40+ years and nearly no one was punished for it.

What happened with the housing market was just another case of these same people’s descendants taking advantage of others and ignoring, bending and twisting the law and not being punished for it. 

They want to buy property at lower rates like everyone else, so they can buy more than everyone else and sell it for profit and keep everything for themselves just as their ancestors did in this country. Enough already, they don’t deserve it. 

Tuesday, May 14, 2013

The Drought



“Once a seed is planted, it needs water to grow.”

The Store-"How do it look?"


One day I went to clean up the fitting rooms and I found piles of men,s clothes in the women’s fitting room, piles. My co worker who had said well it’s a lot of them, lesbians, women that come through here and try on men's clothes, I said but how did they get all these men clothes past the fitting room person and take them into the women’s fitting room, they didn’t look at the clothes and see that they were men's clothes. They don’t look at the clothes, they just ask the customer, “how many” and give them the number they say they have and let them go in.

And then we got this man that comes in dressed in women’s clothes and comes to the fitting room with a bunch of women’s clothes he wants to try on in the men’s fitting room, women’s purses and shoes and stuff, I just say, “you have to go into the men's fitting room” and he says, “Oh yeah, I know, I come here all the time.”

He goes in the men’s fitting room with a pink skirt suit on and high heels and a purse, he is a man dressed as a woman and it’s obvious, so he got to go in the men’s fitting room, dressed like a woman.

I said, “Oh, I can’t take it; people do all kinds of weird stuff right in your face right in public being selfish, not caring how it may make it difficult for someone else”. He came in, in a maid costume one day talking about, “How you like it, it’s my Halloween costume.”
I asked him, “don’t you worry about scaring people when you are on the streets like that, people are wild they will do anything, people will just get upset looking at you and you scare their kids and stuff, don’t you worry about somebody getting mad and jumping on you because that’s what can happen with you walking around here looking like that”.

“Well I never thought about it that way, it’s my Halloween costume and I came in here to find a feather duster and I wanted to wear the costume to see how it was gonna look with it”. I was like, it ain’t even Halloween yet.

My mom said, “I should have said, wow look at you, don’t you look beautiful!”
I said, “Oh no, I wasn’t gone lie to him, I cannot tell a lie.”
“Well, I would have”, she said.
 “Well, I told him he looked scary”.

She said, “You can’t argue with the customers, you can’t be telling them what they really look like, you can’t tell the truth. You got too many opinions.”

Saturday, May 4, 2013

The Store-Panties



The last time I worked a daytime shift with her, she told a lady she could try on panties.  I asked her, “since when did we start letting people try on panties Miss JoAnn?”
She said, “We don’t, we don’t but let her go ahead and try em’ on”.
I was through.

The woman stepped up to the fitting room with seven pairs of panties, and hung them on the fitting room podium we use to count the items and I proceeded to tell her I could hold them for her whiles he took her other items into the fitting room and she said she wanted to try them on.

I told her it wasn’t allowed, and she went off, “I don’t see that written anywhere, where does it say that”? I kind of said, “Well, that’s general, proper, protocol, panties are not fitted in the store.”
“Where is the manager, she yelled”, so I called JoAnn and explained a customer is here in the fitting room wanting to talk to a manager about trying on panties.

She came back their looking at me like, I did something wrong, like, what is it you couldn’t handle? When she asked the woman how could she help her the woman started talking about, how it wasn’t posted anywhere that she couldn’t try on panties, and she went to Emory and she had all these degrees ad she insisted on trying on this underwear and JoAnn gave in to her, and I just stood there and shook my head, and JoAnn said, “let her go in with them”.

When the woman came out stomping right past me, didn’t stop, look at me, smile, frown or nothing, just jetted right past me. I could see what she had or didn’t have with her. JoAnn called the fitting room, just after that and asked me did she buy any of them? I said I don’t know she jetted past me with something in her hands, she probably threw them panties, the ones she didn’t put on for keeps,  back up on the shelf somewhere, you better go see.

I said, “if I was you, I would wait up at the registers to see what she did buy and if she put the others back where they belong, cause if it was me, I wouldn’t have never even let her try them on, and if she come out that fitting room with them panties saying she don’t want them, you hang them back up out there on the floor, I’m not touching them”.

She said, “Um hum, she ain’t gone get em, she ain’t gone get em”. I said, “well if she don’t get em I’m not touching em and she said, “call me when she come out”, and walked on up front then called back to the fitting room after the woman jetted past me, aksing about the woman and the panties. 

You gone put some panties back on the floor somebody done pulled over they twat and butt in the fitting room, you can’t do that.

I couldn’t believe how she let this lady intimidate her, and just to go against me, just to go against me, she rather let a woman try on panties then let me bring my son in with me for four hours.

I had told the lady no, and not in a mean way, she asked for the manager I did not offer to get a manager for her. I thought she would go with me against the lady in this case, but no, I guess that’s what I get for thinking.

I had said to the lady, none of the stores I had ever been in let you try on underwear, not Saks, not Bloomingdales, not any of them. “Well, where is that written”, she said, I said, “it’s an unwritten fact that they don’t bother to put in print”. “Where is the manager, I want to see the manager!” So I called for her to come to the fitting room.

When she came the lady started saying, I have a PhD from Emory University and I yada yada yada…yada yada yada…and I said well here she is, she can tell why it’s not written anywhere and then she tells the lady go ahead and try on the panties. Then says to me, you can’ talk  to people any old kind of way, she said you were rude and yada yada yada

I said JoAnn, who you gone believe me or the lady, she wanted to try on panties!, Now, you know I’m not back here tripping on these customers you know it’s usually the other way around. “I said when she come back out that fitting room with them panties and she don’t want them, you gone hang them back up out there I’m not touching them.”

When the lady came out she flew past me, with them panties in her hand all balled up, probably had some of them on, I don’t know but she flew past me When she called back to the fitting room from the  front I said, “JoAnn she just left the fitting room saying, I’m gonna take them”.

She didn’t return nothing to me. She called back later asking me, did she buy them, I answered, did she? I don’t know you were up there.” Didn’t you see what she bought, I said she probably threw them panties in the store up on shelf somewhere. She probably just wanted a pair of fresh panties on. She probably just put on a fresh pair and wore them out the store people can be  trifling, I swear.

The Store-Greedy


“He ain’t call you yet”? “He know he suppose to call you”. “He know he told me he was going to call you, call him, hell”.
My cousin said she wanted to work their, I told her to put in the application online and call the manager. I told him my cousin wanted to work and he said he would call her, he never did.
I know he won’t hire nobody unless somebody gets fired or quits, he already think he got too many people on payroll. I heard him say it, “It’s too many people on payroll and that cuts into my bonus.”

The money the store makes is used for payroll and the rest is the manager’s bonus. He was trying to get rid of people, especially those making more than minimum wage. I was one of those.  

“I told you one lady told me, I know she didn’t tell you, you couldn’t bring your son in here and she had her daughter in here under her arm pit right at the register”.

I said, “Yes she did tell me that”!

“If them people walk up in here it’ll be on me, not on you.
I’m not upset with you, it’s not you its not you, but them people would get on me”.
I said, “What people, them people ain’t coming up in this store, if they are coming, we know ahead of time and sometimes we expect people and don’t nobody show up”.

With these Christmas hours, they have been open these last two days before Christmas eve till midnight, they greedy, staying open all late trying to make every penny they can, while I might get four hours straight, any hours I can get, the times change to fill their needs and I had to bring my son to work with me this one night.

One day last week, I had three days one day was seven hours, that was the longest day I ever had there and that was because somebody didn’t come in, called out and they asked me to stay past my shift, and the other two days there was four hours that’s it for that week, 15 hours was all I got, but it was better than I had been getting.

If I see 17 hours on my schedule I get a little excited. It has been like this lately, one week I got 15 and one week I got 20, and it seemed that she was being fair with everybody. I told her if somebody call out and didn’t come in, call me I’ll fill in so I could get more hours, but she calls her two friends that’s been there with her for the last five years, she call them first, I told her to call me, but why did I expect to get what I wanted over them, they always get first choice, and then they walk around there talking about how tired they are.

Thursday, May 2, 2013

The Store- I Ain't Studdin' You


We were talking and laughing one night and I teased a co-worker about a man we saw in the store earlier fine as they come, and I said he was in there looking for her, was that the man she was running from and she said I ain’t studdin' you . When was the last time you heard someone say I ain’t studdin' you, that sounds like something my grandmother’s mother generation says I ain’t studdin' you.

I believe it is a variation of the word studying, meaning paying any attention to what you are saying or doing to arouse interest, a familiar southern normal response by a black person being teased by another.

I said, “Do that mean you ain’t studying me?, right, that mean you ain’t paying me attention right, you ignoring me, right, not exactly, but along those lines, right?” It’s like acknowledging you, but it’s like ...let’s say, a more universal understanding might be, with a smile, saying, “Stop it”, “you crazy”, “you a trip”, “stop picking on me” and “I ain’t thinking about you.”

I like it; maybe I’ll bring it back, though it is from my grandmother’s era. I like it, it’s part of history, and it is an identifier of our group’s use of the English language we knew nothing of before coming to this land, in this country, “yeah…let’s bring it back”.

The Store-Christmas


There is this nice man and woman older black couple that cleans the store, they have been cleaning the store for twelve years, I said, “Do yall get a discount on purchases, like once a year on Christmas or anytime of year or anything?”
 “They were like, “No”.
I said, “That’s a dam shame, nothing at all”.
Then she said, “The only way I can get that is if I ask someone to let me use their card, if they ain’t scared, I guess they let me use it. I said you can use mine the next time you want to buy something, get with me”.

It was Christmas time, I walked her up to the register, I  said, “they should get 20% off their purchase at least once a year, here use my card.” Come to find out the store manager can give them a discount and use their own card to do it. 
“Ain’t that a dam shame, the store manager not once offered to do that for these people, just as black as her, the whole time they have worked cleaning this store”. The assistant manager told me the store says they can do that, and the manager said he didn’t know they could do that because the assistant manger didn’t tell him. “People don’t communicate worth a dam”.

The store manger was staring at me through his blue frames with rhinestones glasses. I said, “I like your glass frames, are those diamonds”?  He had some transparent, blue frames with fake diamond studs around the lenses, like some kind of Elton John, I said, “what…, look at him”.

We were closing and nearly finished and I asked, “Can I leave early it’s my birthday?” He said, “Everybody has one of those, that’s nothing special, everybody has one of those”. I said, “Oh just forget it”.

I swear sometimes they can be so ridiculous sometimes they make you laugh and sometimes they can make you cry with how ridiculous they can be these bosses, mangers or whatever, no tact or compassion about dealing with their own kind.     
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