C'est Non Un Blog

In my post-college run at life I had for the most part avoided reading, since reading pretty much described my life for four years. I read a lot. I’m not sure, but I think I damn well read more than everyone else did. I’m almost sure of it. While everyone else was partying and getting the full college experience, here I was frantically trying to fit in the demonically Herculean effort of keeping up with the syllabus. One description of myself Freshman year really hit home: Tanveer, the Bangladeshi who lived next door pretty much had only seen me up on the top bunk with a book in my hand. That’s all he knew of me. And this is coming from the FOREIGN KID, going to a liberal arts school for SCIENCE. What the hell was wrong with me?

Although I did (and still do) obsessively read my new magazines that come every week I kind of avoided books like the plague. Would you blame me? I’ve come to regret that lately, and have thus started to actually buy and READ new books. I read exclusively non-fiction now, really. I get enough fiction in the gazillion films I watch, I guess, so I really want to actually learn something. As sick as I was of school I can’t help but want to learn.

So far I’ve trucked through a history of The Second World War by John Keegan, read Roger Ebert’s Great Movies, gotten part way through 1,001 Movies You Must See Before You Die and almost finished Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light. Today I got The Third Reich: A New History by Michael Burleigh (anyone noticing any patterns?) and read through the introduction. While I find the premise extremely interesting thus far this book has to be the densest thing I’ve read since college. I mean it took me over an hour to get through 23 pages! The book is over 800 pages long. You do the math. I’m hoping this is just the introduction, as actually reading this book might become an effort that I cannot finish.

Today was a long day. To give you an idea of what it was like, well, it started off with my having to take a detour to work because a tractor-trailer flipped on Route 7. It was actually a real pretty drive since you could see right into the hills, mountains and valleys, see the green down below, the yellow in the middle, and the white of snow line. It was like something out of Lord of the Rings. Luckily, I still got to work on time.

Luckier still, as Jeremy was all alone, holding down the fort, since John C. called in sick on him/us. We didn’t really need him though, since when we closed for the day the tracker only read 10 people. That is a slow ass day, let me tell you. Then we had to wait an extra hour as the carpet cleaners did their quarterly clean up job before we could leave.

I get home, open up my highly anticipated (and much delayed by Amazon) new Global Underground release, a Limited Edition 3 disk Steve Lawler mix, and put in disk one, only to find that after track 6 my CD player won’t read it anymore. Hell, I even tried to burn it onto a clean CD-R my CD player would recognize, but my CD burner wouldn’t recognize that I had even put anything in there.

On the plus side I did teach Jeremy everything I learned in college today. Poor Jeremy never went to college. So when it came to writing up this month’s Employee of the Month his single paragraph looked sad and pathetic on the page. I told him, “You can’t give it to him like that! We give him one little paragraph with all of that white on the page and he’ll feel bad. You’ve got to spice it up a little.” We, of course, had both exhausted what little material we actually had to work from the nominations. So I taught Jeremy the fine art of stretching one paragraph of pure information into one page of pure beautiful crap. By adding almost no new information to what he had written I had somehow managed to subtly bloat that sad little paragraph into one amazing piece of BS. Much like I’m doing right now…

It’s so weird to have snow up here. Usually snow doesn’t come until late November, if that, usually well into December. So weird. It’s really wet up here too. That’s what happens after it rains for months straight and tops that off with a good wet snow.

…Depeche Mode’s new single Precious takes me to a better place.

You know how amazing it is that first time you see all of the leaves changed in fall? And you know how amazing it is to see the trees after that first snow? Well, imagine the two of those two feelings put together and you’ve got a good idea what my drive into work was like this morning. Unfortunately it all melted too soon… I say that, but you know when the snow is here to stay I’ll hate it.

You ever notice how your tastes change with the seasons? It’s weird. In the summer I enjoy music that is loud, upbeat, overly sunny and cheerful. Come wintertime my tastes change to softer music more moody and introspective. You hear something season specific outside of its respective season and you’re like, why did I even buy this? Of course that same song comes on when the season changes and it’s almost transcendent.

I woke up this morning, turned off the alarm and tried to fall back asleep–not hard, because I had to get up and get ready for work. So I sat up, opened my eyes and HOLY CRAP! It fricken SNOWED last night. It’s a winter wonderland and everything out there. When the heck did that happen? It was in the mid-50’s to low 60’s yesterday.

Well, I guess it’s a good thing I got my snow tires ungodly early this year…

Go to Google and type in “failure” then click “I’m feeling lucky.” See what happens.

Today I get into work after having six days off and start my daily routine for opening the store. Jeremy had left me a note about what had been going on lately. Apparently we had new paperwork to fill out. So I open the binder and immediately have no fucking idea what I’m looking at. I just want to count the cash drawers, but how the hell do I do that now? I spent about ten minutes trying to figure out what was going on until I finally called Jeremy to ask him how I was suppose to fill out the cash drawers. Well, apparently we still used the old form to count and just threw it out at night after we were done with it. Glad someone told me. Jeez.

Oh, and we sold nothing today. Yeah for us!

Finally, after not seeing anyone for literally hours this old guy ambles in about a half-hour before close. He seems kind of familiar, but only in the way people look familiar when you’ve seen thousands of people over the course of almost two years, all of whom you want to try to remember. He asks me if we’ve worked together before, I say he looks familiar. He then asks me about our headphones.

We talk a little about them before he asks me again if we ever worked before. I’m like, “well, could be.” Suddenly he just blurts out that he’s a “secret shopper”, obviously nervous that he’s been caught, and starts to tell me he’ll give me a 100 anyway because I did a good job last time or some shit. I missed most of that because the entire time he’s telling me this I’ve pretty much got my fingers in my ears, yelling out “lalalalalalalala can’t hear you lalalalalala.” Dude! You can’t do that! I didn’t know you were a shopper. I didn’t guess. We still could have done that thing. I wouldn’t have had a clue. Now because of ethical issues I can’t accept that mystery shop no matter what grade you give us. He also managed to blurt out that we were also getting shopped Saturday. How he knew that, I don’t know. Ugh.

So at this point I don’t really know what to do. Do I continue the shop? What does it matter, I can’t count it. And yet if I don’t try and he gives us a shit grade for no reason and then we try to claim he told us he was a shopper, then what do we do? Of course the store is closing in a couple minutes. No one wants to do a show right before close (which was actually the one good thing about him announcing he was a shopper. If all he talked about was headphones (I don’t know as he would have) that close to closing time I probably wouldn’t have offered the show). You’ll be there all night when you want to go home. Can’t just kick him out though.

I ended up doing the show for him, which he enjoyed, but didn’t want to sit through the end of. He pretty much told me he wasn’t interested at all in it, thus making him the worst mystery shopper ever. We left the store about 6:20, which actually wasn’t too bad. I was helped by the fact that since we didn’t sell anything, there wasn’t much to close.

Oh, one more thing. At one point he asked me if John was the manager. Nope, that’d be me. I think he was hoping that if John was the manager then we could just sneak this one under his nose and no one would have to know we didn’t actually do the shop. I’d still have to tell someone though. Jeez.

Well, it was good while it lasted, but I’m afraid my 6 days are up. Today I go back to work. Damn. Stupid Powerball. I should have won that shit by now…