The day started off a little rough. Jasp forgot to eat breakfast again and although Morro offered her apple (Jasp says she’s allergic) and her granola bar (Jasp didn’t want it because it had chocolate chips and those turn her stomach in the morning), that wasn’t good enough. So once we got to the Eaton Centre she had to get a “muffie” and a “green juice” and we were so late. In fact the first thing the boss said to us was “ You are late!”
We got right to work. We learned where everything was in the store (including the entire wall of dog calendars) and then had to bring boxes to the other location (the store has two locations in one mal how strange is that). Next was the garbage run. We had to carry so many boxes and bag through the mall, into the “authorized person-elle only’ hallways, into the freight elevators, down into the dirty seedy underground depths of the mall where all the veneer is gone, and to the garbage eating monster. Its really just like a transformer robot, gobbling all the boxes and crunching them down. On the way some guy laughed at us and gave us nudie gingerbread cookies (like, the actually had genitalia).
Once we got back to the store we got to sweep. It didn’t go too well because Jasp is really allergic to dust but Morro had a blast going around on the scooter and catching all the dust bunnies.
The came the customer service. Our boss, Sean Michael, said that we needed to make everyone who came into the store feel welcome and acknowledged. Easy. We made sure to hi to everyone at least once… or twice… We got to ride around the store helping people find calendars of Anne Hathaway (well not that because they didn’t have that, but others similar to that like one direction or butterflies) and recommending toys and games such as racing nuns. It was pretty fun until it got really repetitive. Just when we started to feel tired and were thinking we could use a break about now, the boss said that it was time to learn to “face and front” (or something like that) which meant that we had to make all the shelves look good and bring all the boxes to the front, even if they were the only one left on the shelf, and release the lions in plastic bags to add to the front display (we named them Salome and Viktor) and pretty up the shelves that looked depleated… Now we understand the afternoon slumpy humpy that people talk about. Morro got really grumpy and sat in the middle of the floor, which was not at all useful.
After pretending that we were still happy even when we were not (because you still have to make the customer feel happy even when you are sleepy) for a bit longer our boss gave us hot chocolate and tea, told us that we would be getting an evaluation and then said we could go (as we had to get to our other job at Factory). On the way out we visited our friend who is a Chocolate Chef at Rocky Mountain Chocolate (who knew there were so many chocolate covered things in the world) and ran into another friend. Wahoo!
THEN the TTC broke down. Okay, its really hard not to whine when you are so tired and hungry and then the streetcar stops working. We finally arrived at Factory just in time for Franny’s birthday. Nina taught us all about her job when Nigel is not around and Iris wasn’t even there to yell at us today.
Probably the most important decision of the day was that we decided we want to be REVOLUTIONARY! Not sure how yet.