New Tales from Old Navy: Annoyances and Oddities

Friday night was an interesting night at work. Interesting is the wrong word to use there. Irritating is much more accurate. Friday night was an irritating night at work.

I mostly blame myself. Friday ended up being the last day of a very long week. I'm not 100%, but I'm pretty sure, this has been the first full week of school since before Thanksgiving. Nuts, right? That's what happens when you live in a place that sees a constant barrage of holidays, polar vortexes and frozen precipitation.

Anyway, working through a full week of school after getting so used to either having some days off or sleeping through 2 hour delays, I was kind of exhausted. You know how being tired can lead to being irritable? I think that's what happened to me Friday night at the store. Lots of things either struck me as super annoying or really bizarre. Lucky for you, I was nice enough to make a list.

• The Children of the Corn... This requires some explanation. There was a family that came into the store. At least, I think they were a family. It consisted of two women who I would guess to be in their early to mid 50s and four children, 3 boys and 1 girl. When they came by the fitting room, the boys were wearing straw hats that we have for sale. And the boys in the straw hats just stood there and stared at me like I was the first grown man they'd ever seen before. Kinda freaked me out. I was waiting for them to decide they were ready to sacrifice me to their hidden brother Mordecai who was waiting in the clearance section.
• The Woman with the Super-Sized Bluetooth... There was this lady that came into the store with some kind of communication device attached to her head. I can only assume it was some kind of Bluetooth device that was connected to her phone. It wasn't a regular Bluetooth, though. Not the kind that's really small and barely noticeable. This looked more like a hands free headset that you'd find on a cubicle occupant in 1987. Or something Garth Brooks would have on his face at a concert in 1996. But you know how you can tell when someone is having a conversation on the phone? You can just tell that you're listening to one side of a two-sided conversation. I didn't get that vibe from this lady.
• Also, to the Woman with the Super-Sized Bluetooth, I'd like to say this: If you're still unsure of your appropriate clothing size after visiting the fitting room 3 separate times and trying on approximately 28 different articles of clothing, do you really think coming back for a 4th, 5th and 6th visit will clear things up for you?
• To the adults that sat at the children's coloring table in the middle of the store for a solid hour, may I suggest hanging out somewhere else? It's Old Navy. Not Starbucks. If you're not in our store to shop, you're wasting everyone's time. And you're scaring small children away from the children's coloring table.
• When I first got to work, the random playlist on the loudspeaker threw out some pretty decent songs. As the night went on, the songs got progressively worse. It really does not help one's attitude when the music you're hearing is nothing but dissonant crap.
• To the person whose job it is to create those playlists for the Old Navy stores across the country, is this how you really earn your paycheck? I would love to have your job. You basically get paid an extraordinary amount of money to make mix CDs. I could do that. And I'm confident that I could do a better job than you do. It can't be that hard to find better music than what we've been getting. Seriously, we have a lot of songs that just have random sound effects thrown in.
• Finally, I just need to ask you, my readers, a simple question. If you hear someone swear loudly in the restroom, then emerge not a minute later as if nothing happened, should you ask if they're okay? Seriously, this guy shouted a pretty bad curse word, then walked out like he didn't just use profanity out of anger. I just let him go, but I was genuinely concerned. Then I was a little afraid to go into the bathroom because I wasn't sure what I would find in there. And I was a lot afraid of the fact that I had to clean the bathroom as part of my closing duties for the night.
• Ha... duties...

So that was my recent evening at the part-time job. By the end of the night, everything just rubbed me the wrong way. I wanted to crawl into a hole somewhere and just be by myself for a long time. I even considered making a plan to get in my car on Saturday and just drive and drive. If gas was free, I think I'd have done it. Just me, my thoughts, some music and the open road. That's the dream.