Day Four

            Today we start to decorate the store for the holiday season. As a Jew I have always hated Christmas, and Jane picks up on this and it adds to her reasons to disrespect me. When Tammy asks me to help her pin up a streamer to the ceiling, Jane takes over as head decorator. When I try to help her wrap a streamer around the main kiosk station in an attempt to get on her good side she scolds me, “don’t pre-empt me!” I attempt to turn the other cheek by thinking “maybe Jews just don’t know how to hang Christmas decorations.”

On one ring-up Charlie teaches me how to do a “blitz”. It seems to be a free for all discount function. Like the safe haven of a cave in the formidable mountain range of our computer system, I take comfort in the fact that in the event of an emergency I can “blitz” the system.

I watch as Charlie and Jane make Cat noises and gestures at each other. Frank tells me Jane eventually accepted Charlie when he was the newbie, so I hope that before my month is up I can learn the entire store, so I can have a chance at Jane’s acceptance.

Printmaking is getting mundane, but it is still the best part of my day. The worst part of my day is selling people the pricy electronics we stock in our store. Today I muddle through the sale of a durable point and shoot camera for a couple buying their daughter a Christmas present. It takes forty five minutes and consists of me being very nice and guessing wrong about most of their questions, which they discover as they actually use the cameras and read the sides of the boxes.

I sell them a store discount, which knocks the price of the camera in half and entitles them to a number of free prints every month. This ensures they will walk through our door every month for the next twelve, or end up paying even more than the original price for the camera.

Because of the store “discount” and the fact that the color of the camera that the couple want is not in our store, Tammy and I embark upon a half-hour of triplicate paperwork, online registration, credit card carbon pressing and a five minute jaunt through the ms-dos system. During this process I try to be absent as much as possible, sneaking off to help urgent looking customers. But, Tammy keeps on pulling me back to watch over her shoulder. The customers, who were at first excited to make the purchase have had to wait patiently through all of this and are now disgusted.

A sneaking suspicion dawns on me that the couple will be back, and I will have to fill out even more paperwork. Anytime I bring up a minor change that could improve productivity Frank mentions something about a massive re-organization. I suspect he has a complex plan to revamp the place, drawn out over the four long years of working at the store.  But he resigns himself to in-action because he knows he will never get the chance to make actual changes before the business goes under.