Bean Counters

Last night at work we had our annual inventory. For anyone who has ever worked retail (which is damn near everyone), you may well have been lucky enough to endure one of these freakshows.

Basically, your company hires an external company that specializes in inventory to come in and literally count every single item in your entire store. In a bookstore this is a very tedious and time-consuming event. I mean, if you worked at, say, Home Depot, it would be even more dicey as every single nail would have to be counted in that fucking hell-cave. Still, with us, this means coming in at 6 PM and staying to about 3 AM. Worse, the work is very slow, dull, repetitive, and unbelievably unrewarding.

Having sold my soul to the devil many years ago, this means that I have had the pleasure of working an inventory every year but one, back since 1991. Brutal.

Mind you, there have been inventories that have lasted for over 12 hours, and have been veritable cluster-fucks from start to finish. These are the types of events that push me to the brink of homicide.

Fortunately, over the years, much improvement has been made on the procedural end of things, with both our staff and the respective staffs of the inventory folks gaining a great deal more experience in how to maximize effectiveness with as little agony as possible.

Unfortunately, agony in this sense is fairly relative. This is because even the best inventory is still no better than getting ass raped in the polar bear pen at the Baghdad Zoo.

Bring the lube. That’s all I’m sayin’.

I guess my point here is that whenever these people descend on our store I am always amazed to sort of stand back and take in the, uh, spectacle of the whole thing. The people that are hired by inventory companies to conduct these things are real gems in the raw.

At any given night you will get a large mix of any and all of these characters, and all of them are stories unto themselves.

Here are a few totally unfair and tarnished caricatures to throw your way:

You’ve got the boss. This guy is always balding, middle-aged, wears thick 80s glasses, smells fairly mothball-ish, and acts as though when he gets home someone other than his Fleshlight will be fucking him to sleep. This is the guy who wants everyone to respect his authority, when in actuality he is as authoritarian as, well, as a white guy who looks like Groucho Marx, only goofier and a thousand times less confident, and who is about as threatening as one of the Wiggles.

Then, there is a group of about ten or so semi-heavy black ladies who invariably have real bad tattoos, gold fronts, long, curly, and very creepy nails, suspiciously unnatural looking hair (often tinted a questionable shade of silver or gold), and a strong apparent urge to go, “Pssssst...” across the aisle to their friend whenever something really important comes up, like, say, when it’s break time, or if the other person remembers who was giving who a ride later.

Then there are the Hispanic people who usually can’t speak much English, tend to ask weird questions about books you’ve never heard of, and yell louder than necessary for a “SKU-check!!” every 12 seconds because they can’t seem to figure out how to find and scan a barcode to save their lives.

Then you get a whole group of people who are too old to be doing this, seem otherwise perfectly normal and competent, and leave you wondering if maybe this isn’t some sort of cosmic penance for some sort of crime against humanity for which doing this godforsaken job is the only retribution.

Finally - and this is my favorite group - there are the “others.”

These are the undefinable oddities. These people are the ones who speak with speech impediments, have few if any teeth, appear to never have brushed the few that they might have, smell terrible, walk with a limp or some sort of other physical trait, or combination thereof, that is simply impossible to not notice and wonder about. Last night, despite some heavy competition for the award of Most Curious Inventory Person, it all went to the guy who never said a word, worked diligently, appeared to be very accurate, and also happened to have something that looked like a large gray button that was plugged directly into his skull. From the button hung a wire that went right into the the guy’s earpiece, which I assume was a sort of hearing aid that for some reason has to be plugged directly into the guy’s brain.

He won, but it was close.

I’m not slagging the guy, no reason to, just commenting on how in every single inventory there is at least one person, often more, who have some quality that grabs my attention and leaves me wondering for the rest of the night.

I’m pathetic, I know. Just love me for who I am.

At this point it would be best for me to point out that I am in no way advocating that I am somehow immune to this sort of scrutiny. I can only imagine what they were thinking about us, and thus about me.

I guess that’s all part of the fun. The humanity of it. Why, it’s downright impressive to be cooped up with 30 total strangers, in a hot building the size of a football practice facility, in the middle of the night, deliriously exhausted, all of us doing something for someone else we can’t stand, just so we can live another day and do it all over again!

So here’s to next year. Unless death finds me first.