A Forsley Feuilleton: An Open Letter To The Anti-Ginger Grocery Store Night Managers Across This Once Tolerant Nation

I know you are going to do with this letter what you did with all the others: throw it, while laughing, into the wastebasket labeled, “Letters From Fiery Tempered Firecrotch Ex-Employees.”  But I quit another Night Stocking job at another grocery store and have so much time and anger at my disposal that I feel it is my duty as a member of the minority group referred to as Redheads, Gingers, Rustys, Transparents, etc, which only makes up one-percent of the World’s population, to use this PANK column, A Forsley Feuilleton, to call you, Night Managers of grocery stores across this once tolerant nation, out as the Anti-Gingerists you are.

It’s true that Gingers aren’t the only Night Stockers you force out of bed in the middle of the day to jump up and down and chant back and forth at weekly store pep-assemblies.  And, under the pretense that we’re all condom avoiding Irish-Catholics, you may get away with making us Gingers stock the labor intensive baby-food aisle.  But there’s no reason we should always have to stock the poison & pesticide aisle after lunch.  The fumes cause us to puke up our cabbage and potato stew, and your claims that the curry, chow-mien, fried chicken, and enchiladas that my ethnically diverse co-workers eat are all harder to clean up is bogus.  Gingers need nourishment too, and I will not let you victimize me and my kind with these obvious and unbearable Anti-Ginger prejudices that you practice and propagate in every grocery store across the country.

In the American tradition of projecting imaginary integration and apathetic acceptance, I expect you to at least suppress your hatred towards us. . . but I guess tradition doesn’t matter to grocery store Night Managers because you all reveal your Anti-Ginger stance, bluntly, right from the start.  Even before getting hired as Night Stockers, we Gingers have to endure a demeaning interview.  If you’re the Night Manager conducting the interview, rather than using our birth name that appears on our application, you’ll call us “Red,” “Groundskeeper Willie,” or – if you’re feeling extra spiteful – “Ron Howard.”  And I haven’t got through a single interview without one of you offering me water while looking at my head or asking for a Cheeto while looking at my crotch.

Most of us Night Stocking Gingers have grown thick skin from surviving a childhood of terror – or maybe the thick skin is from surviving a childhood of sunburns.  Either way, we’ll usually ignore your insults at the interview and consider them failed attempts at humor and go into the training orientation with a positive attitude.  That positive attitude, though, will quickly turn negative when you repeatedly tell us to cheer-up, when we’re already cheerful.  Like all Gingers, I have naturally pale skin, meaning any heat or nervousness – both of which are produced by training orientations – will turn my skin from white to red within seconds.  You as well as I know the redness isn’t caused from a lack of cheerfulness, and targeting and exploiting the one Ginger at orientation for the laughs of our co-workers is degrading and unprofessional.

Your unprofessionalism then continues into every Night Stocking Ginger’s first week of work.  In addition to the baby-food and the poison & pesticide aisles, you Night Managers will usually dedicate the can & spice aisle to us.  It’s a hard aisle to work, and most of us Gingers will assume the new guy, naturally, has to work the hardest aisle. . . but a few more weeks will pass, we’ll adjust to the night shift, our brain fog will fade, and then we’ll realize that the can & spice aisle is dedicated to us as a sick joke: “that’s where the canned carrots and the ginger spice belong,” we’ll catch you chortling under your breath.

At this point, we Gingers have a choice: quit or adapt.  I usually quit, but a few times I tried to adapt by doing away with the red hair.  Because Gingers have such bright hair, if we’re going to dye it, black is the only option.  But black hair only makes our pale skin look paler and our true identity is always revealed.  So, unless we have a particularly tolerant Night Manager, shaving the red hair off is the only option.  And, from my experience, every grocery store has at least a half-dozen Night Stocking Gingers successfully disguising themselves as normal bald white people.

I don’t know why you Night Managers hate us so.  I’m sure it has something to do with working the graveyard shift too long.  Maybe you all have sensitive eyes and don’t like the effects that those florescent grocery store lights have on our reflective Ginger skin.  Maybe, on your nights off, the only quality show on television is South Park and you’ve seen that “Ginger Kids” episode, where Cartman provides evidence that Gingers don’t have souls, too many times.  Or maybe all the Gingers that end up taking these reclusive, slave-wage Night Stocker jobs are the angry, socially awkward types of Gingers – you know, ‘the redheaded stepchildren’ – that are violent, unreasonable, and generally insane.

But the reasons and causes behind your Anti-Ginger prejudice don’t matter.  It is intolerable and I want you Night Managers to know that this will not stand.  Everyday more and more of us are shaving our red hair off and infiltrating grocery stores across the country.  A revolution is in the works and soon we’ll ban together and rise like a Phoenix, burning you Night Managers alive with our fury.   Well. . . It might not go that far, but we’ll definitely get the all-black dress code that makes a mockery of our skin changed.

You’ve been warned,

Christopher Forsley