Quick notes...

I had a great new sears story written up, involving escalators, bicycles, and the mentally handicatpped, but I hit the wrong button and wiped it out. It'll have to wait a few days until I feel like writing it up again. In the meantime, I've finished the one on the work release crew that I never got around to posting.

I've spent most of the weekend watching football, or parsing a list of files and directories obtained from a psion over a serial link. I've moved onto a new project I suppose.

Proof positive that cats prefer java over perl.

We always had issues getting employees at sears. We had a core group of full timers and part timers, and between those the store would have about 80% coverage. It was that additional 20% that was a pain in the ass to come up with. So sometime during my 2nd year, my boss was on his way out. The district manager didn't really like him, and she was clearly out to get him. He was desperate to cover himself, and somehow he came up with the idea of having work release employees fill in the hard to plug 20%.

Honestly it wasn't a bad idea. These guys had to show up to work, otherwise they'd go back to jail. And we probably got some sort of tax break for hiring them. So, in theory the motivation of not going back to jail should get these guys to show up. It was a match made in heaven really.

In reality, it didn't work out so well. We got 3 guys in this deal, and this is their story....

The first guy we got was Bob (name changed). He was actually the best of the lot, and a pretty nice guy, which is why I'm changing his name. He got stuck in computers, which was great because he knew nothing about them. Coupled with the fact that he had "anger management" issues, this was a dangerous mix. Sooner or later it had to explode.

Bob didn't get on well with the other work release guys. Maybe because he knew he was better than they were. He just had those anger issues. He hated the cokehead/coke dealer, and wasn't too fond of the child molester. The only thing he hated more than the other work release guys were customers who would ask him questions he couldn't answer.

Bob was fine if you stuck to questions about answering machines or phones. He understood the basic principals of these devices and was fine talking about them. He could even cover advanced (for the time) concepts such as digital answering machines and 900mhz phones. But he also had to sell computers, and this is where the problem came in.

I'm not sure exactly how it happened, I just remember Bob and a customer in a shouting match. Bob was red, and I'm sure he was about 30 seconds from beating the hell out of the customer. Bob ended up getting in some sort of trouble with management for this, and he left shortly after that.

Bob was basically boring. Andy (name changed) was a little more exciting. I'm not sure what his deal was, but he was in his early 20s, thin as a knife, and was in trouble for drugs from what I gathered. He had a kid, and the kid's mother was always in the store. I think they had a relationship, but he also had a relationship with about 10 other women. It was kinda funny to see him try to juggle all of them.

So Andy sold stereos. Which was okay, because almost any moron could sell stereos. The exception being this guy named Vaux. He was an experiment, a nice 74 year old guy I'm sure, but utterly incompetent as a salesman. He was one of the few salesmen who'd get corraled and hustled by groups of foreigners into selling stereos for way under cost. I'm not kidding either. Vaux actually came into the office once and said something along the lines of, "These 5 guys who don't speak english have this stereo we haven't sold in 5 years that's somehow broken and want their money back and I can't work the register to give it to them". And he'd get upset when you'd try to explain that you can't give it back because he'd already told the nice men who didn't comprehend any english that they'd be getting their money back.

Vaux was so clueless I once saw him peel off the product summary and price sheets off from the tv displays so he could take them home and study them. I guess he didn't realise that everyone else needed them to function. But that was Vaux in a nutshell.

Because of little quirks like that, Vaux tended to annoy everyone. But if you stayed out of his way, and didn't have to take care of his fuckups, he was generally tolerable. But he was very protective of his sales. More than anyone else. So somehow he and Anthony got into it. And you really haven't lived until you've seen a 23 year old ex con threaten to beat up a 74 year old moron. And chase each other around the department. I'm not sure who would have won. I'd put my money on Vaux tho. He was tough like that.

The best, tho, was Owen(name changed). He was in jail for statuatory rape. I'm sure he's on the internet now finding pictures of underage girls, because man, this guy loved the young girls.

I've never seen anything quite like it. One day 2 girls were walking down the aisle. Owen saw them, and was on them like white on rice. He asked "hey girls, how old are yas"? When they replied 16, he said "well, come back and see me in 2 years".

And he dressed like a super pimp. Suspenders, hats, and a fondness for color purple that was unmatched until Barney came around.

No need to say that it didn't take long for Owen to disappear. Rumor is he knocked up the 17 year old receptionist. She was pregnant, and he did have at her one night, after he finagled her into driving him home.

But I'd rather not know the details of that one.

So if you're keeping score, it's work-release 0, and sears 0.