That Day I Ran a Department Store
Most of the day was great, until it wasn’t.
Get That Paper
After I finally got my bachelor’s degree in English Lit, I had two options:
Continue my education for two more years to get a California teaching credential, become a high school English teacher (and obviously inspire my students while standing and delivering dead poets, write the great American novel during summer breaks, sell the book, retire and write more books)…OR…
Take a promotion from being an HR Coordinator making $12/hr and become an HR Manager making $36k/year. The same salary I’d hopefully be making two years down the road as a teacher. Hopefully.
It took me 7 long years of working full-time, and commuting 65 miles a day to finish my degree without any debt, and once I did it, I really didn’t think I had another couple of years left in my tank for a teaching credential, so like Jordan I said, “fuck them kids”, and took the promotion.
And that’s how I became the “HR Manager” of a well known department store in a touristy California beach town. I put the job title in quotes because my jobs duties didn’t change much after the promotion. I was basically a glorified coordinator who was now paid a yearly salary with no overtime, instead of an hourly one with overtime. (Btw the minimum to pay someone for no overtime pay is still only $36k/yr, which is a whole other essay.)
The company is still around, but the store is no longer there. At the time it was one of their smaller stores that the company considered training grounds for brand new managers.
The store manager was a young, strapping MBA graduate a few years older than me, from some school back East called Wharton. He was a super bright and ambitious guy, with the height and good looks that matched his charisma.
All the other team managers in the store were newly hired or recently promoted, and usually there for a year or two before moving on to bigger stores.
And then there was me. A stocky, 24 year-old Lego block, who worked his way through No-name State, night school extension. But I was happy just to finally be done with college (the first on my Mom’s side to do it) and it felt good being there at the right hand of Wharton giving him “HR advice” like some type of retail consigliere.
At that age I wasn’t self aware enough to have imposter syndrome.
We were a good group of young managers, and it was important to us that the store employees felt like they mattered, so we tried to do a lot of little things to show we cared.
One small example was each Friday morning during the summer, Wharton or I, would stop by the Krispy Kreme on the way to work, grab a few dozen glazed donuts hot off the conveyor belt, and drive them another 45 minutes North for the store’s morning crew to have before store opening. It was something that we enjoyed doing, and our employees loved having delicious donuts before work.
Have you ever driven up a coastal freeway with a car full of warm donuts, look out your window, and see a pod of dolphins swimming by? It’s fucking bliss. I got pulled over for speeding once, and the CHP kept eye-balling the Krispy Kreme box. I remember wondering if he would be offended, or think it was a bribe if I offered him one, so I didn’t.
Inventory Time
That summer after my promotion was the store’s bi-annual inventory. Whenever inventory time came around the store to be on a skeleton crew for a few days during business hours, both with managers and sales associates, while the rest of the staff worked overnight shifts counting inventory after the store closed.
During this time we also hired extra temp workers to help cover day shifts, and prep for inventory. Many of them were students from Ireland working on temp visas over their summer holiday.
Sometimes their accents made it sound like their words were meshed together making it hard for me to understand. Add an upward inflection to every sentence, and I could never really tell if they were making a statement or asking a question, but I learned that they usually ended their sentences with, “it was grand.”
“Hi Imogen, how was your day off yesterday?”
“Oh g’mornin’ Mr. Adam, yeah, ‘twas was brilliant. Nor and I went to the beachand tried bodysurfingand somethin’ called skimboardin’. Oh it was grand!” In the thickest Irish brogue I’d ever heard since Brad Pitt in “Snatch.”
I was scheduled to work each day that week in my usual HR Manager role, but on Wednesday I was the only manager scheduled for most of the day until the closing manager came in at 4pm.
I barely slept the night before. I kept tossing and turning feeling too anxious, and worried I was gonna mess something up, or something was gonna happen that I wouldn’t know how to handle. It was Wednesday so no need for donuts. That morning’s commute didn’t have any dolphins either.
After less than 60 days as a manager, I was now basically gonna be the store manager of an entire three story, 135,000 sq foot department store. The manager-on-duty pager stayed in my pocket in case anyone needed an approval for something unusual at the register.
My HR role didn’t require me to be on the sales floor helping customers, but I had plenty of experience in almost every department from working on the sales floor before my switch to HR. It had been a couples years since I’d used a register to ring up a customer, but I could step in if I really needed to.
I spent most of the day in my office helping with inventory prep, and hoping the manager pager wouldn’t go off.
Anytime I got anxious about being the only manager on duty I’d remind myself - “just stick to the manual and follow procedures. It’s no big deal. Anybody can do it.”
Thankfully it was a typical slow Wednesday. The pager went off maybe 3 times all day. Lunch was a burrito from Chipotle for the third time in as many days, and as 3pm finally rolled around I started to let my shoulders down and unclench my jaw.
That’s when the pager went off for the fourth time. The call came from the women’s casuals department on the 2nd floor.
I called the extension from my office, and one of the Irish employees, Nora, answered, “Um…Aye, Mr. Adam, we need the janitorialstaff to clean up a mess, butwe can’treach anyone?”
“Okay, did you call Eric in the gift wrap department, and ask him to page them?”
Look at me following standard procedures.
“Aye, he’s been trying to reach ‘em, but they’re not respondin’. He saysthey probably went ona break yeah,” Nora said.
I was getting confused, “Okay, can they clean it when they get back?”
“Um…I don’t think so?…it smells really bad.”
“It sme…what? Never mind, I’ll be right there.”
I wasn’t sure if I heard Nora wrong because of her accent. As I speed walked down the office hallway I remembered that women’s casuals department is next to the public restrooms. We had been having issues with a couple of toilets overflowing sometimes, but that had been fixed.
Nora didn’t say it was a plumbing issue.
Back then the store was also having problems with teenagers taking an armful of clothes into the dressing rooms to try on, urinating on the clothes, and leaving them there for an employee to walk in on a gross, wet, stinking biohazard.
The Loss Prevention manager said it was some gang initiation thing that was happening in other stores in the area. Apparently, the local gangs were also utilizing our touristy beach town to train their new recruits.
The second I got to the department I could smell the problem, and the punch to my nose blurred my vision. That’s when I realized it wasn’t urine.
A moment later, my eyes focused on the source of the smell in a small trail of brown blobs going down the walkway tiles.
Every 4 feet or so a little pile of fresh fecal matter, then another, then another…
I didn’t know what to think. I was not prepared for this.
This Was Not In The Manual
Both my mind and heart were racing. I couldn’t think much, and went in to full reaction mode.
I remember saying, “Nora, go down to fragrance, and get some tester sprays to mask this. Darcy, go upstairs to home goods, and get all the potpourri you can find. Sarah, you stay over there, but make sure nobody walks this way. We don’t need anyone stepping on it or…slipping. I’ll be right back, I’m going to gift wrap to find out where the janitor is.”
One of the employees started to gag a little, and went towards the trash can under the register.
I tried to appear calm, but inside I was fuming that someone could have the fucking audacity to smear crap on the floor of a department store. Who the fuck does that??
I wanted to know not only who did it, but why the hell our janitorial contractor wasn’t around to clean it up. I was the only one in charge, and I needed some answers.
When I got to Gift Wrap I asked the team lead, Eric, and he explained that the store’s janitor goes to lunch from 3-4pm. Awesome.
And of course, since they’re out of the building on lunch, that also meant the janitorial closet with the cleaning supplies was locked. Super.
At that moment I was the highest ranking person in a well respected, multi-million dollar department store, without access to cleaning supplies, and no one around whose job description included cleaning shit off the floor.
This was the janitorial company’s job. This wasn’t my job. I worked in Human Resources dammit.
That’s Not My Job
Whenever something needs to be done, I don’t like hearing someone say, “that’s not my job.” I usually think - just help get it done. People will spend more time griping about it than to just get it done.
When I first got promoted to a manager I told myself I would never ask an employee to do something that I wasn’t willing and able to do myself. I originally started with the company as a sales associate, and I never liked managers who only snapped their fingers at employees. Fuck those guys, and if you’re a manager who does that, stop it. The best managers were always the ones right there next to you doing the work too.
Cleaning up messes is literally janitorial’s job. It wasn’t my job. And it certainly wasn’t any of the sales associates’ jobs.
But at that moment getting that nasty shit cleaned up was the most important thing for me to handle. It was my only job.
How could I ask anyone else to do it, if I wasn’t willing to do it myself?
So I went back to my office, found some rubber gloves under a sink, grabbed a small stack of printer paper, and my little trash can with the day’s leftover Chipotle that I was no longer saving for later.
I folded some of the papers into a little hand shovel, and went to work.
One Scoop at a Time
As I cleaned up the mess down the aisle one scoop at a time, being careful to minimize any smearing, one of the sales associates told me they found out who did it.
“Great, where are they?” I asked looking around, expecting to see some punk teenagers caught by our Loss Prevention team.
“She’s in the restroom. She’s a pregnant lady who was trying to make it in time from the escalator, but she couldn’t hold it. She’s crying in one of the stalls.”
My anger quickly evaporated.
“Is she okay? Does she need a doctor?” I asked.
“She’s okay. But she’s crying and embarrassed. She’s wearing overall shorts and sandals, but now they’re all a total mess, so she can’t leave the bathroom.”
“Please find out her sizes, and get something for her to wear. Just keep the tags, so we can comp them out later.”
It Happens to All of Us
That was when I learned the power of empathy. Even though I was fuming mad, picturing a sad and embarrassed pregnant woman crying in a public bathroom stall reminded me that we are all humans trying our best to make it to a toilet in time. In a split second I was able to zoom out, and focus on what was more important.
It no longer mattered as much that I had a paper hand-shovel full of human feces in my garbage can to still reckon with. It didn’t matter much that the perfume and potpourri didn’t mask the hot stench in the air, but rather joined forces, and formed a more powerful attack on the nostrils.
The most important issue to me was the woman in our store’s public bathroom stall, feeling mortified at the mess her changing body made, a body that she no longer had full control over. At that moment, my job as a human was to now help a fellow human clean up the mess.
Everyone has to deal with some shit in their lives. It happens. But even when dealing with your own shit, when you pause to put yourself in someone else’s shit stained sandals, it becomes easier to let go of your small shit.
I haven’t always been the most empathetic person. And I’m ashamed to say even after this event I didn’t always remember to lead with empathy over the course of my career. Unfortunately, it gets easy not to, especially being an GenX male.
While growing up, empathy was something that boys in my generation were taught not only to ignore within themselves, but to ridicule any other boy who showed it.
In the 1970’s and 80’s, Boomer parents taught young boys pearls of wisdom like “suck it up” and “don’t be a pussy”. Any consideration for another person was often considered girly or “gay”. Sexism and homophobia were the lane-bumpers for Boomer bowling balls of ignorance. After so many direct strikes, eventually the bowling pins of empathy stop standing back up.
Over the years I’ve had to consciously work on my empathy levels both personally and professionally. Usually at times when I’ve ignored my privileges.
The billionaire CEO of Tesla recently said on a popular podcast that empathy was western civilization’s weakness. That’s all I need to know to keep me trying to be on the right side of it.
I was reminded of my story when I heard about the Delta airline passenger who caused a plane to divert and emergency land after he had an accident trying to make it to the toilet.
When I heard about it my heart not only went out to the passengers and their gag reflexes, but as a middle-aged man who now often has his own IBS flare ups, my first thought went out to that poo soaked stranger.
There have been many times when I barely made it to the toilet here in my own home. Having a flare up on a plane at 35,000 feet is one of my worst nightmares, and a big reason why I won’t have coffee before a flight.
And if I ever find myself having an accident in a department store, or on an airplane, or anywhere else, I’ll just say wherever it is, I hope there’s some empathetic people around who will help me find cleaning supplies rather than filming it on their phones.
-a