Survivor: Back to School
The weekend has come and gone, and finds me...alive. Somehow. Defying the odds. Though in all honesty, Sunday almost destroyed us. And by us, I mean collectively as a store. A line-up of 8 people that never shortened and only grew longer for 4 out of the 5 hours we were open; messy customers; bitchy customers; did I mention how horribly messy the store was made every 2 minutes after we just finished cleaning it?
If I may be allowed to continue with the last little bit of nowhere's analogy of Aliens, I would consider the business we did on Saturday to be that period of time where the Alien facehugger falls off you. Business was brisk but not horribly busy, and the customers were pretty decent all around. I thought we were going to survive unscathed after all. I thought we were in the clear. After the proverbial facehugger was gone, I thought nothing bad could happen.
Cue Sunday...and that sudden, explosive "Gyaaaarg! It's tearing a not-very-sexy hole through my sexy chest and wearing my intestines like a bad toupee!" Lots of customers--almost non-stop, really, though thankfully they petered out in the last few minutes before the mall closed, allowing us to seal the doors in peace with no one laggin inside. Lots of messy customers too. There must be a Murphy's corollary somewhere, since the customers who leave the greatest mess behind seem inexplicably attracted to whatever area of the store you have just finished cleaning. One day I'm hoping for someone to try making a mess of the upper shelves of luggage just after I'm done cleaning them. Many fail to realize how loaded those suitcases are. Yes, I freely admit the ensuing paperwork and filling-out of an incident report would be tedious, but I'd be doing with a smirk after some idiot decided to manhandle the luggage up near the ceiling and subsequently crushed themselves beneath its weight.
There was also one particularly rude customer who, I must admit, if she were to come into our store again, I wouldn't even have the chance to tear her head from her shoulders and violate in rather unpleasant ways. My co-workers would be skull-fucking her before I'd even realize there was blood in the air. I don't like to dwell on the 'p' someone left in the 'gene pool', but suffice to say she left all of us with nasty homicidal twitches. And on the plus side, the complete sympathy of every other customer in the store for the twenty minutes following her departure.
I really am growing to loathe customers. Of course, I don't think I'd mind this job so much if we were given tasers and the authorization to use them at our discretion. Oh, the sheer happiness of that thought...
Today's Lesson: however long it takes you to clean up any size of mess, it will take only 1/10th of that time (and usually a single idiot to the 3-4 people on clean-up detail) to completely mess it up again.
That, and it appears that today, my little bit of nowhere is not allowing anything to be written in Bold. You'll just have to settle for monochrome text, alas.
posted by Phillip at 7:54 AM
