My first job, and the worst thing I ever said over the intercom

My first real job was bagging groceries, and the story of how I got it, and one deeply embarrassing thing I did early on, are both worth telling before the bakery years that came after.

Marlin’s son

A little background. My dad worked for this same grocery company back in the 90s, at the corporate level, for a long time. That job is also, indirectly, how I first fell in love with pinball, because the company would let employees and their families come play the arcade machines at Busch Stadium, music and games and all. He had since moved on, but he had left behind something I did not fully appreciate until I needed it: a good name.

When I was sixteen, the company was building a brand-new store right in my town of Lake St. Louis, and a new store is about the most exciting first job a kid can imagine. They had set up a little trailer out front to take applications, and I went and filled one out to be a bagger. The moment I handed it over with my name on it, the woman taking applications lit up. “Oh, you’re Marlin’s son?” Yes, I said, I’m Marlin’s son. And that was more or less that. We spent the next few minutes with her asking how he was doing and telling me they missed him at the corporate office, and the whole time she was, in effect, accepting my application. My dad was the kind of person who was warm and ambitious about being good to people, and his reputation walked me right to the front of the line.

I will own that this is a flavor of nepotism. Nearly every kid I went to school with wanted a job at that shiny new store, and I landed near the top of the pile because of who my father was. But the store was not finished yet and they needed people trained and ready for opening day, so before I ever worked a shift in Lake St. Louis, I started at the store over in O’Fallon. Which is where the following happened.

”Shiiiit”

I need you to understand that I was, and to a real degree still am, a shy person. So the store’s paging system terrified me. You know the one: you pick up a phone, press a button, and your voice goes out over the speakers to the whole building. I had never done it, and I dreaded the day I would have to.

That day came when someone asked me to page the frozen-foods department to check the back for an item. I was actually a little excited, it was going to be my first page, but I was nervous, and nobody had trained me on it beyond “pick up the phone and press the button.” In my head I expected some kind of warning. A dial tone, a beep, a recorded voice saying please speak after the tone. Something that told you when you were live.

There is no such thing. You pick up the phone, you press the button, and you are instantly, silently broadcasting. The only feedback is that you can hear yourself coming back through the speakers overhead, including, it turns out, your own breathing. So I pressed the button, heard my own startled breath roll out across the entire store a half-second delayed, panicked, decided I would just hang up and start over, and as I was hanging up the phone, I said the word “shit.” Which meant the whole building heard, in one long Doppler smear as the receiver moved away from my mouth, “Shiiiiit.”

I was so mortified I just put the phone down and walked straight back to the bagging area as if nothing had happened. The person never got their frozen-foods help from me. A minute or two later I heard someone else, a real professional, calmly page the department the way I was supposed to. It is genuinely a funny story now, and it was even kind of funny then, underneath the wanting-to-die. But for a long time after that, the paging phone and I had an understanding, and the understanding was that I would do almost anything to avoid it.

That is how the whole grocery chapter started. A good name got me in the door, a swear word introduced me to half of O’Fallon, and a few years later it would turn into a bakery job, and then, improbably, the start of an entire career.