Lons and the Terrible Horrible No Good Very Bad Day

Happy Easter. Or Merry Easter. Or whatever the hell you say to people on Easter. Have a joyous Resurrection Day.

Anyway, my Easter so far has really sucked big time. I've been running the video store all day. Just when one of the two other employees working went to lunch, we got a sudden surge of customers. Probably people who had planned the first hour of their Easter Sunday with the family (wake up, eat breakfast, open baskets, eat chocolate bunny head before getting sick of chocolate, pick up bits of plastic fake grass stuff from carpet) and then run out of non-movie-related activities.

Normally, this would not be a big deal. We get surges of customers all the time. But today, we had a sudden surge of customers and a simultaneous complete printer meltdown. This means we had people buying DVD's, but could not print out the reciepts letting them know vital information like how much they paid for these DVD's, what the tax was, and today's date. And some people really need that information. For their records, or something.

I don't keep financial records, so the whole thing seems anal retentive to me. Why would you ever need to look up in your files how much you paid for Jess Franco's Venus in Furs? When will that become a tax issue?

Anyway, while all this was going on, a man came in with several dozen movies to trade in for cash. So I had to simultaneously find a receipt somewhere for one guy, fix the printer, continue checking out customers, count DVD's and do the math for a trade in, and call the store owner to come in and help with all these outstanding issues. It was a very stressful hour.

Some people thrive on this kind of chaos. There are executives whose entire position is called "crisis management," who purposefully go to work at companies where something horrific is going on and try to fix or stabilize the situation. I would not be good at this kind of job. I'd pretty much prefer a position in "rabid wolverine management" to "crisis management." Maybe "risk management" also, if I knew what that was.

When these situations begin, I get very frazzled. I like having one activity to occupy me at a time. I can finish a project very quickly if left alone, but once projects begin to stack up, I start to lose my focus and things go haywire. This is why I need to be a writer or something. Any job where you can sit in your room and zero in on one specific activity is alright with me. And if you can do this same job in your underwear while enjoying a tall, frosty glass of Coca-Cola, so much the better.