This is one of a series of posts about jobs I’ve had during my time on this planet. You can read more posts by clicking the “jobs i’ve had” tag, and read a lengthier intro to the series in the first post.
Now we’re moving on to jobs I had during college. My timeline is hazy for college jobs, so I’m going with approximately chronological, but will skip around a little since some things will be better off grouped into a single post like I did with my two car dealership porter jobs.
Either the first or second summer I was home from college, I took on a job as a stocker at Pep Boys, my third car-related job.
The work itself was pretty miserable.
I had to arrive at six in the morning, which meant waking up around 5:15 every weekday. Around 6:15 two or three times per week, The Truck would arrive. The Truck contained at least four or five palettes with loads of key chains, air filters, chemicals, shammys, steering wheel covers, screws, nuts, bolts, license plates made to look like spray-painted t-shirts in Panama City, Edelbrock intakes, fake carbon fiber interior accents, Yosemite Sam tire flaps, and all the other crap you can buy at a Pep Boys. All of it boxed and saran-wrapped together to stand about five feet tall per palette.
Unloading the palettes from The Truck wasn’t the bad part though, as we had lifts to, well, lift them for us.
The worst part was the tires, anywhere from 60 to 100 of them per load, most of them weighing at least 20 pounds, with truck tires being much heavier. It was a three-man job to get them unloaded in any reasonable amount of time:
- Man 1 (usually the driver) stood in the truck trailer, and carried or rolled a tire from inside the trailer, handing or rolling it to…
- Man 2 (usually me) who stood on a platform, took the tire from Man 1, and rolled it to…
- Man 3 (usually an older guy who worked the same shift I did) who stood just inside the door and stacked the tires after I rolled them to him.
I was never Man 1, but I was Man 3 sometimes. There was a technique to rolling the tires. You had to bounce them off the asphalt with enough speed to get to Man 3, but not so fast that if he was behind on stacking the tires that you’d injure him with a rolling tire or send an errant tire flying into the store.
Once the truck was unloaded, which was usually by 7 or so, we spent the next hour working furiously to stock as much of the merchandise on the shelves as possible for the next hour until the store opened at 8. I would usually be stocking merchandise for most of the day until my shift ended at 3:30.
My uniform was black pants I bought on my own and a t-shirt with the Pep Boys logo on it that they gave me. A couple of times I noticed after work that battery acid had burned holes in my shirt from when I’d been stocking batteries. It was bad enough once that I had to ask them for a new one.
My manager was a huge guy, maybe 6′ 5″, bowlegged with a square head and a buzz cut. What little hair he had was red, and he said people called him The Rooster. He made up a nickname for me that I can’t remember now.
That job would have been so much worse if he had turned out to be a jerk, but fortunately he was one of the better managers I’d ever been around. He always kept a positive attitude, but more importantly, he was always helping us stock stuff when he didn’t have something else to attend to. It means a lot in a job like that for the manager to demonstrate he’s not asking you to do something that he’s not willing to do himself.
I also got to go on the occasional parts run, since Pep Boys does do some repairs. One time I went on a run to a dealership more than an hour outside Atlanta and got lost on my way home, and didn’t end up back at the store until almost closing time.
There was also a cute cashier who was a UGA student who was home for the summer. She flirted with me a little, and I’m sure I awkwardly flirted back. She had a boyfriend, so it wasn’t likely to go anywhere.
When I didn’t have anything in particular to do, I would go in the store room behind the wall of cleaners and rearrange the extra cleaners. This was nice because I didn’t have to talk to customers. Although it turned out that despite me being a blunt and antisocial person generally, I was pretty good with customers when I dialed up the Southern a little.
At the end of the summer when it was time for me to go back to school, The Rooster asked me if I wanted him to keep me in the system so I could work there over Christmas break.
I told him sure, but I knew I wasn’t coming back.
If you’ve been digging this series, you’ll be happy to know Thomas has joined the party. Sara has also written a couple of more posts in her series since my last post: Part II and Part III
