Adventures in Retail

Working at Boat, Bath & Beyond (to maintain decency, even though most know who I'm talking about, and if you don't then it's just as well) sometimes just cooks your little grey cells like scrambled eggs. The strain between pleasing the customer and making the company money or just following company protocol is often quite significant. And then sometimes you just get those customers who think they know everything, like the frustrated man who nearly screamed at me the other day, "Doesn't anybody here know anything?!" And the little red dragon on my shoulder said quite complacently, "Well, if YOU knew anything you wouldn't be asking that, now would you?" It all must be taken with a sense of humor and the foreknowledge that the ugly moments will pass, regardless. And that sense of humor goes a long way, especially on those long days that are just slow and we have to get creative.

Like that one day the minutes were just creeping by and my coworker Steve and I were bored to death. We'd done everything possible and more, and there was simply nothing more to be done without customers.

To be continued, because I am typing this on an iPhone at the boat show and I'm tired of the stupid touchscreen because I'm not used to it. Autocorrect is quite nice though because its doing a pretty good job frisking my typing mistakes. I said Pretty Food. Food. Good. Crap.
...
Actually, come to think about it, at the start it wasn't so dead. It was really busy. The printer was out of paper again. I really didn't have time for this as the phone was ringing off the hook and three new customers came in. I ran to the back room for new paper. I just needed these shipment forms to print so I could finish filing the orders form yesterday. Certain people in the backroom often left it like hurricane Sandy matched with writer's block; receipts and forms floating amongst FedEx boxes and water pump rebuild kits.

My coworker Steve was helping an ornery crusty fisherman order some parts we didn't have in the store ("you guys never have the right sizes"), and I slipped by to shove some paper into the printer. The printer made a happy sound and started spitting pages as the crusty fisherman clumped out the door in his brown boots covered in old fish scales. We meet some characters for sure.

"What's up, Krista?" Steve asked as I flipped through the pages.
     "Oh, just shipment forms.... and Sea dragons?" I had come across a picture of the cute kelpy creature from AustralianAnimalsWeekly.com.
"Maybe it's Fred's?" he smirked.
     "I have no idea."
"Are those real?"
     I laughed, "Of course they are!"
Steve looked intently at the photo."He looks happy."
     "Yeah... Hey, the boss isn't working today, is she?"
"Nope, I'm bored... Let's switch name tags again!"

Let me tell you, fish have it easy.