The Salesgirl, the Customer and me at the Clothes Fitting Room
By: Juliano Righetto
Tags: Brazil, Mistakes, Nineties, Christmas, Workplace

As you can tell from our expressions, we got along really well. In all my fifty years of life, I have never been part of a team as close and loving as this one. I enjoyed working there so much, that after Christmas…

I kept working for free.

Since I had been hired as an extra worker to help manage the Christmas movement, I was no longer needed in January. But I liked those people so much that I couldn’t stay away.

My luck is that in a short time, the store manager, this beautiful girl wearing overalls, managed to hire me: Pakalolo wanted each store to have a stock supervisor, someone who would do the accounting for what came and went in the store daily. And that was my job from there.

The problem is that this work's purpose was illegal: the store did not issue invoices for all the products it sold, so it had no real control over what came out of its stocks daily. What I was doing was finding out which pieces of clothing had come out, with or without an invoice, so that they could have realistic control of their stock.

Since my job was illegal, I couldn’t do it in plain sight. After all, if any inspector saw that, he could deduce what was happening. So in practice, what I did was get to the store, get all the labels for the clothes sold the day before, and go into a fitting room, where I filled out a large bordereau with the items. It was a job that I did in forty, forty-five minutes… After that, I stayed at the cashier, as an official cashier’s assistant — the same role I had at Christmas.

And it was thanks to this curious function that the story I have to tell today happened.

After Christmas, very few of these people in the photo above left in the morning shift. More specifically, I, the cashier I assisted — who is not in this photo — the manager in blue overalls, the blonde who is in the middle of the three girls who are kneeling, and the oriental on her left side.

Our work shift started at ten in the morning. As I lived close to the mall, I was never late. So, on the day this event took place, I arrived — on time — greeted the manager, the cashier, and the blonde saleswoman; took the clothes tags and went to the fitting room where I — always — counted the tags.

What I didn’t know was that a customer had already entered the store. And the blonde girl was attending to him. He entered “my” fitting room and was using it. As a result, I went to another fitting room and started working.

A few minutes passed… And the Asian saleswoman arrived late. She greeted everyone, I could hear clearly from inside the fitting room… And she asked about me. Here is the dialogue I heard:

SHE — Where’s Juliano?

CASHIER — (PLAYING WITH HER) Inside the fitting room, stalling with that counting job… What a lazy guy!

SHE — Wait a minute, I’ll fix this now!

I smiled, quickly realizing what my friend had done — he was very playful — since I always, ALWAYS, used the same fitting room.

And the joke worked.

The girl quickly went to the fitting room WHERE WAS THE BLONDE SELLER’S CUSTOMER and frantically started knocking on the door:

SHE — Stop stalling!!! Stop messing around that we don’t have all day here, my friend!!!

As expected, the customer opened the door, very frightened:

CLIENT — Sorry, I didn’t realize I was changing so slowly…

SHE — (VERY CONCERNED) Sir !!! Sir, I’m sorry !!! I was trying to talk to my colleague, who is in the other fitting room!!! (TRYING TO OPEN THE DOOR OF THE FITTING ROOM WHERE I WAS) Ju! Talk to the customer here! Explain to him that I was playing with you!

I was quiet…

The customer, frightened, returned the clothes and left the store, without buying anything. And I finally got out of the dressing room, laughing a lot, just like all the other employees in the store.

Except for the Asian girl, of course.

I keep thinking that if this happened today, the girl might well be fired. But it was the beginning of the nineties. People were lighter, more tolerant… And they laughed more about life.

Too bad this spirit was lost.