I worked last night; 6 hours on the floor. The store was very quiet, not too many customers so when someone from one department needed a break or dinner, we'd cover for each other. I covered Optics just in time to hear a man yell, "Where's Mount David!"
And I mean yell. I saw him head to the back of the department to look at the USGS maps, but he was on his cell phone so I thought he was talking to someone else not to me. But when he yelled "Where's Mount David!" again and then again, I realized he was no longer on his cell phone.
"Can I help you find something, sir?" I asked in my calmest, most polite voice. (We'd all received a memo that evening telling us that, despite the economic uncertainty and the cutback on hours, we were to continue providing excellent customer service. I decided to practice."
"Where the hell is Mount David!" he yelled at me though he never looked at me.
"Well, sir," I was tentative. I tried not to get too close. "The maps are organized alphabetically..."
"No they're not!" he interrupted brashly.
"Actually," (I hate the word actually in this context, but I used it anyway), "There are a lot of mountains that begin with 'mount' so they file them alphabetically by the name of the mountain. In this case, it will be filed under 'David,'" and it just happened that as I was telling him this, I located the map, pulled out the tray, and then pointed to the name tag "Mount David."
The yeller finally looked at me. "How'd you do that!" Well, it still sounded like yelling, but this time it was followed by an uneven chuckle.
I threw in my usual joke, "That's why they pay me the big bucks!"
That was my mistake, joking with someone a bit off balance. He saw it as an invitation an seized upon it with such zeal he barely took a breath between thoughts.
He began talking about his first adventure to Mount David. "I could have made it to the top. On Monday. I was there on Monday. Nice day, but it was late and I didn't have a map or a compass and I wasn't sure how far I had to go to make the summit. Damn it. I could have made it."
It didn't stop there. I stood by, though not too close, and listened as he went from mountain tops to economics to the presidential campaign to explaining how he was "socially liberal, but fiscally conservative."
"I'm more pro-choice than anyone you'll know," he prattled, "and gays can get married just like me and I love trees, simply LOVE them, but if you make millions you worked hard and you deserve it. Don't tell me Obama's not going to raise my taxes. That's crap. 'Read my lips' remember that? Old Bush promised us the same thing and that was crap. He's going to raise our taxes. But McCain..."
...and on and on it went. While he pontificated, I rang up his map and then stood at the register waiting for an opportunity to tell him the price. "Loopholes," he continued. "You just have to close all those tax loopholes. That's how you save money." And then he went into this whole monologue about which loopholes to cut and how cutting them would bring x amount of cash back into the system. By this time, I wasn't listening and even if I had been listening, I don't think I would have understood what he was talking about. I think myself a fairly intelligent person, but either this guy was brilliant and slightly manic or he was unintelligible and frantically manic. Either way, he was beyond balanced.
Christian, for whom I was covering, returned from his 30-minute dinner break and the guy was still at the register spewing his thoughts on healthcare. He had yet to sign his credit card slip even though I placed a pen in his hand and asked to see his ID (something he'd requested on the back of his credit card). Christian caught my eye and tried to ask me a question, but Mr. Mount David (as we referred to him later) just included Christian into the conversation. "What would you call a new political party?"
"Uh," Christian, who is incredibly intelligent and thoughtful, was at a loss for words.
"The Mount David Party," I chimed in, but the guy didn't get the joke.
"We need a new party. I need to think of a name."
In that moment when he actually stopped talking to think, I reminded him that he needed to sign his credit card slip and show me his ID. He did so and then changed subjects again.
"I'll vote for Obama in the end. What choice to I have? Besides, Palin is crazy as a loon. That would be a disaster if she became president."
He kept talking, but he backed away from the register and moved slowly out of the department still yammering on about healthcare and the war in Iraq. Meanwhile, I was wondering if perhaps he should ask Sarah Palin if she wanted to hike Mount David.
For the rest of the night, the tale of Mr. Mount David moved around the store. When I went into packs to relieve Rick for his break, he asked if I wanted to hike to Mount David this weekend. I laughed. "With you, yes," I told him.
The ski repair shop is behind the pack department register. Peter was on duty and even he came out and asked how I was doing after my encounter with the unbalanced guy. "I'm fine," I told him. "When I realized he yelled everything, I didn't feel threatened anymore. He was kind of a nice break from the boredom of this economic recession."
Peter told me he thought there were heebie-jeebie spirits in the air -- pre-Halloween/Election demons. "I sold some ski boots to a guy today and he kept them on."
"Kept them on?" I asked. "Like walked out of the store with them?"
"Yep, like put them on, paid for them, stuffed his old sneakers into the new box, and plodded out the front door."
Rick came back then and added his tales of the day. "How about the guy who brought in the 8 packs he and his wife purchased online and wanted me to fit them all so they could choose the ones they wanted."
"What!?" Often in the pack department, it works the other way around. People come in, try out some packs and then go home and order what they want online. To fit a pack properly takes a good half hour if not more.
"I spent 4 hours with those people today and they still hadn't made up their minds," Rick explained.
The night moved slowly. Painfully and slowly. 15 minutes before closing the husband and wife pack-fitters returned and wanted Rick to fit the last two packs again so they could make a choice. They'd been in the store for more than 7 hours. Yikes.
I headed back to the serenity of the Travel department, the area where I was scheduled, and helped a man find an outlet adapter for his trip to Vietnam. "Are you going for business or pleasure?" I asked.
"I'm going to get away from the craziness of this country," he laughed.
Who would have thought that 40 years after the end of the war, people would travel to Vietnam to get away from it all?
I work again on Friday from 1-9:30. Halloween. This could be very, very interesting.
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