What I did today...

...I hope I never do again. It was three hours of hell. HELL, I tell you!

First I need to set a new policy for talking about work here. I'm not going to mention the store by name because they're touchy about employees saying bad things about the store in public and this is a public forum. On her blog Virginia talked about an auto parts store where she got some lousy service. Some guy contacted her on her blog and said his job is to scan the internet for any mention of this store's name. Since my store has a policy forbidding employees to publicly dis the chain I think it's possible that they too have an internet scanner dude. So, from now on I'm calling this place "Mickey's"

Today at Mickey's it was our job to help a shitload of whiny children paint fake pumpkins. It was freakin' nuts! At first we had everyone sit at tables out on the sales floor but that scene was quickly overwhelmed. So, we moved half of them into the classroom. Deborah, the woman who usually handles the kid stuff, took the group on the sales floor and I took the classroom group. We were running back and forth with paints, brushes, chenille stems, glitter, fun foam, wiggly eyes and whatever ELSE the little darlings wanted to slap on their pumpkins. I'd say about half of the kids were very good. Half of them were merely bratty and three of them were champion whiners (with volume). Those three were in the classroom. Oh my god.

Deborah had brought her two kids. The boy is about 14 and the girl is maybe 10. The boy was a huge, sulking, reeking complainer. The girl just complained. Almost every time I needed to move somewhere in the room it seemed I had to squeeze my way past B.O. boy who acted like it was a major inconvenience that I even existed.

Out in front was a display of some elaborately decorated pumpkins which were, I guess, supposed to serve as inspiration. Well, these kids wanted to do their pumpkins EXACTLY like the display pumpkins. That would have involved their parents purchasing a lot of extra materials and several hours of gluing and painting. I don't know how many times we had to tell them no, you can't do that one. Kind of unfair, really.

I spent a lot of time manning the glue gun. It's a cordless glue gun that sits on a base to heat up. I was running around with it so much that it kept cooling off and I'd have to set it back on the base and wait for it to heat up again. But people kept wanting to use it so they'd just grab it and take off. It was really hard to keep it heated.

Some of the kids applied so much paint to their pumpkins that it took forever to dry. So they had to stop working on them. So they got bored. And started whining. Parents were sitting around the tables fanning their kid's pumpkins.

When Lindsay and Paige were in elementary school I'd go to their classes and do arts and crafts with the kids. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it because I could say to a surly kid, "I don't have to let you do this. If you don't pay attention or if you complain you can go back to your desk." That always had the desired affect. But there's no way I could have told any of these children that today. I'm always kind of shocked when I see parents putting up with that kind of behavior from their kids. They try to appease them which only makes it worse. There were times today when I wanted to get into a kid's face and yell SHUT UP!!!

For this I missed uke group.

I'm doing the same thing tomorrow, only with adults. But you KNOW some of them are going to bring their kids.