I’ve had a lot of working class jobs over the course of my life: Target cashier, small band roadie, waitress, bartender, dishwasher/busser, bookseller, and a smattering of clerical jobs, like a lot of women.  I think one of my most interesting jobs, and one of the hardest, was working the swing shift at a Stop ‘N Go in 1991.  It was my first job in Austin after leaving Houston, a city I politely referred to as Hell given how much horror and dysfunction I went through with my family while I lived there, and because I’d never wanted to go there in the first place.  When I met my ex-husband at BookStop across from Sharpstown Mall and we shortly thereafter lost our jobs, I jumped at the chance to move to a different city where he had friends who would help us out.

The convenience store was walking distance from our incredibly disgusting shotgun duplex, rented out by an ancient couple who only did as much work on their properties as they needed to prevent having them condemned.  The floor was warped, there was no heat or air conditioning, the curtains gently waved in the drafty windows, and the bathroom was covered in slug trails every morning.  Austin was still a sleepy college town and very affordable, unlike today, and I was employed at the Stop ‘N Go within a week for $4.25 an hour.  I knew my tenure there would be rocky when I was assigned the swing shift despite my telling the manager that I did not want to work the graveyard shift.  I guess she thought the swing shift was better?

It wasn’t.  I’ve suffered from lifelong insomnia, and working three day shifts and two night shifts per week did not help this issue, particularly when bill collectors from Houston were calling me in the daytime to bother me about bills I couldn’t pay.  Oh, for the days when the only money I owed to anyone was $125 to Southwestern Bell.

I had to go to two days of training before being allowed to start work, which I got paid for, and then it was off to the races.  During the day shift, I spent most of my time behind the counter ringing up people’s beer and cigarettes.  There was a rush around 5pm when people got off work, and then a steady trickle of folks through the rest of the evening.  Neighborhood teens came in to play the video game machines in the corner: only 2 at a time were allowed in the store, although how I was supposed to enforce this, I have no idea.

The neighborhood I worked in wasn’t the best.  The store faced a 5-way intersection controlled only by stop signs, and saw frequent accidents due to the bizarre design of the intersection, which is now controlled by lights.  A 3-story apartment building at the end of the block was well-known to be a crackhouse, and one of our customers across the street, a very sad woman, was clearly a heroin addict.  The neighborhood was largely filled with working class people and students going to the University of Texas a couple of miles down Duval, plus a hefty helping of artists who made the area a colorful place with their interesting personalities.

It was during the night shift that the neighborhood’s more unsavory character became apparent.  I came in at 11pm, which meant I had to deal with everyone coming in to buy alcohol before the midnight cutoff (or 1am on Saturdays).  Many of these people were already drunk, and not all of them wanted to pay: we were frequently hit by “beer runs”, the name we gave for the gangs of kids who would come in and grab as many 12 packs as they could before running out the door.  One night, one of the regulars came in and was so drunk that he fell into a display of 40 ounce malt liquor bottles, knocking it over and breaking several bottles.  He began to yell at me for the display being in the middle of the floor, and I told him it wasn’t giving anyone else any trouble.  He mumbled that his girlfriend had had a baby that day, and my heart sank in my chest for both mother and child.  I silently prayed he wasn’t violent and that he would either clean up or leave them, because no one deserves to live with someone like that.  I speak from long, hard experience.

During these days, Austin cops were still friendly and polite to the citizenry, something that changed in the late 90s as the tech boom hit our city and rich assholes from other states began insisting they do something about all of these awful artists and musicians.  The policeman who patrolled the neighborhood surrounding the Stop ‘N Go always came in around 4am to get a cup of water and see how I was doing, and I was grateful for his presence one early morning when a very fucked up customer kept coming in repeatedly.  I worked alone on the night shift and was not allowed to lock the door, which is something convenience stores no longer do.  Security was nil, so that cop was all I had.

Two months after starting there, I got a new manager, a man who had been hired at the exact same time as I had been, but he’d gone through the manager training program.  As a result, he thought he was hot shit and got off on putting me down and giving me conflicting instructions.  The night shift was when most of the stores tasks were tended to, such as mopping, draining the beer coolers, and restocking the shelves.  I also had to wash the outside sidewalk, the timing of which I could never get right for this man, who refused to tell me precisely when he wanted me to wash it.  In fact, I couldn’t do anything right for him, and he had me transferred to another store more than three miles away a couple of weeks after he started.  I didn’t know it, but that was what the company did with employees they couldn’t fire but that managers didn’t like for whatever reason, and it was usually an impending death knell for their continued employment.

This store was near the UT campus and so had a much different clientele and was busy during different hours, and I much preferred it to the crackhouse neighborhood.  The students were generally friendly, and because professors and more affluent people lived and worked in the area, it was a more pleasant work environment.  The only drawback was that I’d been assigned the graveyard shift, which meant working 11pm-7am five days a week.  At least it was easier to sleep.  The manager, however, was a stickler for wearing both the idiotic looking uniform (as a woman, they wanted me to wear an apron and a ridiculous frilly tie) as well as a back brace, which I did not need nor want: it hurt to wear.

A nice thing about this location was that there was almost no business after midnight, when we stopped selling alcohol, which meant a quiet work environment for me to get my night tasks done in.  People would occasionally come in for a pack of cigarettes and a soda, but that was about it.

My steadiest nighttime customer was a homeless crazy woman named Martha.  She was a large woman with an angry face and a buzzed haircut, and the rumor was that she had once been a professor at the University who had lost her mind.  She stayed in the campus area because she felt at home there.  Most people were afraid of her, so when she came in one night and lingered, it made me nervous.  Then I started to watch her, and saw that she was comforting herself by straightening the candy bars.  She stood there calmly for at least an hour, making sure there were no Snickers with the Milky Ways or Whatchamacallits with the Heath Bars, and when she was done I gave her a hot dog.  We spoke briefly, and afterwards I didn’t fear her anymore.  She was harmless unless someone did something to upset her, which no one ever did.  Back then there were a number of recognizable homeless people in the campus area, including two women we called the Turban Ladies (one in cloth, one in plastic), and they were regarded with kindness and curiosity by most who met them.  I know not what became of any of them: the UT area is no longer kind to the homeless.

Three months after I began working at Stop ‘N Go, I was placed on suspension because my overnight sales numbers didn’t match what they thought they should be and I would have to wait for someone to look into it.  I talked to a fellow employee and she told me they thought I was stealing the money people were using to pay for their purchases.  I absolutely had NOT been doing this, and as I’m the sort of person to take the bull by the horns, I went up the chain of command and directly called the area supervisor about my situation.  I said directly, “I know what you think, and I’m not stealing. The store is just very slow at night.”  He was actually very kind and understanding and said that when applying for new jobs, to refer to him directly.  I thanked him, and within a week I had a new job around the corner at Eckerd Drugs with the help of a friend who worked there, one of three jobs I had at the intersection of 29th and Guadalupe (the other was Pizza Classics, where I delivered pizza to hungry students for a year).

I met a lot of interesting people working at the convenience store and got to witness a number of spectacles of humanity.  Someone pumped gas one day and then drove away without paying, with the pump handle still in their car, ripping it off and necessitating hitting the main gas cutoff switch.  I learned that I am no good at telling when men are hitting on me, because there were many “friendly” males at that store whom I now realize 30 years later were giving me the googly eyes.  Since I’ve always (wrongly) thought of myself as unattractive, it never occurred to me to interpret their niceness as romantic interest.  I liked some of the artists who would come in to the store in the midst of whatever project they were working on, hands still covered in gloves, their shirts spattered in paint and plaster.  Once, I even got $20 from a customer who accidentally left his wallet at the store, which I noticed and saved in case he came back, which he did an hour later.  I also got to witness the smile of someone getting carded for beer when they thought they didn’t look that young anymore.

Now that I’m 48 and it’s other young people’s turn to do their time at the convenience store, I make sure I’m always friendly, because many customers aren’t.  These are hard times, and people are angry about a lot of different things, so I try to do my part to balance that.  I got my opportunity at the Wag ‘N Bag last year when the young hipster behind the counter complimented my Rush shirt.  It gave me a big smile, since Rush fans are a little obscure, and we shared concert memories while he rang up my smokes.  Alas, that young man will not have the privilege of seeing them live as I’ve been lucky enough to do 13 times, but the interaction left me with a little more faith in humanity, and not minding my age so much.