Folderol

As a former employee of the Gap, I was interested and horrified to read this psychotic Fake Trend piece in the Wall Street Journal, which tells a scary story of the "legions" of former Gap clerks who are afflicted with a strange kind of Post Traumatic Folding Disorder that causes them to compulsively fold everything in sight.  According to the article

"Gap Inc. says it has trained "hundreds of thousands" of Gap store employees in the art of folding since the late 1980s.
Along the way, legions of retail grads have spent countless hours neatly folding T-shirts and jeans and stacking them on tables and shelves.
Now, their peculiar idea of perfection is straining marriages and leading to bizarre behavior ranging from buying clothes based on an item's foldability to straightening up sloppy displays while shopping."

I worked at the Gap for something like five years I think.  Not continuously-- I started when I was a Junior in high school, quit when I got mono, went back when I needed money to pay for whatever it was I spent money on in high school (fast food and Compact Discs?), quit when I went to college, went back for summers, went back when I was broke during the school year, and finally quit unceremoniously and for the last time when I was stressed out about exams.  This pattern lasted between I think 1997 and 2002-- I worked in three different stores.  And yes, I can now fold a mean pair of "denim" if I absolutely need to.  By which I mean I can do it if it's a fucking matter of life and death, so if it isn't please don't ask me to fold shit for you.  Until the day comes when my folding skills can somehow stave off the destruction of the planet Earth, my clothes will be in a crumpled pile covering my bedroom floor, thank you.   

The obvious and overlooked thing about this (by the way completely made-up) article is that, of all the annoying and often degrading things a person must do as a Gap employee, the absolute worst of all of them is FOLDING.  It is a thankless, boring, and truly sisyphean task.  And also: BORING.  It takes forever and you're finally making some progress and then some horrible person comes along and knocks your whole pile over and it's like you never even started.  When I worked at the Gap, I came up with a million ways to get out of doing the folding thing at all.  My specialty was walking around sort of rubbing the clothes in a way that I imagined made it look like I was folding them.  I figured if anyone asked me why none of the clothes I was supposed to fold were remotely folded I could just say they were perfect a minute ago until some bitchy customer ruined the whole thing.  (Not sure if this fooled anyone or not.)  The idea that a person's time in the retail trenches could make them "unable to go shopping without automatically spending 10 or 15 minutes refolding messy T-shirt piles in stores," as the Journal article claims, is insane to me.

That's not to say that I didn't pick up a few things from working at the Gap. The company spent so much time teaching us all about shoplifters as well as trying to catch us-- the employees-- in various forms of theft, including something called "Time Theft", that stealing became a fascination of mine.  The fact that our corporate overlords trusted us about as much as they would trust your average crook-- but surely not as much as they would trust actual proven rich-person criminals like Leona Helmsley or Cindy McCain-- made me obsessed with the idea of taking them down.  In other words: I'm working, but I'm not working for you.

I spent many of my zoned-out folding hours trying to devise the best possible way to steal from the company in the hopes of DESTROYING it from the inside.  The thing is that shoplifting from the Gap is actually really easy-- ask me sometime and I'll tell you exactly how to do it-- but it's running a successful ongoing SCAM without eventually getting caught that is trickier.  You could run a return scam, sell register tape on the black market, be the inside-man for a shoplifting ring... there were many possiblities, and even though I was never going to actually try any of them because I am really just not that kind of guy, it was my number on on-the-job fantasy.  Like I say, if the company was going to treat me like a criminal anyway, it wasn't such a leap to imagine myself as one.

I think a lot of my co-workers were thinking along the same lines, because every now and then, the Gap Secret Police, known as "Loss Prevention," would show up from Corporate and take someone into the back office and that would be the last we'd ever see of that person.  Hopefully people all got assigned to laundry-folding duty in prison.  At least allow them that small pleasure.