The Day I Was Mistaken for the Manager
I resolved two complaints and approved a refund before escaping.
All I wanted was a toaster. What I got instead was a career in retail management that lasted fifty-five minutes and ended in a getaway.
It was a Sunday afternoon at HomeSquare, one of those enormous home goods stores lit like an interrogation and organized like a dream you cannot wake from. I was wearing a navy polo and khakis, because I am a man of no imagination, and, fatally, a lanyard. The lanyard was from a work conference two weeks earlier. I had simply never taken it out of my jacket pocket, and that morning, needing somewhere to clip my keys, I had hung it around my neck like a fool building his own trap.
Navy polo. Khakis. Lanyard. In a home goods store, that is not an outfit. That is a rank.
I was comparing two nearly identical toasters in aisle nine when a woman rounded the corner holding an electric kettle the way you hold evidence. She scanned me from shoes to lanyard, and I watched the decision happen in her eyes before she said a word.
"Are you the manager? You look in charge."
Here is what you need to understand about me. I am a man who rehearses saying no in the shower and still ends up saying yes by lunchtime. I once ate an entire incorrect restaurant order, mushrooms and all, rather than trouble a waiter who had seemed busy. My entire personality is a formal apology with legs.
So when this woman asked if I was the manager, my mouth opened to say "No, sorry, I don't work here," and what came out, in a calm baritone I had never heard myself produce, was... "How can I help?"
I want to be clear that I do not fully understand it either. All I can tell you is that in that moment, it was easier to become a fictional retail manager than to disappoint a stranger holding a kettle.
She told me everything. The kettle had stopped working after nine days. The receipt had gone through the wash. The person she spoke to on the phone had been, and I quote, "dismissive in a way I found frankly European."
I listened. I nodded slowly at the correct intervals. I turned the kettle over once in my hands with the gravity of a coroner, and I said, "This is not the standard we want for you."
We. I said we.
I had worked there for ninety seconds and I was already using the first person plural.
I walked her to the exchanges counter, told her to mention the nine days, and wished her a better week. She thanked me three times and told me I was "so much better than the last one." I accepted this graciously, on behalf of a store I did not work for, regarding a colleague who did not exist.
A reasonable man leaves at this point. I went back to the toasters, and that is where the couple found me.
They were mid-argument about a stick vacuum, one of those low, hissed marital arguments conducted entirely through the sides of mouths, and they wanted a ruling. Did the warranty cover the battery or not? The box was ambiguous. The shelf tag disagreed with the box. A young employee named Ryan, maybe nineteen, all elbows, had been summoned and clearly wished for death.
Three faces turned to me and my lanyard.
"The battery," I announced, with the confidence of a man inventing store policy in real time, "is covered for the first year. We honor the spirit of the warranty, not just the letter." The husband exhaled. The wife said "See?"
Ryan looked at me with something close to religious relief and said, "Thanks, boss," and I nearly confessed everything right there, because being called boss by an actual employee moved my deception into a different tax bracket.
Then the woman asked, since I was being so reasonable, whether they could just return the old vacuum outright, and, reader, I approved a refund. Verbally. With a small decisive nod. "Process it," I told Ryan gently, "and I'll make a note."
There is no note... There will never be a note. Somewhere in that store's ledger is a hole shaped exactly like my cowardice.
It was at this point that the overhead speakers crackled and a voice said, "Manager to aisle nine. Manager to aisle nine."
I was standing in aisle nine.
I have never left a building the way I left that building. Not running... running is a confession. I walked at the pace of a man who is completely innocent and also fleeing, abandoned my toaster on a shelf of scented candles, gave one final municipal nod to the kettle woman near the exit, and stepped out into the sunlight of the parking lot as a civilian.
In the car, hands on the wheel, heart going like a sewing machine, I started laughing and could not stop. And then, somewhere on the drive home, the laughing tipped over into something quieter and more uncomfortable... because a question had climbed into the passenger seat and would not get out.
Where had that man been all my life?
That very week, I had failed, for the third quarter running, to ask my actual boss for a raise I was actually owed. I had rehearsed it in the shower, walked into her office, and asked instead whether the office plants were being watered on a schedule. That same man, given a lanyard and a stranger's assumption, had adjudicated a warranty dispute, comforted the wronged, and authorized funds with a nod.
Authority, it turns out, is mostly a tone of voice and the willingness to be blamed.
Nobody had checked my credentials. Nobody had asked for proof. The kettle woman needed someone to take her seriously, the couple needed a verdict, Ryan needed an adult, and the position was simply open. Most positions, I am starting to suspect, are simply open.
That night I wrote the whole thing down, partly as confession, partly because it was too good to waste, and posted it on a community wall for poets, where a stranger commented that the manager voice was in me the whole time and the lanyard was just permission. I keep thinking, too, about an essay I once read on why safe poems lose. Safe people lose too. Quietly, politely, in aisle nine, holding two identical toasters and choosing neither.
On Monday I went into my boss's office, borrowed the coroner's baritone, and asked for the raise. Out loud. With numbers in it. I got about half of what I asked for, and half, I can report, is an entire universe more than the nothing I had been collecting for two years. I have been writing lately about new beginnings, which feels grandiose for a story that starts with a kettle, but that is where it started, so that is where it goes.
I did eventually get the toaster. Different branch, three weeks later, wearing a red T-shirt as a disguise. The kettle woman was there anyway, because the universe has a sense of humor and excellent staffing. She brightened when she saw me. "Oh! Did they transfer you?"
"Promoted," I said... before I could stop myself.
Some mornings, when the toast pops up, I hear the overhead speaker in my head, calling the manager to aisle nine. And I stand a little straighter in my own kitchen, a man briefly in charge of something, ready this time to answer the page.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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