Published in Crossfire #9 2003 and lip #9 Spring 2005

At the age of nineteen I became a granny. Perhaps it was a little premature, but I was not alone. There was nary a blue-rinse among the staff of the Lifeline Retail Shop in rural Victoria where I volunteered for ten months in during my year-long break from study. We were op shop grannies in name only, unlike the genuine senior citizens who tottered about at our rival store, St Vinnies. But I soon discovered that while Vinnies may have resembled an old age facility, the Lifeline Shop was more like a mental asylum.

I arrived for training one Monday afternoon along with two other new recruits, husband and wife Peter and Daphne. I had never met these two but, being a small town, I recognised their names. They had previously owned the fruit shop behind Target, until one day they abruptly closed it, never to reopen. The local paper ran an interview with Rochelle, a bewildered employee who had arrived at work only to find it closed down. She had not been warned, a fact made all the more curious given that Peter and Daphne were not only Rochelle’s employers, they were her parents.

This fruity couple and I were greeted by Shop Coordinator, Tina and her Assistant Coordinator, Jan. We stood around chatting for a while, Peter marveling at the quality of the goods for sale.

‘I mean, to look at your clothes, Tina, you wouldn’t know they were from an op shop,’ he said while Tina uncomfortably tried to explain that they were actually from Target.

Next we were given a guided tour of the shop – the purpose of each rack, the cupboard out the back where we were to store our bags, the big calico bin for clothing donations, the location of the tea and coffee and cheap biscuits. Tina showed us how to use the cash register, a cranky old Casio, giving us a demonstration of how to change the receipt roll (a technique I was destined never to master). She showed us how to fill out the ‘appro’ book so that we could take goods home and pay for them later. She showed us how to do the end-of-day report, and how to fill out a lay-by form. The thought of having a lay-by at an op shop seemed ridiculous given that the average price of anything was probably three dollars. Tina showed us where lay-bys were kept in the back room. Most were months old.

Shifts were three and a half hours long, and Tina and Jan ran us through a typical day. When customers were in the shop, we were to assist them and work the till. If we were ever to work with Polly we were to operate the till ourselves at all times, as Polly had a fear of handling money. If there were no customers, we could keep ourselves busy by dusting shelves and tidying racks. A tidy rack had all coat hangers facing the same way and evenly spaced. Tina demonstrated how this could be achieved by having each hanger a finger-width apart. There was always something to do, Jan and Tina assured us, but we were welcome to read a book to pass the time.

‘Ada brings in her knitting,’ said Jan.

We were asked to read and sign a book that outlined store policies and safety procedures and to do so every six weeks. Lastly, Jan and Tina had a few words to say about shoplifting.

‘It does happen, even in an op shop,’ said Tina. ‘One man came in and tried on a pair of jeans in the changing room, and after he left we realized that he’d swapped them and left his old ones behind. He had – dirtied himself, so Jan and I had to put them straight in the bin out the back,’ she said, pursing her lips.

A few customers were known suspects, and we were instructed to keep a close eye on them. One of these was Bookman. Bookman, we were told, had a penchant for secreting books inside his jacket and leaving the shop.

‘He comes in every week,’ said Jan, ‘and steals books. But then occasionally he brings in these really big donations, so maybe he thinks he’s entitled to.

I was assigned to alternating Tuesday and Wednesday morning shifts. On Tuesdays I worked alongside Shirley who, like Jan, was also an Assistant Shop Coordinator. Sprightly but wrinkled, Shirley already had close ties with the geriatrics at St Vinnies and liked to engage in industry gossip. Her favourite topic was the new manager, who was stirring things up and causing ripples. One of Shirley’s friends went in every week to get a basketful of toys to take home and clean. Apparently this new manager was getting in her way, imposing new rules that made things more difficult.

‘She gets the toys looking real nice,’ said Shirley. ‘She’s been doing it for years but now she might stop because of this woman.’

In fact Shirley liked any kind of gossip. She lived in a housing commission area known as the Bronx, and knew personally the subjects of every scandal published in the local papers. She was particularly knowledgeable on the Dirtiest House in Australia, which had featured on a major current affairs program several years earlier. She claimed she could smell it from her house up the street.

On Wednesdays I worked with Jan. An ex-English teacher Jan was laying in wait of her 55th birthday so she could access her superannuation. In the meantime she worked 24 hours a week at Lifeline in order to claim Centrelink benefits. Her favourite topics of conversation were the number of months left until her 55th birthday, and her hypochondriac daughter Hayley, who was completing Year 12 at the young age of sixteen. ‘I had to put her in school when she was three because I didn’t know what to do with her,’ said Jan. ‘She taught herself to read when she was two.’

Jan’s inner schoolteacher manifested itself on a regular basis. Once when she asked me to make a sign for the records, I wrote in thick texta on scrap cardboard ‘REKKIDS 50c’. The sign was promptly replaced for fear that an impressionable child might come in and have a spelling meltdown.

Another time we had something of a porn epidemic that had Jan rattled. It started with two copies of the board game, Sexual Trivia, arriving at the shop from the warehouse at Geelong. One of these went in the bin, but I managed to rescue the other for my collection. On the same day I was standing behind the counter looking at the items under the glass cabinet, when I noticed something odd about a keyring. This keyring, which incidentally doubled as a shoehorn, had a picture of a girl in a red and white striped shirt. Tilt it slightly, however, and she was naked.

‘Have you had a proper look at this?’ I asked Jan, rocking the keyring back and forth in front of her. ‘In the bin,’ she said. ‘Or take it if you want it.’ Of course I did.

It ended with a Penthouse jigsaw puzzle. One of the staff members, Pam, loved doing jigsaws, and would take home any that came into the shop to see if they had all of their pieces. When she had finished the puzzle she would put a sticker on the box saying ‘Complete’ or a note of how many pieces were missing.

I arrived at work one morning to find the Penthouse jigsaw in the back room, a picture of a woman lying on cushions on the side. Everything below her neck was covered by a large Penthouse logo. Pam had apparently checked the puzzle, because there was a sticker on the box that said ‘Complete Filth’. I was delighted until Jan said I couldn’t have it.

‘We are putting it in the bin,’ she said firmly. For this particular piece of rubbish, however, she was using a special technique. She opened the box and took out a handful to demonstrate.

‘Every week we are putting a handful of pieces in the bin,’ she said, lifting the lid and tossing them in. ‘That way, if someone goes through the bin they won’t find the whole puzzle.’

Eventually I got bored with work at the op shop, and slightly frightened of Jan’s strange take on the world. One day I caught myself counting down the minutes until the end of my shift – starting at nine thirty. The job also became quite stressful after a rift developed between Jan and Shirley. Tina had quit her job, leaving Jan in charge, and apparently Shirley had trouble taking orders from the ex-English teacher. She defected to St Vinnies, saying that the new manager wasn’t all that bad compared to Jan. Working with both of them I of course had to listen to every bit of the saga, and when it finally got too much for me I left and took up yoga instead.

I feel now like I’ve done my op shop time. When I retire I intend to take up a different activity, like baking slices for fetes, or doing jigsaw puzzles.