A Good Thing That Happened to Me Today

It was around midday, after my first break, but still hours before my shift ended, and I was pushing a huge, heavy flat full of backstock into one of the storage rooms. This particular room had a door with a keypad, so naturally it wouldn't stay open on its own, and you were forced to tug the cart through using your back to prop the door. Unfortunately, my flat was so big and so cumbersome that I could only steer it in by pushing it, and thus could not keep the door open. As I struggled to overcome this obstacle, I spotted someone in the room across the way. I think his name is Aaron. He's roughly my age, I would guess, although my month at Target has taught me that people are often a completely different age than they appear. People I take to be in high school are married with three kids. It's scary, really.

Anyway, I called out to Aaron, asking him if he could do me a favor and hold the door open for me. He was really nice and obliging about it, and hurried over to help. As he leaned back against the door (no doubt praying that with all my swerving I would somehow manage to avoid crushing his feet with the flat), he joked about how difficult the flats are to handle. When I finally got the cart and myself fully inside the room, I thanked Aaron profusely, and he grinned and headed back to finish his work.

After I had dumped the flat and put all of the product away and was walking by the room where Aaron had been, I saw that he had the door (identical to the one he had held for me) propped open with a fire extinguisher. I immediately felt like kind of a bonehead; here I was calling for help like some silly damsel in distress when I had been perfectly capable of propping the door open and passing through all on my own.

I know this may not seem like much now, but at the time it struck me as very kind that Aaron hadn't merely yelled back in reply to my request that I could just prop the door. I don't know about you all, but I certainly appreciate people like that who don't feel the need to point out things that might make other people feel stupid or embarassed. And although I did feel like that later when I figured everything out for myself, it still made me smile to remember that instead of a dull fire extinguisher for a door prop, I got a living, breathing person who made my afternoon.