A Nightmare

Yesterday was a very busy day at work. The regular summer people are here now, and the big horse show is under way. This is frequented by the 1% of the 1% - not just run-of-the-mill rich people, but the uber-rich. These people fly their highly-pedigreed horses in from all over the country and all over the world, and then give each other tens of thousands of dollars for riding said horses around in circles and making them jump over sticks. Ten grand is pocket change to these people. They think nothing more of dropping $5000 on sheets than I would of buying a pack of gum. Less, probably.

Anyway - yesterday was busy. A $4000 sale, a massive special order for almost nine thousand dollars, other "smaller" sales in the $1000-$1500 range. It's all good for my commission, so I swallow my egalitarianism and paste on my customer-service smile and say have a good day.

But... I had a nightmare last night. Not my first nightmare about work, only the latest.

I was in the store, and a couple had bought a certain set of sheets, and then kept coming back for more pieces, one at a time, and unfolding them all, and piling them on the counter. The computer stopped working properly, and I had to figure discounts on the fly. The floor around my feet was littered with shams, plastic packages, scraps of cardboard. The counters were covered with boxes of this and that - business cards, promotional postcards, and just junk.

Then a couple came in with about 5 children, and the adults proceeded to ignore the kids (ranging in age from about 8 to about 14), who ran amok through the store, making noise, knocking things over. They all had rollerskates, and hit upon the idea of putting one of the expensive side chairs which we have on skates, and taking it out on the sidewalk. I was in the middle of folding up the crumpled shams the first couple kept handing me, when I saw these little blonde devils pushing the chair, with the youngest kid on it, out the door.

"Stop! Wait a minute! You can't do that!" I yelled as I sprinted for the door, but it was too late, and I saw the chair and the kid tumble down the concrete steps.

When I reached the scene, the kids were picking up their little brother, and all were laughing, and the chair lay shattered at the foot of the steps. "You just broke a thousand-dollar chair!" I said, but they laughed. Their father appeared, and I said the same thing to him. "That chair cost a thousand dollars, and you're going to have to pay for it."

"A thousand dollars?" he asked. "It doesn't look like it was worth that much."

"Well, that's the price the company put on it, and I can't just write it out of stock. You're going to have to pay for it."

I went back inside, where the mother, a trim, polished blonde, wearing a shocking-pink beaded blouse, was still shopping, oblivious to the carnage outside. "Your kids just broke a thousand-dollar chair, and I need your information so you can pay for it."

"Oh, okay," she said, still browsing.

"Let me get a paper so I can get your name and address." I went back to the cashwrap, where the first couple was still standing, waiting for their shams. I searched through the litter on the counter, looking for a functioning pen and an index card - notecard - scrap of paper - anything to write on. I finally found one, and went to find the couple with the vandalizing kids - and they were gone.

"They lied!" I shouter. "The stinking liars!"

Shaking with anger, I went back to the cashwrap, where the remains of the broken chair now mingled with the other stuff on the floor, and finally rang up the couple with the unfolded shams, and apologized to them for the delay. They were okay with it - patient or unaware - and left me with an unholy mess.

The thing is... though this was only a bad dream, it's not entirely impossible for it to happen - which makes it even scarier!

Just another day

(This is something I found in a notebook from a few years ago.)

July 15, 2010.

A quartet of Southern ladies came into the store shortly after noon today, just as the word "lunch" began to drift into my thoughts. They were sweet and polite, and full of compliments about the store and the products, and spoke with tupelo honey dripping from their voices... and they went though the store like a phalanx of rototillers.

They unfolded shams and crammed them willy-nilly back into the packages. They put sheets in the sham baskets and shams in with the duvet covers, and two-thirds of what they picked up, they put back upside-down. (I can do a whole post about this business of putting things back upside-down. It's so weird!) I asked if they needed help, but they said no, they were having fun vandalizing looking at everything. I followed where they had been, down in the clearance area, and straightened some things - turned six or seven packaged right-side-up, took a duvet cover out of a basket of boudoir shams and put it back where it belonged, and then went back to fighting with the computer as it struggled to print shipping labels. (Our 15+-year-old computer can't cope with the new UPS program, and kept having the vapors.)

The four Southern belles moved on out of the clearance area, and I returned to pick up after them - refolding crushed shams that had been jammed into packages without care, and so on. While I then returned to the cashwrap to hold the computer's hand for a third try at a label, the Belles went back into the clearance area and started all over again!

There's a big basket of sample shams near the front of the store - a rummage basket. Despite the fact that it's an informal display, and the items are inexpensive, that is no reason to leave that basket looking like a heap of unwashed laundry. They pawed through those shams and strewed them around, much in the manner of a family of raccoons rifling through an unsecured trash can. Once they had made as much of a mess of those poor shams as they could without actually ripping them up, they went back for a third whack at the clearance area.

They eventually left with smiles and "Thaynk yew!" and "Y'all have a guud ayfternewn!" All told, they were here about an hour, and spent a total, among the four of them, of about $200.

Someday, when I have nothing to lose by it, when I see someone being careless and messy in the store, I'm going to ask them, "Why do you do that? You can see that you've left a mess. You can see that you put that in the wrong place, that you put it away upside-down. Why do you do that? Do you do that in every store you shop? Do you do that at home? Do you let your kids see that you think it's okay to leave a mess? Do you let your children make a mess and leave it for someone else to clean up? Who told you it is acceptable?

"Because it's NOT!"