I’m glad I destroyed a pallet of Yoghurts

I worked in various roles in a popular supermarket chain for about six years. When I first started, they looked at me in the interview with my gormless face and ponytail and immediately thought to themselves “Hmm, the warehouse probably wouldn’t work. Let’s stick him on checkouts for eight hours a day on weekends”. Maybe it was because I put on my application form that I have dyspraxia and they didn’t trust me doing manual labour.

I don’t know what it is about supermarkets that causes people to completely lose their social filters. I always thought that everyone treated supermarkets like I did: it is a process whereby I go into a shop and buy things and leave: does the checkout operative’s face really have anything to do with it?

I can’t smile on cue. Anyone who’s ever tried to take a picture of me over the years knows this. I do smile sometimes, but genuinely trying to smile is hard. People always used to say to me “takes more energy to frown than it does to smile!” but I don’t believe that’s true. Where’s the evidence? I know that during this period I could FEEL the muscles in my face straining to hold half a smile in place, and I’d just end up feeling even worse when a customer offered the patronising line “y’know you can smile if you want!” Essentially telling me that I wasn’t trying hard enough.

That and it is quite hard to smile when you’ve just had a customer try and pay you with expired vouchers they’ve had in their wallet for too long, you’ve told them they’ve expired, and then they explode at you going “YOU’RE A CON! ITS A BLEEDING CON!”

You’re expected to be genuine AND impervious to emotional abuse. Am I a human being or a cog in the machine? That’s the paradox of customer service.

Anyway, so they transferred my job to another branch when I went to university, and this store saw sense to put me in the warehouse, so the only interactions I had with customers was when I was out stacking shelves and they asked me where something was. I stacked the yoghurts. I remember one time a customer came up to me while I was standing in front of some yoghurts stacking them and he said,

“Do you have any yoghurt?”

I hadn’t heard him, so I said “Pardon?”

Annoyed, he then said, “I said Yoghurt. Y-O-G-U-R-T”

…I desperately wanted to say “you spelt yoghurt wrong”. But you’re not supposed to. So I just pointed in front of me. He didn’t even look embarrassed.

That was actually quite mild compared to the “you don’t have a specific type of butter” rant I was on the receiving end of that I mentioned in a previous blog.

The people I worked with always made fun of me for being a student and doubted I’d end up with a job after it and thought that I’d be in supermarkets forever because my degree is one of the termed “Mickey Mouse” degrees, as in a humanities degree that doesn’t have any practical application unlike science or maths. So, y’know what they were like from that description: people without imagination.

That being said, I did meet a handful of people I got on with. I remember talking to one guy quite a lot. He was a short beefy man who kept talking to me about how much he loved the gym. I don’t remember his name now. The last I heard about him he got fired for trying to steal a TV from the electronics department.

One week we had a shipment of yoghurts come in. It was a huge pallet, probably stacked a bit too high to be safe, wrapped in clingfilm. They made me operate the pump truck for some reason. Usually I just took the yoghurts from the chiller, put them on my trolley and went out to stack the shelves, but this time they put me, clumsy dyspraxic, in charge of a massive pallet of yoghurts.

I pulled the pallet off the truck, it hit the bit where the tail lift hit the floor, and the force caused the pallet to explode. Yoghurt went flying all across the floor. Everyone stopped and stared as all the different flavours just sort of mingled together into this milky cum-like explosion that hit the walls, the cardboard baler, surrounding pallets, myself, drenching everything in sight.

Everyone burst out laughing.

We all set to cleaning it up, and one of the guys whose name I forget now said that everyone’s going to be talking about this for years. It was hilarious.

Embarrassed, I tried my best to downplay it.

“Oh really? What are they going to be saying?”

“Well its funny, isn’t it? You’re gonna get a nickname because of this!”

“What will my nickname be?”

“I…er…yoghurt-O. We’ll call you yoghurt-O.”

So yeah, apparently that’s my name. Yoghurt-O. Because I made a pallet of yoghurts explode once. Just take an item I destroyed and put “O” on the end of it and you’ve got a nickname.

I was very annoyed at the time, but looking back, I find it funny THAT it was funny to everyone. I spend my life trying to write clever things that’ll make people laugh, but I don’t think I’ll ever truly hit on what makes this specific TYPE of humour work. The daily grind and the fact these people are here every day doing the exact same thing means that something as simple as dropping something or making something explode is the funniest thing in the world.

There’s an episode of Malcolm in the Middle called ‘Malcolm’s Job’ where Malcolm gets a job at the store where his mother works, and Malcolm discovers that her nickname around the store is ‘beans’. I like to imagine that she got that nickname because she dropped a can of beans once and because everyone’s so bored and ground down by life, just the simple act of dropping a can of beans makes you a legend in the context of this specific store.

Essentially, causing that pallet of yoghurts to explode was the funniest thing I ever did. I didn’t appreciate it as the time, but I’m glad I destroyed that pallet of yoghurts.

(I am well aware that there is a cost of living crisis going on and the price of food is through the roof and that probably has changed the context of this anecdote. Trust me though, if you were there and did this job every day, you probably would have thought it was worth it.)