Lucy

I had a rather strange experience at work last week. I instantly felt compelled to blog about it, although I’m not sure how it relates to our class.

I work as a cashier at the Co-Op Downtown. It’s a stunningly easy job; I get paid to be friendly and not forget basic addition and subtraction between shifts. Safe to say, I have plenty of time to think while I’m working, and I frequently think about this class, mainly because I have it 10 minutes before my shift starts. As a result, I constantly analyze my interactions with customers, whether they were engaged in the present or not, or if I was as engaged with them as I could have been. Usually conversations go like this:

Joe: “Hey there! How’s it going today?”

Customer: “Oh it’s alright, you?”

Joe: “I’m doing well, thanks for asking!” (forced enthusiasm!)

Customer: ….

Joe: “Will you be paying with credit or debit?”

Customer: “Uh, credit, I guess.”

Joe: “Okay. You’re good to go, have a nice meal!”

Customer: “Yeah, you too.”

The end. 

I throw in the have a nice meal bit because only about 1 in 10 people catch that I said that instead of have a nice day. And even though I try not to judge people, it does seem like there are an awful lot of people who come through my line that just don’t see the grocery store environment as one worthy of their  presence, and as a result, interactions with such people are incredibly shallow, although usually at least polite. And of course, there’s been plenty of times where I wish I would have been paying more attention, as what I say to customers feels pretty scripted come closing time. Overall, customer interactions are this awkward moment where neither of us wants to be rude and acknowledge the fact that between us there’s approximately 0.4642% of a shit given about the 25-45 seconds we share together. It’s weird.

Last week however, I had a radically different interaction with a customer. She was a polite, mousy woman buying a salad.  When she first came through my line there were a couple other shoppers behind her in line, so I was focused on getting her food checked out and moving on. That’s when she said something quite odd:

Lady: “You’re so pale. It must have been so hard growing up and not being able to go outside and play any sports.”

Now, I am pale, so I wasn’t offended, just caught off guard.

Joe: “Um, well I suppose my parents would have saved a lot of money on sunscreen, but I got to do all the stuff I wanted growing up.”

Lady (without hesitating): “You must feel like one of those little white lab rats they do experiments on.”

That one stumped me. I’m not sure what I said, but I’m fairly sure I just tried to laugh it off and change the subject. “Hehehaha yeah , so are you paying with credit or debit?”

The lady, whom I’ll call Lucy, said more that I couldn’t hear, then thanked me sincerely before going to sit down. I was immensely entertained by the exchange and as soon as my line cleared I animatedly told the story to a co-worker. She thought it was funny and went back to her station. I turned to help the next customer. 

To my surprise, it was Lucy. She hadn’t heard me talking about her, and was in fact already talking to me when I noticed her.

Lucy: “…we’re all lab experiments, you know. It’s the billionaires, we’re their lab rats.”

It had been all of five minutes since she’d bought her salad. All she was getting now was a plate with exactly four pieces of broccoli on it.

Joe: “Back for more? How was your salad?”

She didn’t reply, just kept talking about billionaires and lab experiments. Sadly, she was mostly mumbling, so I couldn’t make out any more details.  Lucy had an envelope full of change serving as a wallet. The first time she had paid with cash, and I’m guessing she got out the change because she figured the four pieces of broccoli would be cheap. They were, but in her attempt to get the exact change she dropped her envelope on the floor, spilling change everywhere. I helped her pick it all up, and throughout the process she was very polite and thankful. She went back to her table with her broccoli.

This is when I began to ask questions. I quickly found out from other employees that Lucy had been in the store since it opened, and that at various points she had been crying openly, in addition to having a very loud and angry phone conversation that our dishwasher overheard, during which she said “you can’t do this to me, I’ll make you pay for this!” Not good signs for her mental health, especially since the store opens at 8 p.m.  and was at that time only an hour away from closing at 8 p.m. 

Curious, I walked through the dining area to see what see was up to. On her table were four or five plates, all with various un-eaten meals on them, including her recent broccoli purchase. Before I had a chance to discuss that discovery with a co-worker, she came and found me. Lucy was very worried, and told me she had accidently dropped her bottle of green tea. Again I cleaned it, and again she was very polite and very thankful. 

The store policy is that customers can stay in the store after it has technically closed, but not for more than fifteen minutes or so. So come 8:15 p.m., I approached Lucy to inform her that the store had closed. I was concerned she had nowhere to go and that she wouldn’t be willing to leave the store.  To my surprise, she was very apologetic for staying late, and quickly went about gathering her things. I kept wiping tables, feeling a little disappointed that Lucy hadn’t done something a little more interesting. That’s when Lucy talked to me again.

Lucy: “Did you hear that it’s true?”

Joe: “What’s true?”

Lucy: “Nazi scientists were hired by the CIA after World War II and have been conducting experiments on us ever since. There’s nothing we can do to stop them because all of the billionaires in the world are in on it, and there’s no way to even find out who they are. Isn’t that tragic?”

I’m no stranger to conspiracy theories, so my reaction wasn’t so much shock that what she said was ridiculous, but shock at how earnestly and painfully she said it to me.  

Lucy: “Will they be punished?”

Now, I don’t believe in some kind of cosmic or ethereal police force, and I definitely don’t like to lie, so I just kept asking for more details as I wiped the tables. Her questions all orbited around the idea of justice for those who get away with their crimes in this life.

Lucy: “Will they keep all their powers in the next life? Will I still be so stupid and weak in the next life? Will they still be able to take advantage of me in the next life?”

For Lucy, there was no question of an existence past this one, so I knew my answers had to be based on such a system if I wanted to help her. I knew that’s why she was asking me; Lucy desperately wanted closure on the subject.  I can’t imagine what had gotten her so fixated on it; several employees later told me various accounts on how she was possibly robbed earlier that day or that week. Still, she kept asking me, and asking me in a way that demanded real answers. Lucy was not trying to engage in an existential discussion. Lucy was asking me for the truth, and I didn’t have it.

At first I tried to be vague, saying things like “humans are too small to judge the workings of the universe” and promising that I would do my best in my afterlife to stop them if they (billionaires I came to realize was a reference to the very real fact that sociopaths have been massively successful within the capitalist system, and that as a result much of the major decisions facing the world are being made by sociopaths) could indeed retain their “powers” into the next life.  None of these cop outs worked though, and Lucy was still very concerned. 

The answer I finally found for Lucy didn’t come until after she had left the restaurant. I wanted to tell her that those individuals are sociopaths, and as a result they cannot feel and experience the depths of human emotion. I wanted to tell her that those people are being punished at this very moment simply because they cannot engage in their lives as a human, only as a high functioning robot. I wanted to tell her that all of her sadness and struggle adds up to a far richer and more valuable life than those of a hundred sociopaths at once, simply because she can experience her experiences on levels inconceivable to a sociopath, who could only deal in terms of advantages gained or lost. 

But I couldn’t. Lucy had left, and she had left with a lot of very big questions for someone with such clear paranoid schizophrenia to deal with alone. I didn’t have an answer because I’d never thought of the question, and I realize now that that is what wisdom is: not one’s ability to find answers for the questions they are asked, but one’s ability to find questions for what they have no answers for.

I don’t know if my answer was what she needed to hear, or if the impossible questions of a person like Lucy are worth trying to answer. However, I do know that I have never been so fully engaged by a customer since working at the Co-Op, or by any stranger ever. And even though it was awkward and strange, I can’t help but wish for more customers like Lucy; she may have been quite a ways removed from “reality” as we know it, but the experience of being thrust into a moment she created for me was far more real and exciting than every single experience I’ve had with every single other customer at the Co-Op so far, and I have full certainty claiming that it was because her “disconnect” with “reality” that made that night so memorable for me.  She may not have been operating in the present in a way I’d ever seen before, but Lucy paid more attention to it than everyone else in the store. As a result, I did too.

Lucy’s reality isn’t like anyone else’s. By pulling me into it, she showed me reality as something new: adaptable, flexible, and fascinating.