The Crazy Lady and other Job #2 News

I've been meaning to write about my Other Job.

Depending on your proximity to Provo and your interest in shopping, you may or may not know that for Labor Day our wing of the mall flooded. We were actually 5 inches deep in water because the pipe burst right outside of our store. We lost half of our merchandise and our store cracked in half. Also, the walls shifted, so the fitting room doors would close but not lock anymore.

A couple of our girls were there all night cleaning things up, and our store was still covered in silt afterwards. The rest of the mall was really nice to us. One of the owners of a store in the food court brought desserts to the people who spent the night cleaning. The whole mall smelled like wet afterwards. The Body Shop rated our store one of the ten smelliest and they gave us an oil-warmer thing and some fancy Body Shop oil that made our store smell so good.

The store was closed for a few days while they decided whether or not it was safe for us to continue working there. The stores on both sides of my store had to move to other locations. The actual pipe that was a problem and had caused the flood actually ran directly beneath our store, so they were going to need to dig up our store eventually.

Anyway, so after a month or so of working in our normal location, we had to move down to the ghetto end of the mall. I have to admit, it's been really interesting.

For one thing, business has slowed considerably. We used to be right in the middle of the mall, and everyone knew where we were, so we used to be pretty busy all the time. Now, the store is usually slow, and there are just sometimes rushes of people.

Our old location was near trendy clothes stores, and now we're near an independent toy store, and a kids dress store, and a salon brands hair place. (Nothing like before.) The weird thing about our new location is, management never goes down there (I don't blame them), so things are just...well...a little bit different.

There is a lady who runs? works at? a store across from us, and she wanders around to chat with people in other stores. While her store is open. It's bizarre. The lady in the store next to hers does the same thing. I guess they figure that since they don't have any customers they might as well keep things interesting.

So this lady comes in and chats with us. She tries to keep up on all of the mall gossip. And she informs us when we're breaking the rules of the mall. And from her own store she watches us to see what we're doing. She just stares.

The funny thing is, we used to be in the middle of the mall. So we know what is fine and what isn't, because management was always walking past our store. Like a week before the flood, we got fined for having a streak on our glass in the front of the store. And we didn't know our neighbors at all.

So now this lady is telling us what we can and cannot do, based on who knows what, and she does some wild stuff. My coworkers have seen her close the store in the middle of the day, for an hour and a half or so. (You definitely can't do that in a mall!) And, instead of taking her store's trash to the trash compactor for stores, she'll take her store's trash and dump it in the trash cans in the middle of the mall that are for customers!

One time, I guess management saw her throwing away trash and the guy came and YELLED at her. And she kept trying to change the subject, and it made him angry, and he was like "WE'RE NOT TALKING ABOUT THAT. DON'T CHANGE THE TOPIC!" and kept trying to get her to promise she wouldn't throw any more trash in those trash cans. And she just kept changing the subject, talking about unrelated stuff, and eventually he got her to agree. And she waited a couple minutes, and then took a big handful of trash from her store, and kind of circled the area outside her store, walked up to the trash, made sure nobody was looking, and spitefully (triumphantly?) crammed it into the same trash can.

She's an interesting one.

And then, when we first moved down there, we had a sign near one of our mannequins that said NOW HIRING, bring in a resume, or something. And the lady from across came to us and told us we couldn't have signs in the window. Oooookay. I think we ended up moving the sign, not necessarily because of her, but just because. And now she has a poster drawn on, like, WalMart poster paper that says ABSOLUTELY NO FOOD OR DRINK ALLOWED that she puts in the mall walkway.

And my coworkers have little crushes on the guys that work in the nearby cellphone booths. And the guys that work in the nearby cellphone booths have little crushes on one of my coworkers. One of the guys in particular keeps giving her cellphone bling: first she had her last name in those little sticky jewels on her phone, and then he brought her a crystal lanyard thing to attach to it...

And then there's the issue of the hair store playing music so loud that we can't hear the music we're playing in our store...

Things are just different.

I miss our old store.