Zoning Out

I worked at Target for a hot minute when I was 21.  This is my name tag.

There were aspects of that job that were miserable.  Team stretches and huddles, my direct supervisor, the customers and the fact that all of the Target stores have one thermostat and it's in Minnesota (honest truth) are the few that come immediately to mind.  However, sometimes I liked it.  I was all for zoning.  It started three hours before closing and you were assigned an area of the store and you had to make sure every single item was correctly on the shelf.  I worked hardgoods which is everything that isn't clothes.  If  you were lucky and got assigned something like yard and auto, most of those boxes are big and zoning takes no time.  However, if you were the poor sap assigned to health and beauty, you had to start zoning as soon as you showed up.  That's when it would take a turn for horror.

You ever stop and look at how tiny boxes of toothpaste and vitamins and eyeliner are?  Yeah.  Somebody gets paid to make sure they are all in a perfect little line of the shelf.  I was almost always that person because there were no other girls on the hardgoods team and for some convoluted reason, they felt it would be more interesting for me to line up bottles of shampoo than it would be for boys to do so.  

Newsflash.  Whether it's office supplies, dishes, towels, Nerf guns, seasonal items, cans of soup, bars of soap, xbox games, barbies, motor oil, free weights, basketballs, duvets or boxes of cereal, it all sucks to spend hours on end setting in neat straight lines.  Whether you're a boy or a girl.  It all becomes colored shapes that need to fit evenly and most of the time, don't.