※This is a repost of an article originally published on July 13, 2019.
■ I couldn’t even do a convenience store part-time job
Even I—who has now completely stopped working—actually have experience working a convenience store job, for just a few months, from entering university to dropping out almost immediately.
Today I want to talk about just how hopelessly, terminally fidgety I am as a worker.
On my first shift, the manager himself was supposed to explain the register area… except he was the kind of guy who obviously loved throwing his weight around. With this already-irritated tone, he went, “You see the register every day as a customer, right? You can do it by vibe.” And he suddenly planted me behind the counter. I guess he’s from the Famicom generation and doesn’t understand the concept of a tutorial.
Of course, there’s no way someone as clumsy as me survives being thrown in cold. I start struggling from the most basic motion imaginable: opening a plastic bag.
There’s an easy solution—use the little sponge by the register to dampen your fingers and it opens instantly—but I don’t notice something that simple. I’m standing there, confused, and on top of that my natural bluntness isn’t helping, so the manager hits me with, “You can’t even do this?!” Speedrun any%—TAS world record pace—straight into getting scolded.
And so, having completely lost my composure, I finish my hellish first day while getting yelled at for basically every single movement I make. If a part-time job is already like this… how brutal is “society” supposed to be? My anxiety piles up like drifting powder snow.
Maybe it was my second or third shift. They decided I could handle the register as long as it wasn’t some fiddly special operation, so I ended up on evening shift with an older coworker who seemed like a nice guy. He went to organize drinks in the freezer room, and before leaving, he only told me where the “button you press when you’re in trouble” is.
So there I am—Nyalra—alone at the register.
Even if I “learned” the operation, I’m slow to notice things, so before I know it a line is building up. I realize this is bad, and I start mashing the “help” button, putting my prayers into it, begging for the senpai to come save me.
But my prayers are ignored. He doesn’t come. Not even a hint.
In Super Robot Wars this is exactly the moment reinforcements would arrive… and yet my brain is only getting more and more muddled.
Here’s the reveal: the button I was hammering wasn’t the freezer-room buzzer.
It was the emergency alert button right next to it—the one meant for robberies and problem customers.
Not realizing my mistake, I keep working the register while spiraling through every emotion: Why isn’t he coming? Is this a trial? Am I being tested? Did he betray me?—all of it, all at once.
After taking several times longer than normal, I finally clear the line… and right on cue, people who look like security company staff rush into the store going, “What happened!?”
That’s when I finally understand: I’ve been mashing the emergency alert button.
I bow so hard my spine nearly snaps, apologizing desperately. The senpai looks so stunned he can’t even get angry. The security guys leave with polite, strained smiles. And I just stand there blankly at the register, fiddling with a disposable chopsticks sleeve.
Naturally, after a long sermon from the manager, I get rotated to the night shift.
I think it was around May. I wasn’t going to university anymore, but I tried to argue, “Night shift will affect my studies,” (really, I just hated that I wouldn’t be able to watch late-night anime), and the manager barks back, “This is for your social education!” and I get steamrolled.
Somewhere inside, I could tell the real reason was simple: there weren’t enough people willing to do nights, so I was convenient. But that’s “society,” right… I don’t have the power to say anything. I can almost hear the snow of anxiety settling and turning into sludge at the bottom of my heart.
“Adults are disgusting.”
■ The delightful night-shift crew
Night shift was its own kind of brutal. Expiration-date checks, restocking, cleaning the whole store, processing returned books… it’s endless.
And outside the register, I displayed my worst habits in full: I’d treat small tasks as optional and overlook them. Every morning, the manager would scold me: “You forgot to check expirations.” “You didn’t clean here.” With my tiny little brain, even after hundreds, thousands of warnings, the next day the fine details would still leak out of my head.
Once, I forgot to put the ice for iced coffee back into the freezer and ruined the entire batch—total loss. My paycheck even went negative because I had to pay for it.
If it were someone else’s fault, that’d be one thing. But this was 100% my mistake, pure. I couldn’t even understand what I existed for. Days where I’d retreat into thoughts like, “Just kill me already…” (not because I had some grand tragedy, but because I was that pathetic).
Still—what saved me was that my night-shift coworkers were, like me, mostly people with no social skills. They were interesting. I met an otaku friend who loved Sunday-morning kids’ shows. There was a freeter over forty who’d never escaped pachinko because of childhood memories of being taken to parlors by his dad. A young guy who stole revenue stamps from the register from the blind spot of the security camera and resold them (apparently if he got caught, he’d just move on to a different store). A dark-skinned older man who looked like Dark Zaggy and knew a lot about “herbs,” who showed up to work on a skateboard. A cast of characters.
On the flip side, their behavior was bad too. I’d have mistakes unfairly pinned on me, or get yelled at by an older coworker over tiny things and then lectured through my entire break with “Kids these days…” and yet even that felt weirdly dear to me. Their lack of social fitness was warm. Unlike the manager, who was just tyrannical—these people were genuinely, naturally warped.
Even the otaku coworker, almost thirty, would get cursed out by customers and burst into tears on the spot. Visibly bad at living.
And I’m sure the sight of me—unable to do my job, yet squinting down at my coworkers like I’m judging them—must have looked deeply creepy.
Somehow, I think it was around then that the desire piled up in me: I want to laugh and live with people who’ll never become “social” forever. That feeling is probably connected to the garage lifestyle I have now.
But even in a place like that, I was especially low-grade. Because of my restlessness, I couldn’t even stand still at the register; I’d start bouncing in front of customers, fidgeting with my fingers, and in the worst case I’d even forget I was working and start messing with my phone.
At some point I gave up: work itself is impossible for me.
The final blow was the “blackout incident,” when the Chinese coworker on night shift caused a store-wide power outage.
In that store there was an outlet with a huge warning: “DO NOT TOUCH.” If you messed with it, the entire shop would lose power. That night, my Chinese coworker didn’t notice the warning and did it.
After a while, someone from the power company or the security company showed up and said, “We’ll restore it by operating the control panel in the back, but we need you to call the manager for permission.”
It was deep in the dead of night. I could instantly tell the manager would be furious if we woke him, but my coworker was in full panic mode, so I handled it.
The manager answered, obviously angry from being woken up. I’d always believed, with complete trust, that this man would definitely get mad—and he didn’t disappoint. But the moment I explained the situation and said, “I’ll hand you to the power company worker,” he shouted, “You don’t need to hand me over! You solve it yourself!”
“Sure, I’m the one on site, so yes, I’ll solve it—but they’re saying they can’t work unless they speak to you directly,” I explained carefully.
He wouldn’t listen.
“That’s not the point! I’m not necessary right now, am I!?”
Even half-asleep, is society really capable of driving people this insane…? Honestly, when someone is this much of a madman, their likability loops back around and goes up.
It hadn’t even been three full months, but that incident made me realize: there is absolutely no way I can exist in society. I quit, took on debt, and shut myself in a cheap apartment.
A few days later, the only otaku coworker whose contact info I’d exchanged emailed me: “Ever since then, the manager keeps holding drinking parties and they’re mandatory. It’s hell.” Then he added: “Sometimes they’d all watch the security camera footage of you being so hyper and laugh at you.”
So yeah—so I really am objectively that restless…
This level of social incompatibility is probably like a brand burned into me, clinging all over my body.
“If that’s what being an adult means…”
“I never want to be an adult!”
Will there ever come a day when I find a job even Nyalra can do?
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