West Coast Karen was cleaning up some cheese. This is a term we use for scraping and re-wrapping cheese that has been cut for awhile and hasn't sold. It's not a big deal, really- mold and cheese go together like wild yeast and sour beer, after all- but occasionally we get a piece that is either too small or too damaged to just re-wrap, in which case we clean it up and cut it very small for our sample basket. This is a basket of random pieces and weird sizes where people can get something to snack on while they shop or just a taste of something they have never tried before. Anyway, WCK has taken to referring to these as our Baby Cheeses, which has led to jokes about how we ought to make the basket into a manger, and that "Cheeses is the reason for the season", etc. Yes, we are easily amused in the cheese department.
A good thing, too, because the stress level can be quite high for some people, and were it not for the endless amusement at silly jokes I fear Sven might show up with an automatic weapon one day. There is much tension, you see, between he and another employee. The kind that is unspoken but that I am certain could be cut with a knife on some days. This other employee, I think I'll call her DeeDee, has been in the department for longer than Sven. Longer than any of us, actually, except for Barbara, who is the Big Cheese (and wine, for that matter) and has been working for the Local Grocery for over twenty years. Anyway, DeeDee and Barbara ran the department with only one other person for about five years before Sven arrived, and they developed the kind of shorthand that people do when they build something together. They also built a system that was rather, um... fucked up. But since it developed gradually, they all understood it perfectly and it seemed totally normal to them. So, along came Sven, and a couple other new people, who were trained in yet remained bewildered by this system, and they eventually developed their own system.
This system is just fine for Big Cheese, because she just wants things to get done and has avoided a position in management because she has no desire to tell anyone what to do or how to do it. DeeDee, however, is pissed. She trained Sven to do things her way, he discovered that it didn't work as well on his shifts (mostly weekends, which are extremely busy), and he resents her for "trying to control him."
Yep. This is where I work. Sven will go through the whole cheese case, rearranging and straightening and beautifying the display to his satisfaction, and then he will walk away, and Barbara will go behind him and change it. This is much more amusing/infuriating on the one day that they work together. As a person who should be spending a good deal of their time talking about and selling wine, it is quite discouraging to spend twice as long as I should have to cutting the cheese (heh heh- I said "cutting the cheese"- see how easily amused I am?) because they are spending half the day doing and undoing each other's work. I should add that these two are both well into their forties, and well past the age where childish behavior is comprehensible, much less acceptable.
The good news is that their crazy makes West Coast Karen's crazy seem so much more charming.