Me, In Real Life

Another holiday season in the rear-view. Shoutout to my fellow retail worker warriors who had to navigate a normal buying season during a time when nothing was normal, juggling overtime hours and understaffed schedules and also trying to still make quotas. Many Americans seem to think that the pandemic is over and that it should be business as usual. Y’all are dumbasses.

I will not miss the constant questions of how long to cook our food for (it’s all precooked so you can reheat to 165 degrees however you wish, think how you’d reheat leftovers). I will not miss the phone calls to our front of house phone demanding to know if they can still order dinners because “it says sold out online and I was wondering if I could still order from you directly”. Each store was given an allotment of dinners to sell and we can’t sell any more. A ham recall severely curtailed the number of orders we could fulfill.

Shoutout to the person who ordered a $165 platter of sushi and never picked it up on Thanksgiving. We at the store appreciated that. Maybe there was a reason. There’s always a reason but I hope it wasn’t just that they forgot about it. Because if you can just brush that off if it were nothing then…I wish I had that amount of money.

For all the weirdness I will also remember the good. I’ll remember the customer who called asking if we still had our vegan gravy in stock because they’d called all over and no other WF store had them. I said that we had 1 tub left and I could pull it from the fridge for them if they’d come over (also we had more of our vegan gravy on our hot bar). So it was nice to help out someone like that.

Anyway, Happy Merry. But I’m so glad this year is almost over.

This morning I put a couple of slices of leftover pizza on the stove in a skillet in order to heat them up. I usually do it in the toaster oven but I was in a hurry. Had to catch an early screening of Encanto. Anyway, I walked out of the kitchen for a few minutes to allow the pizza to heat up. When I returned to my breakfast, one slice had gone missing from the pan. J’s mom was sitting at the table, munching on a slice of pizza. Not a word to me. And I was too tired to mention anything (what do you say to someone whom you’re suspecting is teetering from normal forgetfulness to dementia?) so I just tossed another slice of pizza in the pan.

Like, I would’ve happily shared the pizza if she’d asked. Sometimes I imagine that she dosn’t even notice I’m here. My workdays keep me out of the house until 10pm so I suppose it’s an out of sight, out of mind thing.

I’m just thinking about how much it felt like a scene from a bad sitcom. Mother-in-law steals piece of pizza from harried daughter-in-law. Hilarity ensues. *cue laugh track*

I need to find the humor in it because the real truth is that her mind is slipping and no one wants to do a damn thing about it. What did she think was the origins of the pizza? That she put it on the stove herself? That the pizza fairy decided to gift her with free hot pizza? 

So yeah…now I’m going to use the toaster oven no matter what. Damn the time constraints. She’s never used the toaster oven for anything so whatever I cook in there will be mine.