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Workplace Hazards.

I somehow managed to injure myself at work yesterday. Good lord was there a lot of blood. Seriously, it was a surprising amount. The amount of blood that came out of the body part that the blood was coming out of was astounding.

Let me tell you the story (as if you have an option but to keep reading. My blog is like friggen crack,) about the workman’s compensation claim I will most assuredly be filing.

This severiously sketchy looking individual came in to our store today, and immediately asked me where the most expensive frames were. Ever the vigilant employee, I paid him absolutely no attention as that type of behavior would never set off any alarm bells with anyone. This disheveled man with greasy hair and a ratty, oversized, and totally out of season winter jacked with plenty of pockets clearly had no intention of ever acquiring eyeglass frames without first paying a fair and agreed upon price for them. No no, he was simply in my store to shop.

I mentioned our secret code word to my co-workers, the one we use to indicate that we think thievery is afoot (yes, we have a secret code word!) and my co-workers immediately perked up, ever dutiful, and said, “What?”

Idiots.

For some reason, even though I had absolutely no suspicions regarding this gentleman whatsoever, I moved to a position in the store in which I could watch every single move he made. I’m interested in the human condition, what can I say? My co-workers assisted me by continuing to talk about…boys or…or vampires… or David Cassidy or puppies…or maybe candy and highlighters, I don’t know, whatever the young kids talk about nowadays. I’m sure they were simply trying to lull the man into a sense of security as he rummaged through our product. The fact that they had their backs turned to him heightened the illusion even more that they were paying him no heed.

Anyway, at one point he seemed to have decided that he was not drawing enough attention to himself. Or maybe he had a minor electrical event in his brain, I don’t know, but suddenly his arm flailed out and he knocked over a large, heavy plastic display of frames and a sale poster. The noise it created almost made my co-workers stop talking about their werewolves or the New Kids on the Block or what have you, and certainly startled the gentleman enough for him to realize that he had an important appointment he needed to attend, and he promptly vacated the premises.

I immediately realized the hazard of the improperly balanced display (read: I went off and did something else for a few minutes, then remembered that the display could kill someone. For a while I was okay with that, but then I thought that it might kill someone who could one day make me the heir to his or her fortune, you know, like a Bart Simpson and Mr. Burns kind of thing. Remember the one where Mr. Burns realized he had no heir, so he interviewed all the kids in Springfield and, surprise surprise, chose Bart? But then something happened and Bart gave up the inheritance. I was hoping for that to happen, but without the part where I give up the inheritance. That was stupid of him. Well, I guess he is a cartoon, but still, who gives up a huge massive fortune like that?)

So I figured I should go and repair the display. As I was struggling to put it back in place, my co-workers assisted me by discussing the housing crisis in the United States and the current political situation in Libya, what with Gaddafi’s death and all. Ha ha! I jest! They were talking about how dreamy that Jonathan Taylor Thomas fellow is. Anyway, a roughly 2 foot by 3 foot pane of plastic fell off, and gouged my ear.

At first I thought I must be ok, since I could literally hear nothing at all. That’s a good sign, right? Then I realized that my ear canal was already full of blood. My co-workers promptly rushed to my aid. No wait, I misspelled that. They started laughing at me. Until they saw all the blood. Within about three minutes, I had soaked two entire paper towels with blood while trying to dispense a customer’s glasses. I just kept that side of my head turned away from the customer and tried not to pass out from blood loss or get too much vomit on his shoes. I’m really not too sure why the profusely bleeding person somehow managed to get stuck dispensing someone’s glasses. I mean, one of my co-workers went out to get me some spray-on band-aid stuff (that stuff HURTS! And for some reason it smells like bubble gum. Here’s a sentence I never thought I’d say: “Smell my ear. Does it smell like bubblegum to you?”), and one of my co-workers left early, and another one went for a break, leaving me in the store alone while bleeding—oh, I think I just figured it out.

So anyway, on the WCB form I’m just going to write a link to this blog. Perhaps I will gain a few new readers! But I’m mostly doing it because I’m starting to get dizzy and I can’t reallg shree akll thit wsellllmnjbc sfvdffffdaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

The Dirties.

Screw this whole “working on homework” crap. My marketing assignment can wait. I have much more important things to attend to.

The first one: Bathing. Haven’t done that in a while! Whoops!

Okay I’m back. Who knew that having one shower could corrode the pipes like that? The plumber was quite drained when he was done. One might say he pulled the plug on our problems. He sure did flush our plumbing issues away. In fact, we showered him with praise. But he was such a tubby fella. I had to wrench the chocolate bar from him so he could work! Okay, I'm done, I promise!

Hey speaking of bathing, why do I have to be in a somewhat clean state to go to work, and yet some of my customers, well, they just don’t? (Wow I seriously didn’t plan this! I had my whole blog post planned out, tossed in that bit about me not showering in a while, and now my post is about just that! HI-LARIOUS!)

You know the type of people I’m talking about; greasy hair, dirty, rumpled, stained clothes, stink lines wafting over their shoulders, plants withering and dying in their wake, children crying, nuns openly cursing, birds literally—literally—falling out of the sky as they fly overhead, planes crashing into mountains, satellites falling out of orbit and burning down neighborhoods, the moon suddenly exploding, giant fragments of it whipping through the sky like North Korean nuclear warheads, the sun going supernova, turning into a swirling, twisting, writhing vortex of a black hole of absolute filthy stink…Okay, I may be getting a little bit carried away here. I apologize, I know I’m normally a fairly restrained individual. But anyway, my point still stands, which is that some people out there are absolutely gross.

Which is why I really really like it (really!) when they come in to my store to buy glasses. You know, because buying glasses is nothing if not removed from one another. I don’t spend hours of my day near people, getting my face within inches of theirs, staring intently, touching their heads, behind their ears, their noses—wait, should I be the one complaining about these people? Maybe I’m the creep show. Oh well.

My favorite part of dealing with the stank people is that they always happen to be the close talkers. Why? Why is this? I really do want to know! Can’t they tell when they move toward me that I keep moving away? So smelly guy takes a step forward and I take another step back, maybe trip on something, another step, I try to find an obstacle to put between us like a chair or a desk or a large brick wall of some sort, another step around the object and he’s right there beside me, asking me to put some glasses on him, another step, I fall backward and start half-running-half-crab-walking trying to get away, another step, I retch, another step and my eyes start welling up (both from the fumes and the fear that I may actually suffocate on his smell, good god what a terrible way to die that would be! Can you imagine suffocating on someone’s smell? Ugh that just took over drowning as my number one worst way to die!), another step and there’s vomit dribbling down my chin (and his too, but that’s been there for a while), another step and, well, I don’t know how it ends because I normally black out. When I regain consciousness smelly guy is normally gone and my co-workers have managed to clean me up a little bit.

Anyway, moving away from smell, one of my other favorite types of customers is the one who clearly never ever cleans their glasses and then comes in to get them adjusted. This is honestly one of the most disgusting things I have ever experienced in my life, and the layperson will have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about (it’s just so unexpectedly gross!) so I need to give you a diagram.

You know the nosepads on metal frames? The plasticy doo-dads that sit on the bridge of your nose? They are attached to the frames with little metal hooks, like so:

You have no idea how long that took me. Although I must admit, considering I did that using just the shapes on Microsoft Word, that is a dang good looking rendering of a pair of spectacles, if I do say so myself. But yes, moving on, the orange parts are what I’m talking about. The grossest thing, the most absolutely worst thing I can ever experience is when there is some green ass junk growing all the hell over those, sometimes growing on to the lenses, like this:

Ew! Ew it’s just the yuckiest! I seriously want to tell these people that they need to go home and clean their glasses before I touch them and it gets on me and into my skin and my blood and multiplies and turns me into one of the gremlins who can’t be fed at night and you can’t let water touch them and then I’ll become one of the gross people!!!

You Can't Always Get What You Want: Especially when you have no idea what it is in the first place.

My all time favourite customers of all time (seriously, all time) are the ones who don’t know what they’re looking for. The ones who, when asked “Is there anything I can help you find?” respond “Uh, glasses?” with a smirk that is normally reserved for teenage girls who have just made a hilarious quip about the kid with patchy hair and nose-warts who has to run along-side the bus, since he’s not allowed on the bus because he smells and touches things (like the bus driver’s hair) but he can’t walk to school alone in the morning or else he’ll get distracted by a homeless man who he thought looked like a kitty cat. Not that that’s happened to me.

What was I saying?

Right. The customers who don’t know what they want.

I’ll usually respond with some sort of hilarious comment that they fail to appreciate (“Whoops! All sold out!” Ahahahaaaa! Juuuust kidding!”) and then offer to let them take a look around (by the way, if someone offers to let you “look around”, you should be immensely offended. It means that person would rather hang out with their co-workers who, trust me, are no prizes, than to hang out with you.) and I turn and walk away.

A lot of the time, though, they’ll simply start by demanding I find something that looks good on them, such as:

Me: Hi there, how are you do—

Customer: CAN YOU FIND SOMETHING THAT LOOKS GOOD ON ME?

Me: I—uhhh, suuuure. What did you hav—

Customer: I’VE NEVER WORN GLASSES BEFORE. I LIKE PURPLE.

Me: That’s good…(randomly grabs a purple frame) How abou—
Customer: THAT’S NOT PURPLE, THAT’S RED. I LIKE PURPLE I WANT PURPLE PURPLE.

Hm. The word “purple” doesn’t look like a real word any more.

Then there are the ones who absolutely have no idea what they want, but they sure as HECK know what they don’t want! I seriously had a lady a few weeks ago who responded to more than ten frames in a row that they were “hideous”, “terrible”, “just awful”, and even a raised-eyebrow-are-you-effing-kidding-me “Uhh, no,” before my hand even reached the frame. At this point, I gave her my usual “Well, why don’t I just let you look around (see!?! There it is!) to which she responded “Some help you are.”

I think you can all imagine how I reacted to that. I kept walking and cussed her out to my co-workers after she left. Yeah, take THAT you old wench!

Ultimately, though, our all-time favourites are the ones who come in and spend HOURS trying on every single frame in the store, keep dozens hoarded away so they can try them on and eliminate them at some future point in time (because none of the other customers in the store might want to try those ones on. I was once helping a customer who actually knew kind of what she was looking for, and I found a specific frame in some lady’s pile, announced that I would put it right back, and picked it up. You should have SEEN her reaction! “That was MY frame. I might WANT that.” I actually can’t even come up with a hilarious simile it was so vehemently hateful.) Anyway, these hoarders tend to spend upwards of two or three hours in the store needing at least one—if not two or three—employee’s full attention, only to announce that they don’t feel like shopping for glasses. They then leave, and we never see them again.

Another random side story (wow, these people must REALLY be my favourites of all time!) is from a few years ago when I had a customer who came and left four or five times over the span of an entire 8 hour shift, deciding on exactly which frames she wanted. In fact, I think I was even there until half an hour after close just so that I could take her freaking money. She wanted to look like Star Jones (WHY???) and kept showing me magazine photos of Star and her ill-fitting glasses, and at one point I actually had to tell her to stop showing me the photos because Star Jones has no idea how glasses are actually supposed to fit, and it was like she tried to cram size 12 feet into a size 7 shoe. A week and a half later, when this particular customer came in to pick them up, she decided that she wanted to exchange them. Before she even tried them on. She felt that I had—get this!—RUSHED HER.

Goodness me.

I often have people asking me why I haven’t posted on my blog lately. Seriously, I get these questions 3, maybe 4 times a year. The demand for blog posts is becoming so overwhelming that I just can’t take it any more. Blogger even threatened to shut down my account if I didn’t keep posting! I must be popular.

Here’s what happened; I was talking on the phone to a very cheerful co-worker of mine who loves her job just…so so so much. It’s great, really, that she enjoys it as much as she does, but she doesn’t seem to understand people who don’t truly desire to spend all of their time at work. So anyway, we’re on the phone and she mentions that she’s read the blog, and she’s concerned because it seems that I don’t like my job very much. I think she actually told me that I seem angry about my job. I’m not too sure where she got that idea. She then started to wonder how our regional manager might respond to reading my blog. She wondered this out loud in the tone of voice that is usually reserved for wondering how one’s family will react upon hearing that one has been eating the mushrooms growing from the tree stump in the back yard for the last 6 months, and performing lewd acts to the lawn mower. (Not well, that’s the answer.)

Anyway, apparently I like my job enough to want to keep it (or I did at the time, anyway!) so I elected to stop posting.

Several months later, my regional manager asked me why I had stopped posting on my blog. After making a mess in my pants (I had a pen in my pocket that exploded) I explained the scenario. It turns out that my regional manager liked my blog! Huzzah! I was up to 5 whole readers!!! Then and there, I decided I would start posting again.

In 5 months.

Now that I’m working, going to school again full time, and my best friend’s man-of-honor, I figure this is the best time to start writing blog posts again. I’ve never had more free time!

So anyway, on to the actual post. Recently, my company mailed out a simply massive amount of coupons for some free cleaning products. They have actually been bringing people in, and many of these people really do buy glasses. The coupons are working. (Hi regional manager! I like my job!)

But we definitely have some people who clearly only want to receive the free product and leave, but feel incredibly awkward just handing me the coupon. So they make extremely awkward small talk as if they are really considering buying glasses. It goes something like this:

Customer. No, wait, NOT customer. Free Product Wanter: So hiiii, how are you?
Me: I’m great thanks, how are you?
FPW: I’m…I’m gooooood. So you guys, you, ah, sell glaaaases here, heyyy? (They always drag out their vowels. Seriously, do they think they sound casual? Because really, they just sound kind of stoned. Or like they have a van out in the parking lot with the windows painted black and full of candy and puppies.)

Me: Yup. Glasses…

FPW: So how, like, do you maaaake them? (Start fondling some frames.)

Me: Um, with machines?

FPW: Cooool, wow.

Me: Soooo…is there something I can help you with? (Note: At this point there are usually several legitimate customers who really want to give me money.)

FPW: I’m just kind of, you know, just kind of looking around. (Picks up a child’s frame, tries to cram it on their face. Realizing it doesn’t fit, places it gently in the middle of the floor.)

Me: Oh…kaaaay. Let me know if you need a hand at all. I’ll just go help these people out…

FPW: Yeah, yeah. Oh yeah, by the waaaaay, I have this coupon here…(starts drooling as they hand me a moist, crumpled coupon.)

Me: Oh really, I didn’t realize! (I totally realized.) Let me go grab that for you.

FPW: (grabs the free cleaner and immediately sprints out the door, shoving through the line of 47 some-odd people who have been waiting for me.)

Do these people think it’s rude to come in and NOT waste my time? Do they feel obligated to pretend they’re shopping? Do they think I’ll judge them incredibly harshly and talk about them on my blog if they don’t hide the fact that all they want is some free crap?

The good news is that we are starting to run out of the free cleaners. Oh my god, maybe that’s terrible news. No, NO! I don’t want to even THINK about how these people will react when they go through the whole fake-shopping thing only to realize that I don’t have anything to give them! It will be like those teenagers who go out after 10 on Halloween after people have blown out the candles in their jack-o-lanterns and turned off their porch lights, but they still go up and pound on the door and ring the doorbell and yell “trick-or treat” and start laughing like it’s some sort of joke, because it IS some sort of joke, because if you don’t give them treats then you will most definitely be tricked, like the kind of trick where you suddenly see a pumpkin flying through your living room window all evil glaring and shards of glass and oh god is it BLEEDING?!?!? Why is the pumpkin BLEEDING!?!?!?

Oh my goodness, I hope I get fired.