26
And so came Nineteen Eighty-Six.
The hardware store next to my grocery store had experienced a
downturn in its own business when our shelves had gone bare and
decided to find a new home. They settled on a space next to the
second warehouse-sized, non-union grocery store two and a half miles
away. Perhaps they had also heard of the new warehouse-sized
hardware store that would be opening up across the street corner as
well... But for the grocery store itself, it was taken over by the
courts, the details of what had happened to the original ownership
came out, and court appointed management took their place. Since my
years working at my next door neighbor's grocery store chain during
my childhood, this was probably the best management I'd worked under
in my adult life. All business focused and politics
free.
With new funds now available, truck loads of groceries arrived to
fill the long emptied shelves and new employees hired to replace
those who had left during the downturn. Further, the store now
offered various insurance plans to entice employees to stay and for
the first time in my life, I had my very own health and disability
insurance. A new fourth guy was added to our ranks in the dairy &
frozen foods section and his mother took a job in the bakery. Store
uniforms were handed out, they had two types: The white polo shirt
with the store name embroidered onto them and the green classic
tee-shirt with the store name silk screened onto them. I took the
tee shirt to stay with my jeans and tees look. These shirts
had originally been available under the Svensons, but only if you
paid for them. Now, it was part of a new store pride that the shirts
were distributed for free yet, in return, wearing
them was now mandatory.
I started classes at the accredited College, the big brother to the
Business College I had started out at. My credits from two years at
the Business College were transferred and in just over two years I'd
have the bachelors degree in Computer Science and be able to put my
grocery store years behind me, permanently. The College had
rented out a disused catholic girls high school building which
provided it twice the space of the Business College and we used about
three quarters of that. The remaining quarter was still used by the
nuns and we'd see one or two walk down the halls from time to time as
we bustled between classes.
Unlike the previous place, where night classes were two classes per
night Mondays that met again on Wednesdays, and two more classes for
Tuesdays that met again on Thursdays, this place had one course per
night for three and a half hours with a twenty minute break half way
through. At the Business College I had taken three courses each
quarter and tested out of a fourth, by the time I'd reached this
accredited College, I had already tested out of the easier courses
and chose to take four classes per week for the first time since I
started in the Fall of Nineteen Eighty-Three. One semester of that,
along with my renewed full-time grocery store job and one day a week
computer room monitoring & tutoring job, it was too much,
and I was back to three classes per semester for the rest of my time
there.
At the grocery store, where there had originally been four part-time
employees and two full-timers for our section, having it as just four
full-timers posed a problem. Essentially we part-timers had been
tasked with breaking down the truck loads then focused on getting the
frozen food into the cold cases before it melted, then finish our
mornings by filling the dairy cases with the new stock. The
full-timers over lapped during the daytime and evening hours to
monitor the cases throughout the core day with one or two of us
part-timers filling in on their days off. Now that simply wasn't an
option and two of us would run the pallets of new dairy stock into
the refrigerator rooms, then fill the frozen food cases till they
were done. Any time remaining we would get a start on the dairy, but
that stock was to be mainly filled by the daytime and evening people
as time permitted between other tasks. It turned out the other
daytime tasks were pretty light so it wasn't a problem and we came to
realize just how easy it had been for the original two
full-timers of our department under the Svensons.
Our guy in charge, one of the original three remaining hires from day
one at the store, had no issue with my night classes and Saturday
job, so we never had a scheduling conflict. Thus my work hours
dovetailed nicely into the hours of classes and all seemed right with
the world, work-wise...
By the Spring of Nineteen Eighty-Six, the bankruptcy management era
of the store would be over and new owners would buy the store and
take over management.
Not for the better.
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