It's a great job, except for the people

I'm still incredibly busy with setting up the new database, though I am making progress. In any case, it seemed rude to neglect my humble attempt at a blog for too long. The fact that writing something is infinitely more enjoyable that filling in data field after data field and that after spending several days doing little more than entering inventory from scratch I'd leap upon any excuse for distraction like a goshawk on a three-legged squirrel is purely coincidental. I'm sure I'll pay for the mental vacation at some later point, but it seems worth it at the present.

Never mind that now. It's time for ranting.

You see the other night while I was gritting my teeth and offering my sanity as a slowly devoured sacrifice to the gods of Point-of-Sale software, a middle-aged gentleman decided to peruse my store's shelves much to my misfortune and demise of sanguine demeanor. For after he'd explored down an aisle or two he'd apparently discovered something that evoked his interest. Do not get me wrong, ultimately that is the very result we are attempting to cultivate here; some slick, sexy new trifle you can't wait to take home and know in a biblical sense. However, when he looked around a couple times over the level of the store fixtures in concert with his marked focus on whatever item was in his hand at the time, it was time to have a face-to-face chit-chat with him.

As I feared, when I drew nigh to him he was fondling a penis sheath with the carton it had been neatly packaged in prior to his investigation hanging from a peg with the bag panel ripped asunder. I looked at the ruins of the box and then the soft rubber object he was still poking a grimy thumbnail into in contemplation and asked him if there was anything else I could help him with. He replied that it seemed like a pretty simple novelty to which I agreed shortly. He then asked me how much it was. I looked at the violated carton I had by now recovered from the hook and recited the price printed on the tag.

Almost before the sum had passed my lips, he was recoiling. It was too expensive and he was no longer interested in the item.

I had to suppress the small frigid smile that naturally wanted to cross my features when I told him that was a shame since the moment he chose to tear open the package, he'd bought the penis sheath.

Of course, he ranted and raved that it was unfair of the store to have such a policy, that it was impossible to know that customers weren't allowed to open the packages, that he didn't have that much money on him, and that I couldn't make him pay for it.

I daresay I might have implied he had the cognitive skills of a small variety of squash and was nothing more than the meanest stripe of craven thief in the course of explaining to him in pointed terms the correlation of all the items being taped shut and signs saying "do not open the merchandise" to my assertion that not only do we honestly don't want customers to rip open the packages, but it's so obvious it takes deliberate effort to not understand. Consequently, things got a tad heated for a while.

In the end, he left and I was stuck with a no longer saleable item.

In a perfect world I would have been able to hold him prisoner until someone paid the ransom on his behalf not only for the replacement of the item, but pro-rated room-and-board from the hour of his infraction.

It's a good thing I have outlets for my homicidal impulses.