So this past weekend was my employer’s bi-annual warehouse sale. Generally, as these things go, super-crazy die-hards start camping out on Saturday morning an hour or two before we open the doors. There’s a crazy feeding frenzy for the first couple of hours, it tapers, then a little bit of a rush, repeat until we close the doors in the afternoon. Sunday is an entirely different experience - it’s pretty much dead all day with an occasional straggler coming in every now and again.

Curiously, after about 11:00 on Saturday morning (prior to which there was a feeding frenzy that I haven’t seen so bad in all the sales I’ve worked), it was dead for the rest of the weekend. Of course, there was the “Big Game” being played in Berkeley between UC and Stanford, but considering we get people that fly in for these sales (I kid you not), I was surprised that nothing was happening at all for the rest of the day on Saturday. Furthermore, Saturday afternoon saw some really intense winds come through at least the northern part of the bay, continuing through Sunday night. As a fairly popular manufacturer of windproof fleece, you’d think there’d be a little more interest on the “impulse-buy” end of the scale - in fact, I pretty much gambled on it and segmented out all the windproof fleece onto one rack and had signs drawn up calling this out on Sunday morning (even with the sparse traffic, the rack was pretty picked clean at the end of the sale).

So what happens when you’re not answering questions, ringing the register or otherwise trying to tidy up? Work “security”, i.e. sit out in the parking lot and make sure there aren’t any grab ‘n dashes. For the majority of Sunday, this was my responsibility. Well, it didn’t take very long before idle hands and minds got the best of yours truly and some others…