Co-Workers Are Everything

Years ago, Brady, an old friend of mine, hooked me up with a night shift position at a gas station in Minneapolis called Super America. I have some of the fondest memories of that place, and through recent correspondences with Brady via email, you can get a little taste of some of the people we worked with:

"Do you remember Sean, the guy who thought he was an assistant manager? Perpetually depressed? I've had a dissatisfied overweight 30 year-old-ish guy at every job I've worked at since. I think he repaired fish tanks as his other job and he divorced his infertile succubus high school sweetheart about a year before he started working at SA. He carried what looked to be glamour shots of her in is wallet and I don't remember seeing him in any of the pictures- it's funny that he still kinda gloated about her, she was quite the honey I remember- real cheerleader-esque. I think he spent more time on smoke breaks than working.

I'm trying to think of some stand out costumers- lottery ticket guy, Yhada called him Scratchy. He would buy one or two tickets at a time and scratch them off while blocking a register as other people were waiting in line. He walked with a limp and I dreaded running into him on the street because I would get trapped into listening to one of his monologues about the Twins. I didn't want to be rude so I had to slowly walk beside him until I could get him off my back- I usually tried ducking into Target or other places but sometimes he would just tag along.

I heard Yhada and her cousin who worked there quit after working there for about 2-3 years. Over that time they had stolen around $4000 from the registers in total. (And I got fired for admitting I took one refill on my soda, thank god I got out of there though) Months later, Yhada came in while I was working at Gamestop with her gangsta boyfriend and swiped shit off the counter while my back was turned. Too bad that place didn't have security cameras.

I remember watching the footage with Sean of that one fight that broke out between those two black chicks. When the po came, the girls took off but one of their boyfriends stayed and became friends with the cops - weird. There was also a guy who tried to cut me through the little speaking hole in the bulletproof glass, he could only get about half the knife through- sometimes I miss the thug life."

Right now Brady is living in New Zealand and potentially moving to Japan. He's a pretty cool dude.