"By midafternoon, my hands are sufficiently caramelized with THC resin to merit ejection from a major league pitcher’s mound. Rubbing my thumb against my forefingers rouses little rat turds of hashish. There’s probably enough intoxicating filth that gnawing my fingertips would affect my mood, but I don’t nibble them, taking seriously the house prohibition against dealers getting high on the job. Though other employees gripe about the policy, I hardly need a hit of anything. Simply working here makes me feel, in the worst possible way, as if I’m stoned to the limits of my capacity. The mere act of weighing the product, which must be done with ticklish exactitude, to the hundredth of a gram, while the customer rails at you—”Big buds! What’s with all the shake? I’m not paying for that stem!”—is an occasion for nervousness and paranoia of the first order. A third or so of the customers buy hash, most of it cheap stuff, which is hard as a boot sole and requires a kitchen knife to apportion. If you don’t nail a perfect gram on the first chop, you have to make the weight by laboriously shaving brown flour into the scale pan while the customer volubly wonders who let this fumbling idiot behind the bar. Compounding my professional stress is the computerized inventory system, which, as a prophylactic against embezzlement, is finely tuned to track near-atomic quantities of product that might go missing. (For example, the system builds in a standard deduction for the sticky crumbs of hash residue that cling to the edge of the kitchen knife.) It’s like working at a Starbucks where the customers are cranky zombies, where a latte costs fifty bucks, and where a stray speck of coffee grounds falling underfoot will probably mean an ass-chewing from your superintimidating manager."