Never Again

This is hell. Hell has literally frozen over, and now Danielle has to follow through with an ungodly number of empty promises made on these conditions.

Whoever looked at the forecast and decided it was still perfectly safe and acceptable to hold a football game in the middle of the worst cold snap of the year deserves a special place in this hell to burn—freeze?—for eternity. Danielle had hoped and prayed that it would get canceled today, so she could stay curled up in her weighted blanket and watch Christmas episodes from a bunch of random sitcoms while drinking hot tea. What other way to spend her day off from work?

But no, her mother roped (guilted) her into volunteering at the stadium to help earn tips that will pay off her sister’s show choir bills. And her mother only asks her to help out if she’s desperate for hands, and she knows the sacrifices her mother has made for her kids. It’s really the least Danielle could do. So, she sucked it up and waltzed her ass into the stadium at eight-thirty in the morning, looking like a twelve-year-old boy in all of her nylon, wool and polyester glory.

Never again, she promises herself. She says the same to her mother after every other time she gets dragged into volunteering, but this time, she means it.

The man standing before her, decked out in just about every article of winter gear with his team’s logo branded into each one, huffs again as the screen for the card reader glitches and goes dark. He keeps rapidly slapping his card against the tap-to-pay pad as if that’ll do anything.

“Sir, can you wait just a few seconds?” Danielle asks in the most convincing customer service voice she can muster with her numb face. She presses her hand-warmers against the black screen and hopes that they’re still hot enough to unfreeze whatever wires are keeping it from functioning.

The man huffs again. She thinks she can see ice crystals forming in the frail strands of grey mustache hairs peeking over his scarf. “Well, why isn’t it taking my card?”

Because you keep bitch-slapping the reader so quickly it doesn’t have a chance to figure out what hit it. Because for some reason two degrees Fahrenheit and a wind chill that makes it feel like negative-eight is a perfectly optimal temperature for playing football.

“Because it’s just so cold that the screens are not showing anything,” she says instead. “I really wish I knew why, but it’s been happening all day. We’ve had to use hand-warmers to get them to work again.”

Like the magic words to a long-forgotten spell, the card reader finally displays the prompt for what tip percentage to leave. The man resumes his assault on the poor machine and each hit is a fraction more aggressive than the last.

“Sir, you—It asks for you to select a tip before it charges the card,” Danielle says helplessly.

“But I don’t want to leave a tip. I just want to pay for my goddamn food,” he snaps back.

Never. Again.

“Then just tap the button that says, ‘No tip,’ and then it will process your payment.”

She’s aware that her smile is pulling at her lips but she’s too cold to feel the pain. She’s done her fair share of work in retail, and her current job as a receptionist also involves a lot of customer service skills. The wider the smile, the more she wants to wring his neck. He’s not even the worst customer she’s dealt with today. But this would be infinitely more tolerable if this didn’t feel like the ninth circle of hell. Or if she was being compensated. Or if her sister was old enough to suffer through this with her.

The card reader dings and the man gives one last annoyed huff before taking his cheeseburger away. The next customer is a tired-looking mother and her kid, so swollen with thick coats and wooly hats and scarves that he looks like a tick about to pop.

“I’ll have one hot chocolate and whatever draft beer you have,” the woman says, already presenting her ID.

The runner who’s been helping Danielle get food goes to get a cup of hot chocolate as she responds. “Sorry ma’am, but I’m afraid I can’t serve you any beer.”

The woman frowns. “But it’s not the fourth quarter yet. Are you already cutting people off?”

“No, ma’am. The beer lines froze. Nothing’s been coming out of the taps for half an hour now.”

The woman sighs and puts her ID away, fumbling with her wallet. “Two hot chocolates, then.”

Danielle tells the runner, and two hot chocolates are set down on the counter as the payment processes. The kid reaches forward with his mittened hands and wriggles his mouth out from underneath his scarf to take a sip. He grimaces and looks up at his mother. “Mommy, it isn’t hot. It’s just chocolate.”

The woman shoots a disapproving glance at Danielle, as if she is the winter goddess responsible for sucking out all the heat from anything that is supposed to emit even the smallest degree of warmth. Danielle wants to explain that it is so cold that the hot chocolate becomes lukewarm just ten seconds after being out of the giant plastic coffee urns, but the woman collects her kid and her own hot chocolate and walks away. She’s the last customer from this wave, and Danielle finally has a chance to breathe.

They’re halfway through the third quarter. Just three more hours of this bullshit, and then she can go to the car, blast the heat for the entire hour-long car ride home, and spend the rest of the day with her weighted blanket, sitcoms, and tea. One more quarter after this, then cleaning up and inventory, and then they’ll be free.

“This sucks,” the runner beside her mutters. She can’t remember his name, a volunteer pulled to help them from another group, but she does know he’s been saying that every five minutes. “How cold even is it?”

“Cold enough for the freezer to be warmer than it is out here,” Danielle deadpans, and she wishes it was an exaggeration.

“There is no way this is safe. I want to punch whoever thought having a game today was a good idea,” he says.

Danielle huffs out a humorless laugh. “Get in line, dude. But I’m more appalled at how many people decided to show up today. I mean, we didn’t really have a choice. They did.”

“I mean, I get it. If I weren’t working, I’d probably do the same. Fan loyalty, you know,” he says.

Borderline cult behavior, Danielle thinks, but she decides not to voice her opinions. She’s pretty sure he plays football for some college around here, and she is too tired, too cold, and too irritable to get into that argument with a man she doesn’t know and doesn’t care to know.

If not compensation, she deserves an award for the amount of restraint she’s showed today.

The door slams open, and the two sixteen-year-old volunteers tasked with lugging the coffee urns full of hot chocolate back and forth between the kitchen and the prep room drop a new batch onto the counter with a loud thump. Danielle’s mother follows closely behind them, exchanging her plastic gloves for real winter ones. She silently cusses her out for sticking her in the trenches while she gets to work in front of the hot grill all day, then remembers that she’s helping do this so her mother doesn’t have to spend as much money on show choir costumes and travel expenses. Of course, it would be fantastic if most people actually sympathized with them and left tips, but something is better than nothing, she supposes.

The first thing her mother says is, “Yeah, we’re never doing another game or event this late in the year.”

Glory hallelujah.

“The good news is that this is the last one we’re doing until March,” she continues. “How are we doing on hot chocolate?”

“We’ve got three sleeves of cups left,” Kenzie reports. Danielle is somewhat familiar with her, knowing that she’s a friend of her sister’s, but she’s been in college for the majority of the semester and can’t say she’s had much of a conversation with her aside from exchanging pleasantries. “But the hot chocolate goes cold the second we start pouring it.”

“Can confirm,” the runner helping Danielle pipes up.

Her mother spares a glance at Danielle before continuing to address the rest of the people working in the front. “Once the fourth quarter starts we won’t have that many customers,” she said. “Just… think warm thoughts and remember that you’re closer to being done than you were an hour ago.”

Danielle prays that the rest of the day passes quickly. She prays that there are enough customers to keep her busy, but not so many that she’s overwhelmed on top of cold and irritated. She prays that the numbers all add up after the first try when they count inventory. She prays that everyone puts their asses in gear so they can get the place cleaned up quickly. She prays the line to the bus that takes them to the parking lot isn’t long. She prays the car warms up quickly.

But she also knows damn well her luck isn’t that good. So of course the next batch of customers that come by are just as moody as she is. Of course the numbers are off and they have to count again, and the line to the bus is so horrifically long that they have to wait another hour just to get to their cars, and of fucking course the car does not, in fact, fully warm up until about twenty minutes into the drive. At least the clean-up went by quickly.

Old, jazzy Christmas tunes fill the silence that settles between Danielle and her mother. Danielle is so relieved that the day is done that she can’t find the energy to still be mad. She can finally feel her face again, and the promise of being the first into a boiling hot shower to wash away the stench of grease, hot chocolate, and cheap beer is enough to keep her temper at bay. Instead, she tries to pass the time by mentally queueing up a bunch of sitcom episodes to watch when they get home.

The second they merge onto the highway, her mother interrupts the smooth, whimsical voice of Michael Bublé. “Never again.”

Danielle shakes her head. “Never again.”