Thursday, July 9, 2015

Th-th-th-that's All Folks!

I wonder just how many of you read the title of this week’s offering and assumed it meant I was retiring from my blogging career.  And I wonder, how many greeted the news with a sigh of regret and how many spontaneously burst into hurrahs.  Well, whatever your reaction, you were duped because I am not giving up this dubious (non-paid) employment.

Those of you who know me well, on the other hand, would most likely have quickly made an association with my love of Warner Bros. animation.  And for those that did make the connection, most would anxiously be awaiting a missive on the history of that art form.  You would also be wrong.

But those one or two of you who are really familiar with my personal history, on the other hand, would brace yourselves for another overly worded anecdotal event from the Adventures of Dale that clearly demonstrates how closely life follows (cartoon) art.

I worked my way through college (the second time) employed by a local department store chain (no longer in existence) as what today would be known as a loss prevention specialist.  Back in my day, we were called security agents.  Our main responsibility was walking the sales floor, dressed in street clothes, trying to ferret out shoplifters.  It was, to paraphrase fighter pilots, hours of boredom punctuated by the need to actually arrest someone, the terror level dependent of course on the size of the thief.  While it was not particularly stimulating work, it paid way more than sales staff remunerations, most likely due to the potential for physical violence.

The chain was made up of about seven stores and over my five-year tenure I worked in six of them (never made it out to Palm Springs).  For one year, I worked exclusively at the store at Fifth Ave. and Broadway in downtown San Diego, which was standard because it gave the agent a chance to learn who the regular thieves were.  The downtown store was more exciting, led to more fights, and is the source for juicier war stories, but those are for another time.

Most of my shifts were worked at the flagship store which was located in the East San Diego shopping center known as College Grove.  There was a pretty good reason for that.  The store was open until nine o’clock at night which allowed me to attend classes at SDSU (go, Aztecs!) in the morning and work a full eight hour shift afterward.  Also, the boss worked at this store and he was kind of a little guy, finding some comfort in having a partner that was six-feet tall and weighing in at a little over two hundred pounds.  Yeah ladies, I was a stud!  And it was kind of a crummy neighborhood… but come to think of it all of our stores were in kind of crummy neighborhoods which is probably a contributing factor in the company’s eventual economic demise, albeit after I had completed my education and moved on to greener pecuniary pastures.

If you have ever worked at an entry level retail job, you know how mind numbing it can be.  Now imagine that you are there but have no actual tasks to perform.  That’s right, being a store detective is not action packed, especially when your stores are void of customers (or thieves, as we liked to call them).

One of the features of the College Grove store was its tri-level design.  This necessitated the presence of escalators.  Do you remember the childhood anxiety you felt the first time you ever boarded an escalator.  Moving stairs!  It’s not natural.  But with the help of your mother’s steady hand you quickly mastered the mount and dismount.  Now imagine how quickly a fully developed adult becomes totally inured to the process when he rides the contraption about, oh, a hundred times a day.  It becomes second nature.  You're too busy looking for shoplifters (head on a swivel, yawn) to look at the steps. You just walk on.

Rule number one: No matter your endeavor, complacency is the pathway to death… or dismemberment.

Through the fog of history, I recall it was a pleasant summer day.  In my memory, they are always pleasant summer days, probably because I lived in San Diego.  As usual, a catatonic lethargy had befallen the store.  I was shuffling around the store trying to keep from falling asleep on my feet.  You will recall, I went to school in the morning, worked the afternoon and evening, then went home to study.  I did not sleep a lot during my twenties.  I did not sleep a lot during my thirties either, but for much different reasons.

I decided to take in the action on the third level.  That’s where the beauty (word applied loosely) salon was located, and sometimes a whiff of the dying and setting chemicals (ladies, why do let them do that to you?) would jolt the old cerebrum into a semi-waking state.

As the step on which I was riding neared the top, I felt a bit of a tug on the front of my shoe.  It seemed that the rubber toe cap of my Converse All-stars (Chuck Taylors, of course) sneaker was resting against the riser of the next step.  As the stair began to collapse into its transitory configuration, the flat surface (next time you ride an escalator take a look at the face of the riser, you will notice now-a-days the surface is ridged, wonder who came up with that idea) caught hold of my shoe and was not going to give up the tug of war.  My shoe was being dragged into the crack between the two stairs.  Now I have rather large feet (that’s right ladies, the myth is false) and trussed in by so many lace criss-crosses, I did not have time to extricate my foot from the trapped sneaker.

So, unable to avert what seemed to be a catastrophic outcome, my mind went into overdrive.  I couldn’t afford to lose any toes.  I was an accounting major and sometimes you have to be able to count beyond ten!  Or fifteen, whatever.  I immediately fell back on my most successful tactic, brute force.  I curled my toes as tightly as I could and pulled upward stretching the rubber toe as far as it would go.  Suddenly there was a loud pop and the pressure on my shoe was released.  I stepped off the escalator, afraid to look down.  Eventually I summoned up the courage.  The damned machine had cut the rubber toe completely off where it had joined the canvas fabric.  But there was nothing protruding out of the end of my shoe.  I felt no pain.  Was I in shock?  Where was the blood?

Slowly, I released the tension in my calf muscles.  And, starting with the big toe, I let each in turn uncurl itself into the open air, just like in a cartoon.  At final count, I had five; and as best I could remember under this adrenaline surge, that’s what I had started the day with.

I drifted over to the nearest sales desk to have something to lean on.  After a while, the sales ladies got bored by my not answering their queries about my day and wandered off to huff salon fumes.  I used the phone to call my wife (yeah, I was married then) and ask her if I could buy a new pair of shoes; priorities, you know.

Sometimes I will startle myself awake at night with a reliving of the incident.  And then I wonder; who has the worst nightmares?  Me, or the escalator service tech who found the disembodied toe cap in the escalator well? 



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