On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane

by Emily Guendelsberger

Finally, I do a full squat to retrieve an item from a bottom drawer and my body mutinies. Stand up, I order my legs for the hundredth time today, but it’s as if they’ve gotten fed up with all the abuse and hung up on my brain. Stand up, you idiot, my brain screams as I slowly topple backwards into a sitting position, but it’s just not happening. I sigh. Might as well rub my feet as long as I’m down here. I start to take off my shoes and am slightly horrified to find that my feet are so swollen they’re straining my shoelaces. Untying the laces feels sinfully good. The “sinful” part is reinforced by my scanner, which has started notifying me that I have zero seconds remaining to pick my next item. Fuck you, I think, reaching above my head to drop the horrible thing on my cart, out of sight. I try to rub some life into my horrible-looking feet. How many minutes of this can I get away with before some Time Off Task algorithm alerts a manager? If you’re deep in the mod, it can take fifteen minutes to get to a bathroom and back—if I keep it under fifteen minutes, maybe it’ll just look like a bathroom break. I desperately want to believe this, so I do—in retrospect, I realize that the scan gun’s GPS would have given me away.