Nobody Likes Sara Lee

His old job hadn't been much fun, but at least it had paid well. It was a refrigerated warehouse, working with lunch meats; it seemed he always needed new long johns in July, prompting disbelieving stares from clerks at JC Penney. He was part time there for ten years, always intending to go back and finish college, but something always got in the way: car trouble, trailer trouble, credit card debt, food. Then one day the company laid off two thirds of the shipping department, and he was shunted sideways into security. Wow, was he not suited for that job. It was run by an ex-Army sergeant, with a military-style mix of straight-arrowness and cutcornersness, and he could never work out which way each task was supposed to go. The guy took an instant dislike to him, riding him, expecting him to know every task that went with the job within days. The hurry-up-and-wait crushed his spirit; you were either riding the desk for hours or feebly responding to whooping alarms. After about three months, there was an incident. A departing employee was flagged for a lunchbox check, his supervisor apparently suspecting he might purloin a package of hot dogs or something. He joked to his partner that evening (the night shift worked in pairs) that some ham might have winged its way home in his pail at some point over the years. The very next morning, he walked in to face a row of grim expressions. They didn't even let him get his stuff out of his locker; they bagged it up and sent it to him in the mail. Two days later, his ten-year-anniversary gift, a Bulova watch, came in the mail too. He had been washed out. And then the dark time came. Well, the second one.