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| Jacob and I on "our bench" |
10) Impromptu Streetfighter tournament. A few summers back, I had a group of Kroger friends over to my (then) apartment at Brandywine. While hanging out, they noticed that I had the early 1990s Sega Genesis gaming system and a myriad of games. Before we knew it, all ten or 15 of us were fully enthralled in an all-out Streetfighter tournament. And I dominated. I beat every one of them. Until my friend Yohan decided to take me on. He put my sweet, super fast Chun li kicking moves to shame. And with that, I was knocked from the title spot.
9) Power Outages. During my tenure, our store suffered from more than one thunderstorm-induced power outage. If you had a shift during one such occurence, you could count on a good time. All customers would have to leave the store--and the doors would be locked behind them. Those of us on the Front End would be sent off to tackle cleaning odd jobs around the store. This often turned into us goofing off in the dark--including games of tag or hide-and-go-seek. Other times, when we were "done" cleaning, we would plop ourselves onto the patio furniture that lined the front of the store and just talk. What a sight it must have been--groups of us sitting under umbrella covered tables in the dark.
8) Midnight shifts. Ok, not every one of those shifts make my top ten list, but back in the day, I would often get to close with a good friend (or two) of mine. We would get into all sorts of mischief. For serious--if our managers had watched the video footage during some of these nights, we would have been written up for sure. Luckily, this never happened...thankfully... One of our favorite things to do during these late night shifts was to race the motor carts (or as we often called them, the "mechanized" carts). Sometimes it would just be a race through the store, but more often than not, it would involve a race around the entire store. Outside. In the dead of night. A handful of times this resulted in a dead cart--you had to cross your fingers it wouldn't happen to you behind the building. If it did, you were stuck with pushing your cart to the finish line...aka back into the store lobby.
7) Made-up games to pass the time. A few of us would play games to pass the time...one of our old favorites was the ABC game. We would pick a topic (like movies) and the first person would throw out a movie title. "Anaconda." The next person in line would have to come up with a movie that started with the last letter in Anaconda, also an "a." And so on until someone gave up. There was also the infamous cookie dough challenge. We only made it through that game once--let's just say it involved logs of cookie dough and some people may have thrown up. Just saying. The junior high classic M.A.S.H also made its way into the rotation. Many a rainy day was spent standing at the supervisor podium or at Uscan writing on long pieces of receipt tape.
6) Hide-and-go-seek. No, we didn't only play in the store. We often took our shenanigans over to Shilito Park after dark...often times after we would all go to dinner together. These outings always made for a lot of fun. Good, clean fun...until one of those adventures took an unfortunate twist that resulted in me breaking my foot. Eeek! That was a pretty embarrasing story to tell the clinic doctor the next morning.
5) Produce prep room intervention. On the very day that Jacob first asked me out, back on Halloween in 2004, there was an intervention of sorts held in the store's produce prep room that involved about five or six of my Kroger guy friends. Somehow, someone overheard him ask me out (or heard us making plans for the night) and word traveled fast. Before I knew it, I was paged to the store's produce prep room. I walked in to find a cast of characters back there and they spent a few minutes questioning me and my plans for the evening. Come to find out, one of the guys leading the intervention had a crush on me. He even intercepted Jacob in the parking lot that night (to ask if he could tag along at the Trail of Terror.) Long story short, Jacob let him come along. The three of us went through the trail. Then the three of us watched a scary movie. But, as you know, Jacob won out. :)
4) Stickering of Gragg's car. Through the history of Kroger, there have been quite a few characters who have worked there. In my 9.5 year stint, I could easily name some 20 or 25 interesting personalities I worked with. This is a brief story about one such co-worker. (Brief history: this guy had asked me out--twice--once in the privacy of the breakroom where I nicely turned him down and the second time, he brought an outside--a non-Kroger employee--for support and asked me out in front of a crowd of our co-workers, to which I famously replied "Are you crazy?") On the front end, we had "I've been Krogering" stickers that we would hand out to kids. One night, four of us thought it might be funny to cover this kid's car in these stickers. So we did. We still laugh about it to this day. What wasn't so funny? His reaction. He was an angry sort. And it was unfortunate that the very next night, a different group thought it would be funny to do it to his car again. Not the best decision they ever made. I literally had to talk the kid out of calling the police. For serious. Luckily, the stickers came off pretty easily. I would know, I broke down and helped him clean it up.
3) Roof top nights. An old dear friend of mine from the Kroger days was the most mischievous of them all. He was the one who located the door that led to the roof. As in the top of the building. We were both working a midnight shift when this discovery occured. And yes, we took advantage of the opportunity. Climbed up the ladder and walked around on top of the store. I think there may have even been a snack involved (popcorn, what else?).
2) Co-workers. I have to sum it up and say that one of my top memories at Kroger were the friends that I made. Some of which I have been lucky enough to keep in touch with over the years. And the rest, social media sites like Facebook have allowed us to keep in touch though our lives have taken us all over the place. Not only that, but just the random assortment of people that I worked with over the last 9.5 years have easily made their way onto my top-ten list. Kroger would not have been Kroger without those people. (Even those interesting personalities I mentioned earlier!)
1) My hubby, of course! I tease Jacob all the time that he owes a lot to Kroger...it's where we first met. He likes to remind me of his early memories of me--I was the girl who would eat apple slices (with caramel dipping sauce!) and read books in the breakroom. But something about that obviously drew him in (the charm, of course...). I will never forget when I found out that he had a crush on me--I literally named every guy in the store before I said Jacob's name (I always considered him to be the hot, older boy...why would he have any interest in me?!). I was floored! From that moment, our co-worker friendship grew into something much more. We only dated a few months before he quit Kroger back in 2005, but we had some fun times as co-workers.
At the end of the day, I am blessed to have had such a great part-time job all of these years. I will always look back on it with fond memories in my mind and a smile on my face. And, if you think about it, I will always have a little bit of it with me. I go home to him every night.
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