Monday came. I wore a white shirt and a pair of grey pants and got on bus number 7. Almost every seat was taken. The bus seemed to be a labor carrier, especially at that time of the morning. It picked up people with vacant faces and lunchboxes and water bottles from various locations of the city, places that I hadn’t seen before. At nine in the morning, they seemed to be saying, “Is it five yet?”
The bus reminded me of the large pickup trucks that brought unskilled workers from the neighboring villages to the city of Lucknow every morning. The vulnerable day laborers got off close to the coffee house, an important landmark in the city. They massed across the street to make themselves available to the city folks.
I remembered going to the city center to pick up a handful of workers in order to get my house painted or to get some other repair done. As I’d approach them, they’d surround me, desperate, two inches from face, begging to get hired. When I noticed someone looking especially miserable, I’d use that to exploit the wage. I would choose the one who agreed to work the most number of hours for the least amount of money. After being in the United States for a while, I hated myself for having done that.
On bus number 7, I was the one who was going to beg to be hired, I was the one who was vulnerable, I was the one who was going to be exploited.
I showed up at the store and after I had stood around for a few minutes, someone came up to me.
“What can I help you find?”
“I am here for an interview.”
“Oh, let me go get Mike.” He returned shortly and said, “He’ll be right out.”
A couple of minutes later, a middle-aged, pot-bellied, crew-cut, white man of average height came out with a blue clipboard in his hand.
“Hi, I’m Mike,” he said. “How are ya?” He extended his hand to shake mine.
“Fine, thanks. How are you?”
“Hungry! Haven’t eaten since morning. This is what you get for being in the retail business,” he said with a grin. I looked at him and thought about what he meant. Why did retail stop him from eating?
“Sorry you had to wait. Come on in,” he gestured for me to follow him.
He took me into a room full of large cardboard boxes, piled up to the ceiling on movable racks. Other boxes were crowded on the floor, stuffed with alarm clocks, batteries, wires, and other kinds of gadgets. A white computer table and a black swivel chair were tucked in a corner. Above the computer, on the desk, was a shelf that had a printer, several cables running in different directions, and a very small television that kept changing images every three seconds.
He climbed over the stuff spilling out of the boxes on the floor, and pulled out a chair. “Have a seat,” he said, and sat down on a step stool. As I looked around the room, he said, “Yeah, I know, but trust me, it’s not this messy all the time. I’m in the middle of putting up merchandise.” I gave him a smile and fixed my shirt collar for the interview.
He looked through my resume. “So, you’ve never worked in retail before, hmmm.” He looked up with a concerned face and said, “Do you know something about electronics?”
I answered, “I like them and I am sure I will learn more about them once I get to use them.”
He gave me a warm smile, and asked, “Can you hook up a wall phone?”
I wasn’t sure how a wall phone was different from any other phone, and what he meant by hooking it up. I wanted to say yes, but at the same time I didn’t want him to hand me a wall phone to demonstrate. I said, “I should be able to.”
He nodded his head in a slow motion and rubbed his index finger on his lower lip as if he didn’t believe me. His body language was not making me feel comfortable, but I was still confident that I could do the job. How hard could it be to sell a gadget, I thought? The customer walks in and asks for whatever he wants and the salesman hands him the product and takes his money—as simple as that.
He asked me some general questions about my integrity—what would I do if I saw an employee stealing, and had I ever stolen from my previous employers? After a few minutes of going through his notes, he flicked the clip on the clipboard with his thumb, and said, “Congratulations, you are hired. You will work at a different branch of this store.”
I asked, “What’s the salary like?”
“Well, this is not a salaried job. You get paid by the hour here, but if you work your way up and become a manager, you get a salary.”
“What’s the hourly pay?” I said.
“It can range anywhere between seven and fifteen bucks an hour. Depends how hard you work and how good a salesman you are.”
I had never worked on an hourly basis before, and I didn’t understand what he meant.
“When can I start?”
He said, “Your manager, Cindy, will give you a call and let you know.” He shook my hand, and gave me a white packet. “Here’s some reading material for ya.”
I left his office feeling happy that I had been successful in my first interview in America, although it was not the job of my choice. A couple of days later a very authoritative-sounding woman called my house and said, “Hi, this is Cindy. Is this Deepak?”
“Yes, it’s him.”
“I was calling to tell you that we are waiting for your background check. I will call you when I have your information and then you can start. In most cases it takes just under a week. But I am not sure how long it will be in your case, since it has to go through India.”
I told her I was anxious to work and would wait for her call. “Well, you’re gonna have to wait for the background check. I can’t let you start before that, alright?” I heard the sound of the phone receiver hitting the base as soon as I said okay. Once again, I started waiting. I felt helpless; it seemed like I had spent the last three months in America waiting—waiting to get my work permit, waiting to get better after falling sick, waiting for people to give me a job interview, and now waiting for this background check.
I called the store after a week. The woman who answered the phone said, “I don’t see anything on my fax machine. I will call you when I get your papers.” I waited for another week and called again to get the same answer. Cindy’s tone became less friendly every time I called.
Since I had never committed any crime, I started wondering why it was taking so long to get my background checked. After about five weeks, I got a call from the district office of the company. Someone named Lindsay called and said, “Is Deepak there?”
I had to ask her to repeat herself at least three times before I could make out that she was saying, “Is Deepak there?” She was from West Virginia with a mountain accent and pronounced there as theyur. When I said she was speaking to Deepak, she said, “Listen, I’ve been calling at your work in India but no one seems to be there.”
“What time do you call?” I asked.
“I call between eleven and three during the day.” I immediately knew why my store manager hadn’t received my background check papers. I tried to explain, “Lindsay, there is a ten-hour difference between India and the United States, people are sleeping when you call there.”
“Oh, really?” she exclaimed. Her tone reminded me of a time when I had told an illiterate farmer in India that a man had landed on the moon. He was just as surprised. After a few moments of awkward silence on the phone, Lindsay said, “Can you provide a local reference?”
“Yes,” I said and gave her a phone number of a local contact.
A couple of hours later, Cindy called and said I could start working the next day. I wondered why it took Lindsay so long to realize that there might be a reason why people in India weren’t answering her calls. I also wondered if the doorman there—who guarded the office by staying awake the whole night—ever thought it was eerie that the phone rang in the early hours of the morning, every day, for a whole month.
The next day I presented myself at the store, dressed in a light-blue button-down shirt and khakis. According to the manual that I had received after my interview with Mike, employees could only wear light-colored plain shirts and dark pants. The last time I had worn a uniform was in high school.
It was ten in the morning and the store had just opened. Cindy—I recognized her voice—was helping a customer. I stood in the television section and stared at one of the big screens on the wall. A few minutes later, Cindy walked up to me and said, “Hi, what can I help you find today, sir?”
“My name is Deepak, and I am looking for Cindy.”
“Oh, hi, Deepak,” she said and burst into loud laughter. “I am Cindy, I thought you were a customer.” She continued laughing. I smiled, and wondered what was so funny. “Alright, come on in.”
She took me to a backroom that looked neat and orderly—quite different from Mike’s. She gave me a black swivel chair to sit in and sat herself down on a similar looking seat.
She started flipping through some papers in a cream-colored folder. “Awright,” she said and pulled out what looked like my resume, “since I didn’t interview you, let me quickly go through your application and see what you’ve done before.”
“Okay,” I said. I noticed her eyes doing a run-through of my resume.
“Awrighty.” She put it back in the folder and said, “I’m gonna give you a form to fill out your available hours and days of the week.”
I looked at the sheet she handed me. It had several rows and columns, rows for days of the week and columns for hours of the day. I checked myself available for every hour and day the store was open. I handed back the sheet and she said, “Do you have any questions?”
“Yes, I do, actually,” I said.
“Go ahead.”
“Could you please explain the pay structure? I didn’t understand it very well in my interview.”
“Sure, it’s minimum wage plus commission,” she said. She pointed towards an employee. “That’s Jackie. She makes about twelve bucks an hour.” She looked at me and smiled and said, “So if you can sell like her you can make as much as her or more, there’s no limit.”
She smiled at me again, and pointed towards a different employee and said in a hushed voice, “That’s Ron, and he doesn’t make more than seven bucks an hour. You know why?” I didn’t know why, but I made a guess and said, “He is not as good a salesman.”
“Exactly, and he is on his way out,” she said and smiled in a way that gave me the impression that she was trying to drive the point home to me. There was something strange about her smile; I couldn’t tell if she was in a good mood and being nice to me, or if she was angry. She spoke with a sharp and commanding voice.
“May I ask,” I swallowed and said, “another question?”
She said, “Of course!”
“Since, this job is so much about selling, will I get some training?”
“Oh, yes. You will spend your entire first week sitting in this chair taking certifications online.” She turned around and put her hand on a desktop computer. “The company is very strict about training; we don’t let our employees go on the sales floor until they are confident about the products we sell.”
“Okay,” I said and took a deep breath. I was already feeling overwhelmed by the pressure to perform, the number of things to learn, and the need to build a rapport with my coworkers and, most importantly, with my boss. I wondered if there was a training manual for an Indian coming to work for the first time in America.
Cindy rose from her chair and said, “Let me first give you a tour of the store and introduce you to the employees.” She walked out of the backroom into the main part of the store, and I followed. She started from the entrance and pointed towards a wall and said, “This is our cell phone wall. We sell prepaid phones and contract phones and carry products from three different companies.”
She moved on to the next section while I listened carefully. “This is our home entertainment section. We sell small boom boxes and home theater systems.” We shifted to another part of the store and she pointed to some products that looked like long, thin antennas, like the ones installed on trucks.
“This is where we keep radio scanners, radar detectors, and CB radios.” She spent less than fifteen minutes walking me around the store and pointing at what seemed like fifteen hundred products—many of which I hadn’t seen or heard of before.
Then she introduced me to Ron, an overweight, middle-aged, light-skinned, half-bald, African American man with a goatee. Ron was carrying a box full of wires and batteries. He put the box down, shook my hand, and said, “Hi, nice to meetcha.” His voice was deep and hoarse. He wore a well-ironed navy-blue shirt that had three pens clipped on its pocket.
“Nice to meet you, too,” I said and smiled at him, but Ron didn’t smile back. He picked up his box and walked away.
Cindy gestured for the other employee to come to us. “Jackie, this is our new employee, Deepak. Deepak, this is Jackie. She’s been here the longest.” Jackie was a young-looking African American woman who was quick to shake my hand. She gave me a big friendly smile. I returned the smile and said, “Nice to meet you, Jackie.”
Although everyone seemed cordial, I got the feeling that they were trying to glance at me when I was not looking. I had had that happen at my previous jobs in India too—people trying to check out the new employee, his behavior, mannerisms, style of dressing. I didn’t have anything in common with Cindy, Ron, or Jackie. There were strange vibes between us. I had to learn to speak like them, to understand the jobs they did, to coexist and be friends. I had to learn a whole lot more than any other American who just wanted to get a job in retail.
“Come on back, Deepak!” said Cindy as she started walking towards the backroom. “Let me set you up on this computer so you can start taking your certifications.” She logged me onto the company’s website and said, “Here you go, you’re all set.” She got up from her chair and gestured with her hands for me to sit down.
I smiled and took the chair. She said, “I’ll be out front. If you got any questions, come get me, awright?”
I started reading and answering questions about various electronics—satellite radios, wireless home security systems, digital weather thermometers, digital answering machines, digital baby monitors, digital shower radios, digital metal detectors, digital radio scanners, digital this and digital that. There was a lot to know, and so much to remember. As I read about the products and their uses, I wondered why people in America wanted to listen to the radio while they showered, why they wanted to find buried pieces of metal in their backyards, why they left their infants and babies in another room and then monitored them with the help of electronic gadgets, why they wanted to listen to conversations between police officers or firefighters on their radio scanners.
Cindy walked in while I was staring at the computer screen, puzzled with all these thoughts. “Deepak, you got any questions?”
I looked at her, smiled, took a deep breath, and said, “I am okay, thanks!”
After a week of sitting in the backroom and going through hundreds of products, their features, technical specifications, and accessories, I was formally done with the training. When I finished my last module, a message popped up on the computer screen: Congrats! Now you are ready to answer any questions that your customers may ask. It felt good to see that, but I wasn’t sure if I was ready to tackle the customers.
It wasn’t that difficult to read about the products on the computer and answer questions by picking an answer out of five possible choices. I had the uneasy feeling that customers were not going to offer me multiple-choice questions.