A few weeks ago I mentioned in this column that my daughter, Clementine, had gotten her first job. (There may have been some vague threats about tearing her first paycheck into tiny little pieces in front of her and then stomping on them as some kind of cosmic revenge. My lawyers have asked me not to comment on whether or not that actually happened.) Since then she has learned many valuable lessons about life in the working world. She has learned that school actually starts later than most jobs. She has leaned that the worst part of customer service is, in fact, the customers. And she has learned that some people are just one apocalypse away from turning into cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers.
It all comes down to the lettuce. Or rather, the lettuce box. The empty one sitting on the shelf in the walk-in. The one that is empty because the last person who went in to grab some lettuce took the last head out of the box and then left the empty box on the shelf for “somebody else” to deal with.
Or maybe you don’t work in a restaurant. Maybe you work in an office and have come in to an empty copier time and time again. Or maybe you work in landscaping, or construction, and can never find the tool you need because the person before you neglected to put it back where it belonged. Regardless of where you work, it is your first job that makes you first realize that there really are some people out there who possess the sort of moral turpitude you previously only thought existed in comic books and children’s literature.
Too much, you say? Am I really comparing the guy who didn’t take out the empty lettuce box with Magneto and Voldemort? Actually, yeah, I am. I am saying that the only thing stopping the lettuce box slacker from attempting world domination is the fact that they lack any useful superpowers, and if one day, through chance, they happen to acquire some super powers, it will spell doom and destruction for all mankind. In other words: Peter Parker would have broken down that lettuce box.
Broken it down, carried it to the recycling bin, and then gotten the new box of lettuce down from the top shelf so that it was easier for the next person to use.
It has been said that it is the things you do when no one is watching that proves the kind of person you really are, and nowhere does that statement hold more true than in the workplace. And the worst part of it is that I’m not sure that being a lettuce box slacker is the kind of moral fault that can even be fixed. How do you teach an adult human being to be a good person? It’s like, theres a window of opportunity to learn these things, and past a certain point that window just closes. Past that point all you can do is teach them how to fake it better. Again, though, maybe I am being too cynical.
All I know is that one day I may get the chance to see Clementine accepting the Nobel Peace Prize. One day I may see her being sworn in as President as the United States. And one day I may see her on an afternoon talk show describing her latest tell-all book entitled Growing Up with a Really Terrible Mother. But none of those events will make me happier than her answer when I asked her, after she told me about the empty lettuce box scenario at work, what she did about the box after she found it.
“I broke it down, of course.”
Well, then, I thought, my work here is done.