I spent five years of early freelance life working for Le Chateau, pouring one out today, still have bins of something like 150 old Chateau clothes in storage https://twitter.com/torontostar/status/1319629734343565314

One of my fave memories was in the first store I worked at when my coworker, who dealt drugs out of the store, started charging at me screaming he was going to kill me because I’d helped the girlfriend of a guy he was helping and taken credit for her sale

For some reason *I* was the one that got transferred out after that incident but it’s okay, I went to a better store. The next time I heard about him he was in the news for being involved in a club shooting and then shooting at a cop (he missed)

We once found several dead rats in one of our new clothing shipments. Swaddled that crate in plastic like a biohazard and spent at least an hour reflecting on how my life had brought me to this

The Polo Park store in those years was basically a cult, we had the most motley crew of staff who were joined at the hip and developed our own dialect and were generally jerks to customers because we really didn’t care about selling cocktail dresses

When customers asked me to try stuff on I’d just look at them, sigh, slowly put my hand out for their clothes and go “...suuure.” The weird part is customers didn’t even seem to mind, I think they expected Chateau staff to be snooty in those years

I gotta give a shout out to all the foot fetishists that used to come in there to “buy shoes for their girlfriends.” They’d ask us if we could try the shoe on to see how it looked. Sometimes they’d fool us once, but we usually figured them out pretty quick

My assistant manager for all these years was Extremely Hot (still is, she married one of our coworkers and hasn’t aged a day in 15 years) and every day she worked was a parade of mall security guys coming to talk to her to “check in and make sure we didn’t have security concerns”

I have a thousand stories about jerk customers but I often think about the guy who threatened to get me fired because I refused to stay on the phone keeping him company as he drove from the airport, to St. Vital, on *Boxing Day.* He showed up screaming at me for that.

Anyway, Chateau is dead, long live Chateau, it was a mind-numbing minimum wage job but also sort of a really fun time during a formative period of my life. I made some of the best friends ever and sometimes wish I could go back to when life was that simple.