Impending Suck: Alaskan Book Signing and Strange White Fallout

[Jay 2K Winger]

So this Saturday, December 5th, is going to be crazy busy at the wholesale club for two reasons.

First, a certain former Vice Presidential candidate is coming to the club to autograph copies of her book. The club has imposed certain limitations-- only two books per customer, no personalized signatures, you must have purchased the book at our club and have the receipt, and you must be a club member-- and stated that 1,000 wristbands will be handed out starting two hours before the event (incidentally, that two hour mark will be as soon as we open on Saturday), with wristband holders getting their book signed.

Already I've heard that one of my CWs has relatives from Chicago who are flying in and signing up for membership at our club just to get their books signed. We're going to have the police around tonight at the club to shut down part of the parking lot to help deal with the crowds, since apparently some people are actually planning to camp out so they can be first in line when the doors open to get their wristbands.

The estimates I'm hearing for expected turnout is anywhere from 1,000 to 3,500 people, a number which I'm also guessing includes possible protesters. Either way, this will mean the largest crowd I'll have ever experienced at our store. Ever.

The Impending Suck is because any time you mix a huge crowd of people like that with a limited number of wristbands, the aforementioned limitations on the signings themselves, we're expecting to get people wanting to return their books because they didn't get them signed, and people then asking for a refund on their membership fee, because they only signed up so they could get their books signed.

And that's before you factor in possible protests and any political-related Suck that may rear its ugly head.

As if all that weren't bad enough, the weather forecast is calling for that infamous strange white fallout coming from the sky known as snow. Anyone who's ever worked in retail knows that the merest whisper of that s-word on the weather reports brings out the craziness in people, so we're also expecting to have people coming to the club, looking for ice melt, snow shovels, sleds, cold weather clothes, jackets, gloves, hats, what do you mean you're out of all that, can't you see it's snowing out, how dare you be sold out, I want to talk to your manager, I'm never shopping here again rabble rabble rabble.

[Crossbow]

Ugh. That's just a recipe for disaster, even before the weather. I wish you the best of luck.

[Crime Scene Scarf]

That sounds like hell! I wish you luck!

You have to come back with the stories. They are bound to be horrific.

[mikoyan29]

I absolutely hate the first snowfall of the year....

Good luck...

[eltf177]

And what's worse is the original prediction was only for an inch and that was on the grass, as I post this they're now calling for 2-4 inches!

I for one do _NOT_ want a white Christmas!

[AnaKhouri]

Things actually went pretty well when that particular person was at our bookstore, but we did have lots of people bitching how they didn't get their books signed (though we told them only 1000 people were allowed, there was a b-list of people who would be signed IF there was time and we told them that, and hell, she is only one person...). Good luck!

We did have one small group of protesters but in this city they couldn't protest on private property, which included the parking lot, so they protested on the sidewalk about 100 feet away. I believe in people's right to protest whatever they want, but it was kind of amusing to see them so far away...

[Jay 2K Winger]

P-Day Report

So the first half of my shift, from 5am to 9am, I kept some decent notes about goings-on in the prep-work. No notes for the latter half, since we were too damn busy for me to make notes on my cell phone.

Hour by hour report...

4 am -- Get started with shower, etc. No sleep during the night, not for lack of trying. Feel surprisingly alert for someone up all night.

4:30 am -- Get going to work. Weather conditions: Chilly, but rainy. Not cold enough for snow. Drive past wholesale club parking lot. Cops stationed at one end of lot, people camped out and waiting in the cold and rain.

5 am -- O/VM MC is already at the club. He usually comes in at 6am. Tells me to be sure to wear my vest, because managers from other clubs and from farther up the corporate chain will be coming to the store. No mixed pallet for me to break down and scan in the computer, just two stacked pallets of books for the impending event. This means I have nothing to do for most of my shift but wait for the vendors to show up for DSD work. Weather conditions: Still rainy.

6 am -- Throughout the hour, the corporate brass and managers from other clubs start to show up. They all have to sign in, as they are technically visitors, even if they are helping out. Weather conditions: Still rainy, but getting colder.

7:15 am -- I smell bacon, I smell grease, I smell Fairfax County Po-lice. FCPD officers arrive, to help with crowd control. Shortly thereafter, rent-a-cops show up as well. As with the outside managers, they must sign in at the back door.

7:30 am -- The meat department manager notices a slight burning smell. When he brings this up to the GM, the GM remarks that the heat is on in the club for the first time in... a long while. Thus, I determine, the smell is likely the dust on the ducts starting to smolder. Whee, I can haz dust fire? (Note-- I exaggerate. The dust is not in such accumulations to be that dangerous.)

7:30 am-ish -- Around this time, the phone calls start. People asking about the event, what the rules/limitations are, asking for directions, etc. Being an honest sort, I tell the callers that people have been camped out since the previous evening, and there is already a significant crowd. Two of my CWs, one of whom works the book department, get slightly upset with my honesty, as we've got a lot of the damned books to sell. If I tacitly discourage the customers coming, we won't sell them. Meh.

7:45 am-ish -- The Entemann's vendor brings a couple of pallets of their Little Bites muffin/brownie snacks to the club, which management passes out to some of the folks waiting outside.

Shortly thereafter, a vendor from Keuring coffee shows up with their K-cup serving-size coffees to likewise pass out to the waiting folks. Keuring lady is a little highstrung (which I jokingly attribute to Too Much Coffee), but surprisingly slow to unload her equipment from her car, which means I'm standing there in front of the open DSD door, freezing my ass off. Weather condition: Rainy, but getting damn cold.

8 am-ish -- I finally get some idea of how the event is going to work. Instead of having the whole mass of people come in the main entrance, we opened the two fire-doors on the front side of the building, one as the entrance, one as the exit. Folks there for the event come in one door, sign up for a membership if necessary (we set up a Point-of-Sale terminal and computer by that door), get their wristband (though those aren't available for another hour), and can then get their books signed later.

But the managers decide to start selling the memberships early, and open one of the doors for this purpose. Since the door is one of the emergency exits, the alarm goes off. Humorously, the alarm goes off at the same time the rent-a-cop chief is popping outside, and he freaks out, thinking he'd set off the alarm. Estimated count of people waiting outside: 400~500.

8:30 am -- Little Miss Panicky arrives, and tells me that we had at least ten people waiting outside at 2pm yesterday, with their children. (This makes me lose a lot more faith in humanity, making one's children camp out in the cold and wet for a damned autograph signing.) When I mention this to O/VM MC, he tells me that the guy with the tent out front has been camped there since eleven am. The consensus is that the man is insane. (Later hypothesis: He wants to be mentioned in the news.) Weather condition: Wintry mix. Uh oh.

8:40 am to 9 am -- Many phone calls, most on the same lines as previous ones, questions about the book signing. However, one call made me want to pull a Pedro ("NOOOOOO~!"), because they asked if we are carrying Zhu Zhu's. I said we are not. Weather condition: FUCK! WE HAVE SNOW!

9 am to 1 pm -- I head up to the front door, where we also have some of the LP team members from other clubs. Their job is to check for visitors' membership cards and direct non-members to the front desk. CR is there as well, helping me with FDLP receipt-checking, which causes no small amount of Suck.

The majority of the customers we checked this morning were buying a copy of the book, which they then inserted in a plastic bag to protect against the difficult weather. Alas, most of the time, their receipt was inside the bag as well, and in some cases TAPED to the inside cover, slowing things down. Complicating matters further was the fact that most of the book-buyers were trying to bypass the receipt-check entirely. Granted, most were probably new members, and thus not used to the process. One "gentleman" gave us a sour look and snapped, "You guys are being so picky today!"

On top of this, many of the people who had waited, once they got their precious wristbands, came into the store and loitered in the food court-- usually without buying anything-- to warm up, thus taking away space from people who were actually planning to eat there.

News crews show up as well, asking me or CR where the media sign-in is. Since neither he nor I was told anything about this, we direct them down toward the event area, since we knew the GM (or an otherwise in-the-know manager from our club) was there.

Weather conditions: The snow gets heavier as the morning rolls on.

10:45 am-ish -- The woman of the hour arrives. She apparently enters through the event doors (the opened fire doors), as I never see her. I'm tipped off to her arrival by the outbreak of applause and the flashing of cameras from that part of the store.

Two people claiming to be "on the governor's staff" try to bypass the receipt-check when they walk out with an armload of books. CR intercepts them and asks for their receipt. They cite the above rationale for being exempt, but CR stands firm and verifies the books are paid for before letting them go. We had been told that NO books were being pre-signed for the club or team members or otherwise exempted. All books had to be paid for.

11:15 am to 12:15 pm -- My long-deserved break! At last! Food, drink, bathroom, ker-thud!

12:30 pm-ish -- While CR takes a restroom break, one customer gives me a bit of a hard time about showing his receipt, saying he's been in and out several times, and tries to excuse his short-tempered-ness with "we've been waiting outside in the snow for the last two hours." So fucking what? I think. Nobody forced you to come out in this weather. I've been here since five in the fucking morning on zero hours of sleep, asshole! But I value my employment, so I bottled it up for release now.

1 pm -- FREEDOM!

There was still a line of people outside (waiting for wristbands/waiting for their books to be signed) when I left, trudging through slush and snow back to my car. I spend a few minutes brushing the strange white fallout from my vehicle before getting lunch and coming home for a quick power-nap.

Weather conditions, as of 3:20 pm: Still snowing.

[nuthing12]

Good thing there are cops around for you to call on for the real sucks out of the bunch.