So I used to have a job in this town. I used to be the
second-shift front desk clerk for a self-storage facility.
It wasn’t a fancy job but it was a big job, at least I
like to think. ‘Cause a lot of people need their stuff stored, right? You know,
we’ve all got so much stuff these days – sometimes I wonder where everyone puts
it! But my place was one place. And, you know, lots of people have more stuff
to store than their apartment can hold – better a self-storage facility than
tripping over a bunch of junk to get to the kitchen table, right?
Well anyway. This place, big tall square brick building, not
dressed up very fancy. It had a big neon sign out on the top that said “Self
Storage.” Big letters lit up in red.
And I’m working at the front desk alone because the only two
people who really need to be there are the receptionist, a couple security
guards, and the manager. It’s a pretty low-overhead kind of place. Good profit,
and I get some of it. Enough to pay for the cheapest apartment this dumb city has.
So around about noon one fine cold day this guy comes
walking in and he looks homeless. You know how you can tell sometimes, right?
Wearing lots of clothes all at once, carrying a big bag of cans, face looking
like all the world’s come right down on you, which, to be fair, it has. Well this
guy didn’t have a big bag of cans and he wasn’t wearing all his clothing at
once, but he did have that look on his face. And he was, to be fair, pretty scruffy.
And he came up to me and he said, “I would like to store
myself, please.”
And I said “Stop yanking my chain.”
And he said, “I’m not trying to yank your chain, I want to
store myself.”
And I said, “Either tell me what you actually want to store
or stop wasting my time and get out of here.”
And he said, “Look, can I speak to the manager?”
And I rolled my eyes and I went to bring the manager out,
and the manager asked the guy if he could pay, and the guy brought out a big
old wad of cash. Well that threw me for a loop. Where did this guy get a big
old wad of cash if he was homeless? The way he explained it, he had a decent
job and all, working at the dollar store and second shift at a fast food joint,
but he still just couldn’t afford an apartment in this dumb city, you know how
it is, especially since he had to help pay his sister’s medical expenses, and
the motels didn’t want him around, and he got kicked out of the Salvation Army
Shelter because – well he wasn’t going to explain that at all. So maybe this
was a last ditch, you know, a wild shot in the dark. Better than sleeping on
the cold street, right?
And I thought well that’s fair, and the manager said well
that’s fair, but it’s not like our units have ventilation or anything. And he
said he would leave the door open a few inches at the bottom.
I didn’t think the manager was going to go for it, but he
did, and the fellow purchased a unit and promised he would pay extra if he was
going to bring anyone else in. And by day he would be out and about, doing his
work, and by night, before the third-shift clerk came in, he would come back,
pay his fee, give me a high five and go to his unit. Never brought anyone else in. Maybe he couldn't pay enough?
We wound up having to explain things to the third-shift
clerk and the first-shift clerk, because sometimes Mister Stores-Himself would come in much too
late for me, and of course he’d be leaving when I wasn’t there – the
first-shift clerk thought it was pretty funny but the third-shift guy took some
convincing. Fortunately in this economy, “do it or you’re fired” is pretty
convincing. I always felt a little ashamed about that but hey – I’m not the
manager. None of this was my decision. I’m just along for the ride and making
money.
Well. Things went like that quietly for a while. I wondered
if any other homeless folks would follow in his wake, but, you know, we do
charge a fee for storage, and we’re not going to give discounts. Got to make
money, right?
The first test of that principle came when the neon sign had
a letter burn out.
You know how it is with those signs, right? Where you drive
up to the store at night and the sign says “ARGET” or “OOD MART” because the
boss was too cheap to get the sign fixed and who cares anyway. Maybe you’re old
enough to remember when the Hollywood sign said “HULLYWO D”? That kind of
thing.
So now, as soon as night fell, our facility was called “ELF
STORAGE.”
I thought that was kind of funny, like, oh no someone’s
going to try to store an elf here. I stopped laughing when a lady came in
around 6 PM and asked to store an elf.
So I said, “Come on, lady, I don’t need this kind of crap.
I’m here on my feet from 5 to 11 and – ”
And she cut me off like a jerk. “I don’t care about your feet,”
she said. “I want to store an elf.”
And I said “Look, you can store any object you want as long
as you can pay, but why do you need to tell me the details? Just get out your
credit card and stop wasting my time.”
And she said, “This isn’t an object, this is a real elf. The
sign says Elf Storage. So I’m storing an elf. Do you want me to sue you for
false advertising?”
And I said, “Do you want me to call security?”
And she said, “I want you to call the manager.”
Here we go again! So I brought in the manager and the
manager said alright, let’s see this elf, and the lady brought out – must have
been from behind her back somehow, I swear I never saw the damn thing before
that moment – a living breathing elf.
A fairly tall elf lady, as it was, and I could tell even
though her long hair covered her ears, cause she was a foot taller than my
annoying customer and she was giving me a look that made me shudder and I was
pretty sure her dress was made of actual leaves.
So I turned to the manager, hoping to get some backup for my
refusal here, and the manager said, hey, we have to make money. And I said, I
think we’re in over our heads. And the manager said, do you want to get paid or
not?
That was a good answer, but I still had a burning question
on my mind, so I turned to the annoying customer and said, “Why don’t you let
the elf here speak for herself?” And that turned out to be a mistake because
the elf’s response was a song that sounded like it came out of twenty different
people.
And the annoying customer said that this was the elf lady’s
request, because now that the sign no longer said self-storage, she couldn’t
ask to store herself.
And that was when Mister Stores-Himself walked in and put
down his fee for the day, and the Elf Lady told him to scram because he was
violating the sign. He told her to shove off. They almost started a fistfight
until the manager put his foot down very loudly and said it was his facility,
by thunder, and he’d accept whatever he wanted to accept.
That was a fair enough answer for the elf lady. She could
understand monarchy well enough. And Mister Stores-Himself was just glad to
avoid being tossed out. So he didn’t put up a fuss.
Money in the till and that was that. The annoying customer
purchased a small unit and the elf lady shrank to fit. I could swear she gave
me a wink before she closed the door.
Things went like that for a while. Someone would come in
wanting to store an elf, and all kinds of them – some thin as a rail and taller
than me, some short and squat, some pale, some brown, some golden, some blue,
didn’t matter really, they always looked completely different every time any of
their doors were opened. And the third-shift guy kept telling me that they
looked nothing like human when they crossed through moonlight. I asked him how
the hell he was seeing moonlight in the middle of this city and he said he
could see the full moon out the windows every night, when the lights flickered
out at random times. I asked him how the hell the lights burned out when they
were fluorescent track lighting installed last month. He couldn’t explain.
It took some convincing to get him to put up with all this,
which is to say the manager threatened to fire him again.
Well, whatever. I didn’t have to deal with it except on the
very occasional instance that the lights went off before my shift ended. One
time Mister Stores-Himself came in at just that moment, and needed help finding
his own unit. Wouldn’t have been a problem except that my flashlight wasn’t
working, so I had to use the glow from my smartphone screen and that kept turning off.
Slow going. Especially since Mister Stores-Himself told me to keep my eyes away
from the patches of moonlight, so I’m shuffling around them with my eyes down.
Talk about a nightmare. I have no idea how I found the guy’s unit before dawn.
Both me and third-shift guy were envious of the first-shift
clerk, or more envious than usual.
That went on for a few months. No more incidents on my end,
although Mister Stores-Himself complained to the manager that his unit’s door
kept getting shut all the way. Thank heavens the first-shift guy always made
sure to check. Otherwise it was a nice time. The building was warmer than you
would have expected.
Then the next letter in the sign burned out.
At that point most of the elfs disappeared. They weren’t
going to stick around if the sign didn’t say they could. And the manager no
longer had a hold on them. Maybe he never really did. Maybe they were just
playing with him. Or maybe they were following rules that he didn’t understand.
Or maybe they understood what was coming. Whatever it was, the fees for their
storage were gone, and the manager was despondent. He made hints that he would
have to let us go. No more money. Well, that was going to be a problem, but at
least the units were free for other people, right?
Unless some whack-off comes in trying to store an LF. What
the heck is an LF? I don’t know. Hopefully nobody knows.
So the very next evening some fellow comes in with a pet
carrier in one hand. Big pet carrier, the kind that holds a medium dog or a
really big house cat. And oh boy, the sound that comes out of this pet carrier.
Snarling like the devil himself. SNARL, GRRR, ROWL, RARR. I can barely hear the
guy as he requests to store an Eleff.
I say, “What? You want to store an elephant?”
And he says, “No I don’t think you’re elegant!”
And the manager comes out, grabs the pet carrier, opens the
door, sticks his hand in, and suddenly it’s dead quiet.
Alright, so maybe these things shut up if you give them a
taste of the long pork. I asked the manager if Mister Stores-Himself is going
to like that idea and the manager said, we have to make money.
So now it was my turn to suffer. First-shift clerk had no
people coming to store Eleffs; third-shift guy only got them now and then; they
all came in on MY shift, and oh my poor eardrums. I had to learn to stick my
hand in the pet carrier despite my utter terror.
Whatever these Eleffs were, they were pretty fluffy.
And once you shoved the pet carrier into the unit their
snarls were muffled. That worked well enough for a while. Until we got as many
of them as we used to have elfs, and all the muffled snarling added up to an
ominous sound that had the third-shift guy shaking in his shoes all night. He
didn’t wait for the manager to fire him, apparently. Just ran out the door into
the night. Or so I was told. I never actually saw him go.
You’d think if he got eaten Mister Stores-Himself would have
gone first, but, by the same token, HE had a big steel door to hide behind. And
what was he going to do if he didn’t like it? Leave?
I felt a little sick thinking that way about a fellow down
on his luck, but it was true. He had to accept whatever this place threw at
him, as long as his unit was his own. And the manager would take anything, as
long as someone paid the fee. Money. Money money money. Maybe Mister
Stores-Himself and the manager were both stuck in their own way. Manager out of
greed, Mister Stores-Himself out of desperation. And me? Well, I had an
apartment to pay for as well. This place paid well enough that I only had to
work one shift. What a rare thing around here. I was stuck as much as anyone
else was, unless I wanted to work myself to death at some warehouse
package-fulfillment place where I could die and nobody would find me for twenty
minutes.
So while these Eleffs were snarling all the livelong night,
I was drowning them out with my own snarls about who had enough money to pay
our fees, after all. How the hell did they get it and what did they do. Who were these people. Why had none of them hired me first.
Well, that went on for a while, and I wound up picking up
the third shift because I was really good at ignoring the noises from the
units, and NOBODY was applying for the position. Hey, double wage,
what’s not to like, right? Oh right, the fact that I had to stay awake from 5
PM until 5 AM. No goddamn way, man. I slept under the front desk.
Until the security guards ratted on me to the manager. Maybe
they were mad at me for supposedly accepting all this nonsense. Hey, all I ever
did was call the manager!
So I got real mad and I decided to get real sneaky. One
night I told the security guards I was leaving the desk to use the bathroom,
cover for me alright? And I snuck up to the seventh floor where the big red
sign ran right under the windows. This whole LF thing was going to end right
now, dammit. I leaned out the window and whacked the glowing red L real hard.
Admittely it was a long shot, but I was thinking that, if
they’re hanging up high, they’re not built to withstand any heavy blows. Well,
I can’t say for certain. My idea didn’t work.
What actually happened was that the metal parts holding the
sign to the brick were really rusty because mister We Gotta Make Money never
bothered to pay for maintenance on these things. So one smack sent the entire
thing right off the wall. Hey, it was bound to fall at some point, right?
The impact down on the ground sure drowned out whatever
snarls were coming from the units. And thank god it sent both security guards
running towards the sound, because they were too distracted to see me coming down the
stairs. They were looking up to wonder why the sign had fallen, and down to
worry about the massive amounts of glass all over the place.
I didn’t get any more sleep that night. The manager told me
to sweep up all the glass. Oh, security guards didn’t have to help, did they?
No, they had to protect the precious storage units from the sneak thieves who
might have been using the sign as a distraction.
They wound up blaming Mister Stores-Himself because he
was…an easy target, to be honest. They knew I’d gone to the bathroom and Mister
Stores-Himself couldn’t prove his whereabouts, could he? And he could open his
unit’s door from the inside, right? There you go.
The fact that I never revealed the truth when I had the
chance to save that guy is not the greatest shame of my life, but it’s up
there.
Well. I’d solved my problem, at least. Now we were going to
get people trying to store an F. And no more snarls! No more Third shift for
me!
Except that by this point, nobody in their right mind would
have applied to work for us. I had hoped that Mister No Longer Stores Himself
would take the opening that I had left, but maybe he wasn’t going to put up
with a place that treated him like crap after pretending to give him a chance.
So, welcome to third shift again!
And my assumption about the new customers proved correct.
Sort of.
The first guy that came in next evening said, “I want to
store an Eff.”
And I said, “Store an F? Maybe you can just paste it to a
wall somewhere.”
And he said, “Excuse me? Oh, no no. Spelled E-F-F. Slightly
different.”
And I said, “The sign says F not E-F-F. No dice.”
And he said, “I want to talk to the manager.”
I was sorely tempted to go behind the doorway and pretend to
be a gruff manager telling him to scram, but the actual manager was there, so,
nothing for it.
The manager said it was fine as soon as he could see this
“eff”.
And the customer said, “You can’t see it. But! You know it’s
there. Here effy effy effy effy.” And suddenly a gentle breeze blew through the
room even though the door was closed.
Money in the till and that was that.
Only after the second and third of these things came in did
I think to ask where, exactly, these things were being stored. The manager
said, wherever. And I said, what do you mean whatever. And he said, you can’t
store the wind in a definite place, can you? And I said yes you can, it’s
called compressed air. And he said, the point is, we can store as many of these
things in here as we want. Infinite customers! We’re no longer limited by
space! And I said, compressed air, dumbass, there’s a limit to how much air you
can fit in a space. And he said shut up or you’re fired.
Fine. At least this time the security guards weren’t going
to venture into the building. At all. They were getting really scared. So I
could sleep behind the desk now and fall asleep to the sound of a gentle
breeze.
Or with good earplugs, because as we got one customer after
another, the wind got louder and louder. I had to sleep with a thick blanket
behind the desk because that wind was taking the heat right off me.
Mister manager kept his door closed and pretended not to
notice.
But eventually, it was impossible not to notice, especially
when I was having trouble standing upright at the desk. If I couldn’t hear a
customer say anything then how could we get any more customers? Sign language!
Thank goodness everyone knows sign language, right? Right. Right. Lucky me.
At the point that the manager himself could barely get his
own door open, he began to have some doubts himself. But, gotta make money,
right? And I tried to tell him that this was now impossible. First-shift clerk
was long gone. Maybe blown out the window. The manager had to cover that shift
himself.
But before he had the chance to figure that all out for
himself, I wasn’t going to let him learn for himself, before I had my goddamn
revenge. What I did was, instead of communicating the impossibility of the
situation to him in sign language, I opened one of the windows, staggered back
to the cash drawer, opened it up, and tossed all the cash into the air.
Must have been three thousand dollars that blew out the
window with the escape of the Effs.
So NOW it was quiet.
And the manager told me I was fired.
Fine.
As it turned out, I wasn’t going to get any more money out
of that place. Now that the remaining customer base had been thoroughly
infuriated, they collectively sued the guy to oblivion. He tried to pin the
blame on me but I never wound up paying anything because HE counter-sued the
customers for creating the whole situation, and the whole thing became a legal
tangle. He had to sell his storage facility to a national chain in order to
keep paying his legal fees, and then settle.
In the meantime I took a first-shift job at a mattress store
and a second-shift job at a nail salon, and those places were at least
nicer. And I’d picked up enough money from the night shift at the storage place
that I could put a down payment on a better apartment than my old place. I
tracked down Mister Stores-Himself and offered to make things up to him by
letting him pay a quarter of the rent instead of half. And he said, oh no, I
don’t think you can put up with me, and I said, what could possibly be the
problem? And he said that, before he managed to put on deodorant in the morning
he always smelled like the devil himself. He had asked for a unit in a storage
facility because he knew he’d be totally alone in the morning.
Well I’d lost my sense of smell in a firecracker accident years ago, so that
wouldn’t be a problem. And he said fine and dandy.
So now we’re kind of stuck together, but I’d rather be stuck
with him than my old manager.
I wonder why the manager never said anything about the smell.
Maybe he was too polite? Nah, can’t be.
It had to be the money. Well, he got what he wanted.
And maybe everyone got what they deserved, after all.