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The store did well over the holiday weekend. That was a relief. Fifty sales ($800) on Saturday; 25 sales ($600) Sunday. Still a volume game: people buy hot sauce, tee shirts, the occasional cookbook or poster or salt and pepper shaker. Nothing over $25. Success under this model ties us to the fortunes of Cannery Row where come tomorrow, once again, the entire itinerant human population will be a single homeless guy scavenging around in garbage cans for cigarette butts. Not a formula for retail triumph.
I'm kind of at a loss how to finesse this. Clearly we need a Big Ticket Item, but what? Kitchen ceramics don't work. I love Balocoloc's Venetian carnivale masks – paper mache, hand-made, decorated with gold foil, crystals and feathers; really the most exquisite evocation of Commedia del Arte archetypes. But so far we've only sold one. Ditto the Peruvian retablos, which are so much more detailed and amazing than Mexican retablos. It's the great retail paradox: people will only buy something when they see twenty items just like it in a store but on the other hand, I can't buy twenty pieces unless I have some kind of guarantee it's going to sell.
Meanwhile, the scut job is your basic Bartleby the Scrivener assignment with the added stipulation that my DoD security clearance is pending and I had to pee in a cup. I'm not at all sure that I can pass a DoD security clearance, what with my colorful past and all, so this job may be very short-lived.
The peeing in the cup part was amusing. I had to drive into Salinas to do it. Pee Central is a grungy little trailer across the street from the big grungy hospital that is slowly being driven into bankruptcy through the health crises of assorted farm-workers. Nowadays, they insist on seeking medical attention when they get poisoned from pesticides. Formerly, they just crawled off and died.
Some immutable law of the universe decrees that places like Pee Central are always staffed by morbidly obese young women with perfect French manicures. This one led me into a back bathroom and recited the rules: you have three minutes, you can't flush the toilet, you can't wash your hands. The pee in the cup has to cup up to this mark.
Then she left me.
I'd had to pee pretty badly on the drive up but of course, with the cup in my hand, I didn't have to pee at all. And I was on the clock! Think waterfalls, I told myself, plopping myself down on the toilet. Big mistake. I immediately began to pee, but the cup was not positioned correctly; thus most of my precious urine escaped into the bowl.
I toddled back to the front office. "Well, I did this much!" I said brightly, and it struck me that this whole ritual had as much to do with reprogramming as it did with engendering a drug-free workplace. Here I was reenacting scenes from my earliest toilet training: see, Mommy? I made pee! I'm a good girl!
The fat girl put down her nail file. "That's not enough."
"So what do I do?" I asked.
"You'll have to come back later and try again."
"Oh, no," I said. "I'm not driving forty extra miles to pee in a cup. I'll stay here." I gestured towards the sink. "Do you mind… ?"
"Suit yourself," said the fat girl, shrugging.
I hate drinking plain water. The one habit I retained from the two years I lived in France and Italy is carbonation. Still, when you're in the trenches, you do what you have to do. The water from this sink was luke warm even with the tap pushed all the way to cold. I gulped down six Dixie cups. Then I grabbed a copy of People Magazine from the rack and lost myself in the marital misadventures of Brad and Jennifer. He wanted a baby. She wanted a career. Why do they say she's a great beauty? Her eyes are much too close together and there's something desperate going on with her mouth. (C'mon bladder!) He has bad acne scars. These are not perfect pretty people. (Hey bladder, bladder, bladder!) I'm glad it wasn't my $3.50 that went towards the purchase of this magazine, cause I'm not sure how much fun Brad and Jennifer would be at a party, he with his architecture obsessions, she with her massive insecurity about her looks. Though maybe they'd like to invest in a hot sauce empire –
Bingo.
The urge.
This time the pee in the cup came up to the desired level.
The next day I drove to the Ministry of Love. No time to report on all my adventures there except to note that time moved very s-l-o-w-l-y; so slowly, in fact, that the only way to stay awake was by computing the number of times I could have drowned in the Tsunami in order to make it move faster (four minutes till Brain Death goes into eight hours of Absolute Tedium X times.) I took lunch with two obese young women who alas! did not have French manicures and so were forced to seek employment outside the exciting world of medical assistance.
"Oh, yeah, the drug test," said one. "My uncle told me how to beat those."
"That part's easy," the other one agreed. "You just get a little kid to pee into a condom! Then you tie it off, put the condom in your underpants. They don't actually stand in the bathroom with you. You pour some pee in the cup, and the rest of it in the toilet –"
See? Life's lessons are everywhere.
I'm kind of at a loss how to finesse this. Clearly we need a Big Ticket Item, but what? Kitchen ceramics don't work. I love Balocoloc's Venetian carnivale masks – paper mache, hand-made, decorated with gold foil, crystals and feathers; really the most exquisite evocation of Commedia del Arte archetypes. But so far we've only sold one. Ditto the Peruvian retablos, which are so much more detailed and amazing than Mexican retablos. It's the great retail paradox: people will only buy something when they see twenty items just like it in a store but on the other hand, I can't buy twenty pieces unless I have some kind of guarantee it's going to sell.
Meanwhile, the scut job is your basic Bartleby the Scrivener assignment with the added stipulation that my DoD security clearance is pending and I had to pee in a cup. I'm not at all sure that I can pass a DoD security clearance, what with my colorful past and all, so this job may be very short-lived.
The peeing in the cup part was amusing. I had to drive into Salinas to do it. Pee Central is a grungy little trailer across the street from the big grungy hospital that is slowly being driven into bankruptcy through the health crises of assorted farm-workers. Nowadays, they insist on seeking medical attention when they get poisoned from pesticides. Formerly, they just crawled off and died.
Some immutable law of the universe decrees that places like Pee Central are always staffed by morbidly obese young women with perfect French manicures. This one led me into a back bathroom and recited the rules: you have three minutes, you can't flush the toilet, you can't wash your hands. The pee in the cup has to cup up to this mark.
Then she left me.
I'd had to pee pretty badly on the drive up but of course, with the cup in my hand, I didn't have to pee at all. And I was on the clock! Think waterfalls, I told myself, plopping myself down on the toilet. Big mistake. I immediately began to pee, but the cup was not positioned correctly; thus most of my precious urine escaped into the bowl.
I toddled back to the front office. "Well, I did this much!" I said brightly, and it struck me that this whole ritual had as much to do with reprogramming as it did with engendering a drug-free workplace. Here I was reenacting scenes from my earliest toilet training: see, Mommy? I made pee! I'm a good girl!
The fat girl put down her nail file. "That's not enough."
"So what do I do?" I asked.
"You'll have to come back later and try again."
"Oh, no," I said. "I'm not driving forty extra miles to pee in a cup. I'll stay here." I gestured towards the sink. "Do you mind… ?"
"Suit yourself," said the fat girl, shrugging.
I hate drinking plain water. The one habit I retained from the two years I lived in France and Italy is carbonation. Still, when you're in the trenches, you do what you have to do. The water from this sink was luke warm even with the tap pushed all the way to cold. I gulped down six Dixie cups. Then I grabbed a copy of People Magazine from the rack and lost myself in the marital misadventures of Brad and Jennifer. He wanted a baby. She wanted a career. Why do they say she's a great beauty? Her eyes are much too close together and there's something desperate going on with her mouth. (C'mon bladder!) He has bad acne scars. These are not perfect pretty people. (Hey bladder, bladder, bladder!) I'm glad it wasn't my $3.50 that went towards the purchase of this magazine, cause I'm not sure how much fun Brad and Jennifer would be at a party, he with his architecture obsessions, she with her massive insecurity about her looks. Though maybe they'd like to invest in a hot sauce empire –
Bingo.
The urge.
This time the pee in the cup came up to the desired level.
The next day I drove to the Ministry of Love. No time to report on all my adventures there except to note that time moved very s-l-o-w-l-y; so slowly, in fact, that the only way to stay awake was by computing the number of times I could have drowned in the Tsunami in order to make it move faster (four minutes till Brain Death goes into eight hours of Absolute Tedium X times.) I took lunch with two obese young women who alas! did not have French manicures and so were forced to seek employment outside the exciting world of medical assistance.
"Oh, yeah, the drug test," said one. "My uncle told me how to beat those."
"That part's easy," the other one agreed. "You just get a little kid to pee into a condom! Then you tie it off, put the condom in your underpants. They don't actually stand in the bathroom with you. You pour some pee in the cup, and the rest of it in the toilet –"
See? Life's lessons are everywhere.
