Ever notice how it's the little things in life that amuse us so much? More to the point, ever notice how it's the silly little idiocies in life that amuse us more than anything else? Well, this is not as much ''the little blog that could'' as it is ''the blog that enjoys going up the down escalator in your local mall.'' Will it have anything of real importance? No, probably not. But enjoy the ride never the less!

 
"Screw the sales, let's have a seance instead with all these candles!"

Yesterday (Thursday) was my first day working at Bentley, a store with a veritable cornucopia of carry-ons, loads of luggage, and scads of schoolbags and a bountiful booty of bookbags. I would add something with knapsacks, but I'm at a lack of quantitative, alliterative words starting with the letter "K". I'm lazy that way. Friday (today) was supposed to be my first day at Bentley, but they called me in and asked if I could work a 6-hour afternoon shift to help them with the new inventory stock they'd been shipped. Not one to pass up on money--er, work experience, I strolled over to the mall.

My first day did leave me in the dark, though. Literally.

As some of you reading this entry with candlelight, emergency laptop powerpacks, or else a computer harddrive being powered by a car battery or a generator hooked up to some poor sot on an exercise bike already know, there was a sudden lack of electricity. At first my manager and I were curious about the flickering lights in the store. Then it appeared that all the lights in the store decided to form a union and go on strike, since they all vanished. Bentley was plunged into darkness!!

Well...semi-darkness, actually, since right outside the store was a large skylight.

However, the rest of the mall went lights-out as well, which led customers and store employees to wander into the corridors with bewildered looks on their faces and asking themselves if April Fool's Day had come a little late this year. Sears wasted no time closing their security doors and locking hapless customers in with their merchandise and sales mannequins.

Eventually every store followed in suit, since it's rather useless to have customers browse your stock when your cash register and debit/credit machine are about as usefull as a "Let's Learn Mandarin!" book in central Africa. So those of us working at Bentley at the time idled around, waiting to see what had happened, and placing bets as to when the lights would come back on.

Sometime during this stint, one of the girls who had disappeared down the hidden bowels--er, windowless corridors of the mall to toss some cardboard boxes into the recycling bin reappeared. In a sense of perfectly macabre timing, she had been in the middle of the corridor when the lights went out, plunging her into pitch black with no real sense of direction, and she had spent the subsequent 10 minutes after fumbling & feeling her way in the darkess back to one of the exit doors.

Some people have all the fun.

And so began my first day at Bentley. I always like answering questions of 'how was it?' with colourfully evasive answers like: "Eventful." This was one of the first times I could truly say it was eventful, and not at all what I was expecting. At this rate, I'm half expecting to go into work tomorrow, and discover that a horde of crazed, rabid mongooses have been let loose into the airducts, and could crash into the store at any given moment. I don't really think I'd worry; I'd just lock them into the nearest carry-on.

But what about the 2 1/2 hours I actually spent working? Surely some of you are desperately seeking a means of getting so bored you can fall asleep and turn the tables on that pesky bout of insomnia you're suffering! Well, all in all, I was having deja vu flashes all over. Everything I was doing had been done at previous jobs beforehand. Stock work and inventory was my primary job working at Party City (now some patio warehouse...the times they are a'changing), and all my retail experience from working at Sunglass Hut filled in the rest of the blanks. I was quite pleased with myself for not floundering about and looking like a complete idiot. Many conversations were like this:

Manager: "Okay, we need to do inventory. Do you know how to read a SKU list?"

Me: ^-^ "Why, yes, I do!"

Manager: "Great. Now then, you have be careful opening all these boxes since we don't want to slice the luggage. Do you know how to slash cardboard boxes open with a matknife?"

Me: ^-^ "Do I?!"

Manager: "Great! Now then, some of the prices need to be changed. Do you know how to use this funny-looking pricing gun?"

Me: ^-^ (cradling the pricing gun) "Oh yes...poppa missed you...."

Manager: "Great! Now then, since we accidentally hired one too many of you new employees, we're going to have to let someone go. And we figured that the best and funnest way of doing that would be playing Russian Roulette, and the first person to die gets let go. You do know how to play that, right?"

Me: o.O "Um...."

Manager: ^-^ "Just kidding!"


Today's Lesson: the policy at Fairview Park Mall in Kitchener is that after 1 hour without any power to the mall, all the stores are declared officially closed, and the employees can go home early.



posted by Phillip at 6:56 AM