Hey, it’s ten percent

The training supervisor handed me some papers stapled together.

Call in if you’re sick, and, Don’t call Santa by his real name, even if you know what it is.

(And so forth.)

She led me to a cash register.

A cashier mumbled instructions and glanced around the room.

He asked me to stand by a second cashier and figure it out.

(Oh. That’s not what he said?)

“I can try it now,” I told the cashier, after 15 minutes.

Some women handed me camouflage sweatshirts.

My supervisor tossed the hangers in a box as I asked them for their numbers.

Something about “We get in trouble” otherwise.

Is that how it works?

(I always make something up, a cashier told me later.)

Me, too.

A man in a black polo and khakis approached.

“I wanna get the military discount,” he said.

“You got your ID on you?” my supervisor asked.

He explained that he didn’t, that it was probably in a box in Virginia.

I scanned his items.

“I don’t have my ID, but I can show you where I got shot,” he continued.

I tried to remember which buttons to push.

Number?

He told me.

“They sent me to Germany. I sat around there for a while but my leg tightened up, so there you go. Now I’m working at KFC.”

Um. Do you have a rewards card?

“I’d go back in a heartbeat if I could,” he told us.

He pulled up his pant leg to reveal pink welts behind his knee.

Credit. Right?

“Thank you for your service,” my supervisor said.

He signed, shrugged and walked away.

(You’ve saved ten percent.)

On what? The mind bends.