I’m sure I’ve used that title before, but if I haven’t, it’s about damn time.

I usually don’t bother discussing my escapades as an OfficeMizzy Soul Jizzy here at dorkclub.com, mainly because said escapades could easily be reduced to “I hate people,” but today’s adventures in store 944 were entertaining enough to warrant this update. In fact, this very update which you’re reading now was written almost entirely on the back of furniture pull tags, marking it as not only the first update which I’ve written in OMax (I frequently wrote updates at work back at the public library), but the first dorkclub.com update which has cost a giant, world-spanning corporation (Boise Paper) a little of the fat bankery.

The fun really didn’t get started until late in the day, as I returned from my “lunch” (at 6:45 PM), to find a half dozen customers crowded around the manager on duty (MoD) and watching the Kings/Pacers game on one of the cable-less display TVs. A pair of rabbit ears jutted out from the shelf next to the television, having been hijacked from their usual home in the employee break room. Naturally, I joined in the fun, as did the other two sales associates on duty (AoD). As new customers entered the building, not one bothered to stop and ask us for assistance. Instead, they either stopped to happily watch the game with the growing crowd, or merely smiled and went about their shopping. For some reason, customers don’t dare interrupt employees while they watch TV, but if I’m actually doing work, shooting tags or balancing a stack of paper shredders, every customer wants me to drop everything I’m doing and read information from the side of printer boxes to them. Ah, physics.

Later, a tall, bone-thin woman with teeth smeared with red lipstick spent half an hour walking me around the store and continually assured me that money was no object. Her husband/boyfriend/half brother who just happened to be good fuck, Junkyard Joe, spent the entire time completely fascinated by the typewriter ribbons. This woman informed me that she needed a new printer as well as an Internet-capable PDA (pronounced “Pee-Dah”) because her laptop had undergone some sort of vague accident. I tried to explain to her that Internet access through a PDA is hardly comparable to “real” Internet access, but she was having none of it, eventually deciding on the most expensive PDA we carried (the HP iPaq something or other), the most expensive HP printer we carried (which she was sure would plug into her PDA, despite my frequent attempts to convince her otherwise), and a wi-fi card for her new PDA. As the MoD took me into lockup to retrieve the PDA, he waited until the door was closed before asking, “Do you think she’s scamming us?”

“Scamming us?” I replied. “Maybe. I just thought she was really stupid.”

After I wrung her up, her total coming to A Lot of Money, she tried to pay with a check, only she was completely without ID. MoD: 1, wedge55: 0. When I told her I couldn’t sell her the items without ID, she went into a frenzied rampage of idiocy, ultimately storming off, assuring me she would be back in ten minutes with her driver’s license, declaring that afterwards she would never shop in our store again. She never came back.

Not even fifteen minutes passed before another woman showed up with a desk to return, claiming that it contained hazardous chemicals which were making her sick. I rarely get the chance to be in such close proximity to such obviously insane people, so it was a nice change of pace. She then had me bring the desk, which she had assembled piecemeal, into the store. She had managed to put together two of the drawers, as well as stick a whole hell of a lot of screws into some random piece of wood. As an added bonus, the whole thing was also covered in ants. The rest of the desk remained in the box she purchased it in, which she appeared to have run through some sort of industrial paper shredder. Additionally, to prove just how sick the desk had made her, she launched into a coughing tirade every few moments before asking that we move the half-assembled monstrosity away from her.

Thankfully, the night was unbelievably slow, save for the few random hiccups, and we got out a little less than an hour early, an hour which I gratefully used to type up this very update. Besides, I got at EAS ninja star out of the whole deal, which in and of itself was worth eight hours of taking it to the max.