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!

 
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

 
"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

 
"Luggage? This entire thing was about luggage?"

I was horrified today. As many of you may recall, I have spent countless bits of nowhere waxing ecstatic about the wonders of having so much damned spare time on my hands. I've always adored having more time than I knew what to do with, and especially loved slipping into a lethargic coma-like state due to all those hours. Yet today, that has all come to a crashing end.

Because starting Friday, I get to sell luggage.

Well...not luggage, per say. The store in question is a retailer by the name of "Bentley", and I get to join the ranks of the few, the proud, the people with paychecks. So instead of my usual passtime of sitting around in sheer boredom, I now get to dance down the mall with backpacks and schoolbags, lift high the might name of the carry-on, and lovingly fondle leather briefcases when no one's looking.

I have no more expansive leisure time. I have no opportunity to be driven into a spiralling madness by boredom. And I couldn't be happier. Why am I so willing to give up all this luxurious freedom? Because when you strip it all away, it comes down to the money. And my need thereof it.

In other news, I have searched the Internet high and low, as well as a number of book store cooking sections, and so far I can say that I have found nothing that would imply there is such a thing as gnu pâté. Perhaps any aspiring chefs out there would like to revolutionize the cooking world be creating this new and innovative hors d'eouvre...and then sell it at exorbantly high prices.

Today's Lesson: sometimes it takes a little patience and a little luck before things start to happen, and sometimes it takes a lot of patience and a little luck. Other times all it takes is a rubber chicken and a suit of armour.





posted by Phillip at 1:30 PM

 
Don't Hold Your Breath (Actually, You Might Want To....)

There’s an old saying that states: home is where the heart is. Happily this is only a figure of speech, otherwise I’d be either dead or a delicious little brainteaser for physicians the world over. The last few days have seen me visit Toronto, which remains my favourite place be. If there ever was a city I loved being a part of, Toronto was and still is it.

Whenever I return to Kitchener on the Greyhound bus, I always look like a lost puppy as I whimper and paw at the window as the downtown buildings and towers pass me by. It’s garnered me some strange looks on my return trips, but hey, it’s their fault for sitting next to me when there was perfectly good and vacant seat in the row in front of me.

It was a last-minute, spur-of-the-moment trip, born of whimsical fancy and the fact that I really didn’t have anything else better to do for a weekend. Friends of mine were going, invited me along, I said sure, why not. Ideally I would have been a surprise at a gathering of friends in Toronto…but we had not counted on everyone else being busy.

So surprise! I was in Toronto this weekend!

(On a related note, I’m currently wearing a black, short-sleeved shirt with a pocket on the left sleeve, and a pair of blue jeans that desperately need to be washed tomorrow. In case any of my friends who didn’t even know I was in Toronto decide to inflict gratuitous bodily harm upon me for this, you can use that list of what I’m wearing when you need to ID me at the morgue.)

But much fun was had in Toronto. Food was eaten. Anime was watched. Soap was purchased. Hours were spent on the phone with Mel, and my friends & I took random turns at getting her to blush profusely. There was also the unexpected boon of Toronto hosting it’s “A Taste of the Danforth” celebration, which in essence is a very long street party (leisurely touring it may take 3 to 4+ hours from one end to the other) with live entertainment and a lot of food, mainly Greek.

Yet in the end I had a Shih-tzu to return to, and a room to reventilate since it was a rather muggy weekend and my room had both its door and window shut closed the entire time. It’s always nice to come back to 3 hyperactive puppies who are so excited to see you that they can’t decide if they want to lick your face or pee all over you.

What I didn’t like returning to, however, was a most horrifically repugnant aroma. It was supposed to be lasagna. I emphasise the words “supposed to be.” This was like the lasagna of the living dead. It didn’t taste too bad when I sample it, but the repulsive scent it’s left behind has the same sort of effects you see after feeding someone pureed Brussel Sprouts and then forcing them onto a roller coaster. (Or showing them the Batman & Robin movie.)

It’s almost like having my own personal Bog Of Eternal Stench that I never wanted!

My stomach is making noises that weren’t meant for this earth. The scent itself is offensive to all the laws of nature. I half expect to see neighbours dropping dead where they stand if they stand downwind of the patio doors in their backyards. So as I write this little bit of nowhere, I’m holed up in my room with the fan blowing in my face, praying that the horrific burned-to-a-crisp stench does not manage to slip in beneath the crack of my door and further nauseate me.

My heart still is in Toronto. And after the putrid smell that greeted me when I returned to Kitchener, I think perhaps I should have my olfactory senses in Toronto instead.

Today’s Lesson: horribly burned & mangled lasagna smells quite different from a horribly burned & mangled kettle.


posted by Phillip at 5:56 PM