The Salesgirl, the Customer and me at the Clothes Fitting Room
Sometimes it is not good to jump to conclusions…
At Christmas 1989, I worked for the first time in my life at a clothing store. This store, in particular, was extraordinary: it was part of a rapidly growing store chain, with colorful and cheerful clothes that pleased the vast majority of the Brazilian public. That made it always very crowded, which was great for our pockets… But it was not only in this respect that this store was exceptional.
Our team was fabulous.
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.
