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!

 


So here I am this morning, watching Elton John and the Electric Mayhem Band singing "Good-bye Yellow Brick Road," and I'm contemplating the eponymous yesterday Mel & I got to endure. Sure, it seems somewhat tacky to have been without a post for half a month, only to return to whiny bitching (glorious, high-definition whiny bitching!), but rest assured this will only fill half your Emo-esque content for the day. For the other half, I'm sure a simple venture into Fandom Wank will give you enough to last the rest of the week.

Anyhoo, here's to Monday. This truly was a moment where everything conspired against us. First and foremost, our store was having 8 tables going up in the mall corridor. Not a bad thing, certainly, since our store's now quite swanky without it's epic piles of backpacks and lunchbags hiding everywhere. (And I do mean everywhere: half our luggage was pushed out because stacks of this stuff were lurking behind it, ready to messily devour any small child who would dare poke their curious faces into...uh, nevermind. Pay no heed to the suspicious bodycount in our fine establishment!)

So, tables. Eight of them. Out in front of the store. Which naturally meant that I was pretty much out of commission as a customer-interacting employee since I needed to decorate the tables with our pretty man-eating backpacks...er, did I say man-eating? That is utter falsehood! A lie, I tell you! Lie!

(They're soul-eating, not man-eating. These are equal opportunity, carnivorous backpacks.)

Now, this unto itself wasn't a bad thing. We had 4 people on shift over the course of the day, so I knew I could stick at the tables with minimal dusruption to the store. Or so I thought...until, right at the start of the day, Mel took a call from the 4th person on duty, who is now apparently spending the entire week in the hospital under observation.

She never did specify to Mel just why she was going in "under observation," which leads me to believe in one of two possibilities. Either she: a) might have Swine Flu, or b) is actually bagging off her job to spend the week in Cuba for a family wedding. As cruel as it sounds, I'm hoping it's the former; you can't get fired because of a possible Swine Flu infection. Fortuitously, she only had 2 shifts this week, but unfortunately today happened to be one of them. And now our store had two people plus me-on-tables to interact with customers.

Not exactly the greatest in timing, but still doable.

Except...for the simple fact that our District Manager was/is coming in for Tuesday. And that was/is my day off for the week. Which naturally meant that I wouldn't be around the help our or answer any pressing questions she had. And I'm pretty good in placating any concerns she might have about anything. Now, she did know well in advance that I wouldn't be in Tuesday, but she still wanted to come in, mostly because she's got a full rotation of stores to visit this week, and for us it was either visit Tuesday or not until September.

The downside to all this was that I wanted--if not needed--to make sure that not only the tables were done as close to our DM's preferences as I could, but to also make sure the store was up to snuff for her visual standards. (Which of course also meant that the soul-eating backpacks had to be hidden under the tables so they'd do minimal damage.) So there we were on Monday: one person short, with table displays to set up, and a store to make as pretty as possible so the DM wouldn't growl at us.

Now this even was not entirely a bad thing. We knew that we'd be worn out at the end of the day, but we could manage it. Except...everyone showed up at our store today. Everyone. More often than not, our store was filled with 2-3 people or families/groups of people, making any of the aforementioned tasks nearly impossible to do. Every time we turned around, half the things we were cleaning or tweaking ended up being utterly undone.

The tragic part about this is that, were any of these four aspects removed, we'd have managed just fine. DM not coming in on my off-day? Hey, no problem. We could leave things a little messier than usual. No tables? Hah, Yesterday would have been kid's play. Four employees on duty? Piece of cake for everything else! Monday being not swarmed with people? Bring it on.

But no, they all conspired together like some sinister X-File-ish organization. All we need now is some old guy smoking a cigarette as he watches us like a stalker, and we've got a show! (Though knowing my luck, I'd get eaten by the leech-monster before the opening credits rolled, and Mel would be a recurring character.)

By end of the day, we were over-worked, over-tired and ready to just unleash the hordes of soul-eating backpacks on the crowds in retaliation. And then, just to drive home the point of how aggravating it had been, the radio decided to play The Boomtown Rats' "(Tell Me Why) I Don't Like Mondays."

I pretty much turned to Mel at that point and said, "They're playing our song!"

There was a silver lining in yesterday's cloud, mind you, since we met up with a friend and got to see District 9. I have since decided I'm going to greet customers for the rest of the Back To School season in a fully armed power loader. Sure, things might get messy with all the exploding body parts, but after Monday...ooh, it'll be so worth the squeegee.

However, there was an unintended side-effect of all the shaky-cam action, namely the fact that it amplified my already burgeoning back-of-the-eyeball-stabbing headache and made me feel like I was about to puke. I've watched movies like this before without any such nausea, so I'm chalking it all up to the sheer exhaustion from the rest of the day kicking my ass while it was in the theatre chair.

And in a most anti-climactic ending, I pretty much crawled into bed the second we got home an slept for the rest of the night. Given how I feel mostly better today, I'm now quite glad I've got today off to recover from Monday. Sure, things yesterday might have been easier had I been in the store today, since I could still be tweaking things for the DM. But I seriously need to spend all my time doing very little of anything today.

And hey, you never know: maybe the invading, soul-eating backpacks will riot in the mall and cause it to close down early. We can only hope.

Labels: the running gag involving backpacks who will devour your soul but not your pants, why must Garfield be right, workday hell

posted by Phillip at 6:16 AM