Sisyphus at Retail

I gaze through a glass window to what was once a bookstore a few months ago. I remember the first time I walked through the entrance doors. I remember the place brimming with the colors of the countless books as they laid in their brown and black shelves. Now, there is only darkness like a black hole. Yet I do not see a difference, as this store took  a year and a half of my life away.

I look closer into the said abyss to spot a chief cause of my suffering. You may know it as simply a pair of restrooms. These were meant for ‘‘customer use only’’ ,mandated by law to be in the store since it also housed a small cafe. Yet everyday, people will walk in, ask for the restroom keys, use the restroom, return the keys (if they were generous enough not to steal them again), and then leave. Some days we will have lines of customers waiting outside the restroom doors.

Because of constant usage by ‘‘customers’’, I learned to dread having to enter our restrooms when needed, in fear on what I may find. Sometimes I would find that someone had changed his clothes in there and left the boxers in the trash can. Some days I could find a faucet clogged with vomit since the toilet was three feet too far. Some days I would enter to see a man washing his hair over the other faucet and simply say, ‘‘What?”. There was even a day when my coworkers and I discovered a man pleasing himself with a couple of magazines. Both the man and the magazines were promptly exiled from the store.

Yet the worst instance occurred outside the restrooms. I was eating in the back room with a coworker one day when I heard her shriek. She pointed at the room entrance to what looked like three ‘‘glomps’’ of mud. However, as I got closer, it was obvious that this wasn’t mud. I opened the back room door just to find where the true damage was. What was once the entrance to the restrooms was now a biohazard wasteland. It was on the floor and walls. It was on the doors and water fountains. It was everywhere, and I had to clean it. 

Yet the most difficult aspect about the task, besides feeling like what I was cleaning up, was the barrage of customers that followed. A woman asked if she could use the ladies room as she stared at the sullied walls. A man asked me how long I was going to take before the restrooms opened for service. One person even managed to walk past me, nearly touching the desecrated restroom door. I would remember more if my memory was not like vision back then: hazy from the tears caused by anger and cleaning chemical fumes.

‘‘It’s because they all have the potential to buy something,’’ was my manager’s response when I asked him about the restroom incident and how anyone could commit such an atrocious act, ‘‘Any enforcement will scare them and their precious 25 cents away”. The customer is always right, remember?’’ The customer is right to read novels and magazines for hours with purchasing any of them. The customer is right to use the science, sports and crafts aisles as makeshift lavatories. The customer is right to bring their outside food from the nearby Popeye’s and McDonalds and eat the food in our cafe, leaving their messes behind. The customers are right to call me an ass**** or threaten to sue me when I ask them not to sit on the floor. The customer is right to steal bibles and leave the plastic wrappings for us to find. The customer is right to open the emergency exit door despite the multiple ‘’Do Not Exit’’ signs in different languages. The customer is right to leave sexuality books in the children’s section. The customer is always right indeed.

It was with this realization that the infamous quote was loaded with what I had to clean before, that I knew my time there was coming to an end. I was forced to watch each of our rule and policy enforcements meet with futility and rebuttal. And as I watched my coworkers leave the store like rats abandoning a ship, I soon followed. Now I stand outside the closed building, now filled with darkness, now just a different shade.

Notes:

This is the first essay and probably my longest one of the bunch. While some writer struggle to have enough material to write about, I had too much. The challenge was selecting what events of the story I would use to describe the message of the essay. After writing this essay, I started to learn about the importance of brevity and how powerful it can be.