My boss is a little weird sometimes.

Don’t get me wrong. I like Mrs. Lee well enough as a human being. She’s friendly, and when we still had a Starbucks she’d go on a frappucino run from time to time when it was hot. But there is a fundamental challenge in our relationship, which is the fact that she doesn’t share a language fluency with anyone at the store other than her husband and the computer techs–i.e. anyone who does the day-to-day work of the place.

Now, I don’t begrudge her this. English is hard; I have often said that I would never have learned it if it weren’t my first language. Nevertheless, this presents a problem. Explaining anything to her is an agonizingly slow process of trying to find the intersection of words she knows and words which describe what’s going on.

The frequency with which this comes up increased drastically in April, when we “upgraded” our point of sale system. (Whether or not this was actually an upgrade is a topic for another day.) Mrs. Lee helps out at the counter sometimes when it’s busy, and suddenly there was a new, not terribly intuitive interface for her to deal with. And because it was busy, we didn’t really have time to explain it properly. (She is old enough that computers and the common patterns of using them are not a familiar part of her life, as is everyone at work besides me.) She picked up the basics–she’s not dumb–but it’s reduced the amount of actual work she’s able to do with us.

So she finds other things to do. Like turn off the heat seal labeler, which is a 370° mini-press we use to put customers’ names in their shirts. She does it to save energy, which is valid, but it drives us batty because the thing takes ten minutes to heat up again, which both is a waste of our time and also negates any energy savings. We’ve given up on explaining this for the reasons given above. She also tries to organize things, which is always terrifying because a lot of my job relies on things being in the right places and knowing what those places are. (Especially on Saturdays, when a) it’s really busy and b) the pickup schedule changes at midday, necessitating a lot of fast reorganization.)

One day we had a queue of baskets of clothes waiting to be marked, as is sometimes the case when it’s been busy. In fact, we had just filled one and started a new one, so there was a basket on the end with a single order (in a bag) in it. I can only guess that Mrs. Lee was trying to arrange the empty baskets, and saw that one on its own. It was almost empty, and didn’t yet have a tag with a range of order numbers on it, but . . . there was a bag in it. I saw her consider this, but got distracted by a customer. When I turned back around, she had moved that basket to be in line with the queue of empties, but taken the bag out and placed it carefully on the floor where the basket had been in use a moment ago.

Er, well, okay. I put it back, put the new order in it, and made an order number tag. Mrs. Lee didn’t seem to notice or mind, and I went about my business. (Technically her business, I guess.) Under normal circumstances I like having things clear and explained, but sometimes, you just have to keep doing your job.