Think Like Luggage, Massage Like Turkey-Handler
Despite probably every employee's wild hopes, the mall remained open today and did not close early due to any possible "Kill Power Now" moments. The city's been turning off various city grids for 2-3 hours at a time to help relieve the stress of power consumption as the province gets its energy supply back in working order. Scuttlebutt had it that at around 3pm, the mall's grid would go down, and thusly the mall would close early. However, the mall had other ideas. In discussing it with the city officials, the mall officials managed to ensure the mall's electrical grid would stay up and running until 6m. So everything closed only an hour earlier than usual. Yet this goes to show how much political power a mall has in a city these days.
And here we all thought commercialism was losing its clout!
Ah, I had all but forgotten what it's like to have your ankles scream, "Damn you! If I were your mouth, I'd spit upon you for the hideous torment you're putting me through!" But when you're standing or walking very short distances for roughly 8 hours on end, your feet tend to get rather abusive. On a
silver lining note, it becomes almost euphoric when you at last sit down in a recliner chair for an hour or so and let your legs rest.
Most of the day was spent getting the store kiosk I will be working at operational. Our kiosk appeared almost magically overnight (and to an extent, it did), which had a few mall-trotters pausing for a moment and blinking their eyes as if they also expected to see the Scarecrow skipping down the promenade humming "If I only had a brain..."
One person asked me how we had managed to get our kiosk up and nearly-operational without any consumers noticing. It was at this point I informed him that we had in fact gone to such lengths to ensure privacy for the kiosk's construction, and surprise everyone too. Days beforehand, we had secretly killed all the power to southern Ontario, taking out part of the US' power supply too, which forced the mall to shut down and get everyone else to leave. So in essence the power blackouts were our doing; we really wanted to surprise the people!
That guy did seem rather surprised. Though not overly impressed. I don't know why....
All this aside, it's a rather amusing adventure to open up a kiosk full of schoolbags and backpacks, and have a cash till that lacks not only the debit/credit card reader, but any sort of float either. For about half an hour, we could only accept cash--and exact cash, at that. Nobody bought from us during this time. I felt dejected and abandoned. But then we got a lot of fun cash for out till, so suddenly it was "Sorry, Cash Only." And the customers flocked to us...occasionally.
The rest of the day was spent idling around, learning a cash system not so different from previous jobs, and stuffing backpacks with paper. Yes, you read that right. To showcase just how full our packs can get (read: how much abuse they can take in terms of overloading), we need to stuff 1 of every floor model to the brim with large amounts of semi-crumpled newsprint paper.
"Yet how much paper could possibly be needed to fill a schoolbag?" you may ask.
Surprisingly, a ridiculously large amount. This paper needs to be crammed wall-to-wall, so to speak, in the bag, so if you hit it, the bag loses very little of its inflated form. The short is we needed to have our display schoolbags double as punching bags. So I spent countless hours today (and 5 hours last night, to boot) grabbing freshly-crumpled newsprint, and ramming it into the hitherto undiscovered depths of countless bookbags.
I did not have any sort of gentle touch in doing this, which makes me fearful of every being asked to stuff a Thanksgiving or Christmas turkey one day. Knowing my luck, these old "ram the hell out of the schoolbag" techniques will come back to me like a bad habit, and I'll take that handful of breaded stuffing, and shove it so far up the ass-end of turkey that my still-clenched fist will suddenly explode from the neck stump, resembling some horrific 6 year-old's imitation of an Alien chestburster.
Come to think of it, this might suddenly be the easiest way out of having to do any kitchen work at holiday gatherings ever again....
Today's Lesson: it takes a surprising & respective 5 minutes to stuff the average backpack full of crumpled wads of newsprint. If it's a larger almost hiking-sized pack, 7-10 minutes on average.
posted by Phillip at 7:20 PM
