It has been an odd couple of days, loyal readers. I’ll do today first, then yesterday. Just because.

I really enjoy my job, I do. But if there were one time I could not have to come in and work it would be the holiday weekend. I hate fucking holiday weekends. There’s nothing worse. You see two, three times as many people as normal but none of them want to talk to you. We’re a nice little store out in the middle of rural Vermont. During a normal weekday most people will talk to you, even a little, even if they don’t want to. On the weekend you get all your New York and Jersey tourists giving you the “Just looking!” strong arm from a simple “hello!” Just looking my ass. Just look from outside. We don’t have some of the best customer service in the biz for you to just not talk to me politely.

Sometimes they do talk to you, but not much. And they never buy anything. You could have a thousand customers and still not do as good in sales as you did on a Monday when you saw, at best, forty people.

Or if you do get a talker, you get the “I have nothing better to do and no one else will talk to me, so you’ll do.” My god. I talked to this one guy, who after I expressed a little interest in something he said to try to get him to open up with me started talking for five minutes straight about old tractors and how stupid old people were because they couldn’t figure out eBay. This guy “loved our stuff” but for the life of me I couldn’t find a single product he might want to buy. It’s hard to sell sound to someone who doesn’t listen to any.

Then you occasionally get the head scratcher pain in the ass customer. Jeremy saw this woman today who had been in before. She came in, said she wanted a Lifestyle 48. Score! Jeremy talked some details with her. Seemed like a really nice woman.

Then something odd happened. She asked if she got a free Wave Radio with it. “Sorry, that only comes with our previous model Lifestyle systems,” Jeremy says. She starts to get all huffy. What? It doesn’t come for free with the new systems. People always expect you are going to cut them a deal or give them something free for doing nothing. Do something that impresses me and I might think about it.

That wasn’t the worse part though. Jeremy gets the woman up to the cash wrap and starts to ring the system through. We just started a sale on the systems, so he asks us what the price is to make sure he doesn’t have to manually discount it. I say, “$3,449.” Then Sean says, “No, $3,349.” Where are you getting that price? It’s 3,449. But sure enough, the price sign in the Lifestyle room says $3,349.

Well, that’s wrong. But the woman heard us say it. She probably never would have known the difference if Jeremy had never said anything. But now she’s turn into a madwoman. “Since it’s signed $3,349 in the store you have to sell it to me for that!” Well, it doesn’t work that way. We can’t just change the price.

She just walked. On the way out she turned to some of our customers and said to them “don’t buy here. They change their prices!” Totally unrational and uncalled for. Fortunately the guys she passed said to Sean, “What’s her problem? I thought we left New York.”

The one good thing about holiday weekends is the women. So many hot women came into the store today. Being the only single guy working there it was killing me. You see one hot cute girl here and there it doesn’t bother you, but when they are in mass like that, man, I really need to get out there again.

FRIDAY

Weird fucking day. I was the only manager on duty. And I was definitely being tested. One problem after another came flying at me. As soon as I solved one problem the phone would ring and, guess what? new problem! It was one of those days where you have 15 things to do, everything is going wrong and then, oh yeah, our internet just disappeared. Well, isn’t that great? The truck is coming late. Now it’s not coming at all. What are you going to do about that? My this doesn’t work. Have you ever heard of that before? NO! Where the hell did you get this shit?

Man, oh man. I was tearing my hair out. Luckily my guys totally took care of the store while I spent half of the day on the phone. Oy vey.

One other nice thing was that unlike Saturday, Friday we had some of the nicest best customers I think we’ve ever had in the store. Everyone was just so cheerful and grateful and kind. To give you just one example, I had these two Canadian couples that came in. At first they were kind of a pain in my ass, because I had twenty things I had to be doing and was worrying about and they were pulling me in all different directions. But then there were moments where one of the couples were dancing to the SoundDock, just having a great time. Then I got them in the show. They were super fun and all into it when I started. Then after doing the unveil they gave me quite possibly the greatest ovation we’ve ever had in the store. They were clapping as hard as they could and whistling as loud and high pitched as they could. It seriously hurt my ears, it was so loud. At that point I was so moved that I had tears in my eyes. Great people.

There was of course a rain storm that day. Driving home was a mess. Water all in the road. As I got closer to my house, the flooding had gotten so bad that it was in the road in a few places. My road was all washed out. There were small logs in the road and everything. Just crazy.

The power was, of course, out when I got home. My sister was sitting there reading a book. Said the power had been out for a good four hours. She was bored and just a little pissy. So I took her to the movies and we saw Batman Begins (second time for me.) Awesome movie, but more on that some other time.

Power still wasn’t on when we got home. Everyone else around us had it except for our road. I called Niagara Mohawk after midnight to remind them that we still didn’t have power. That didn’t come back on until 4:45.

At least it came back on.