Monday, September 27, 2004
Official chronicle of events...
8:19 a.m. Arrived at work, clocked in, realized I was the only one told
we were going to be changing our hours. I was told we were going to
open at 8:30, this however, is not the case. That starts next week, just
as well, I was still on low power from a weekend spent suffering through
a cold, but I did have Nyquil!!! Nineteen minutes late for work, a good
start to the week!
Got a call at work from my friend Michelle, she's going to be out in
Schaumburg shopping at IKEA and wants to know if I want to tag along,
sure what else am I doing? We meet at IKEA and we agree that the place
has gone way down hill since our days at the "Big Blue Sh*t Box" as
Michelle calls it. Now if you've ever been to IKEA Schaumburg, you'll
know the place is designed so that you start your shopping on the third
floor (in the big yellow revolving door, up the escalator to the second
floor, quick left, and onto the next escalator to the third floor), and
right at the top of the escalator on the third floor, is a really
trashed room setting(not that it's supposed to be trashed mind you).
Michelle's comment was that, in our day we would have never gotten away
with letting a room setting get that bad, and she was right, there was
example after example of how the place has gone down hill. I don't know
who the current manager is, but I have a feeling there has been so much
turnover in the staff there that maybe ten percent of the original
opening day staff is there. I think that the staff that was hired after
they were open for a while never got to see the store in it's truly
pristine condition, and thus never wanted to try to maintain, or reclaim
that condition, as I think the people who helped put the place together
did.
We went to the lighting department to get the fixtures she needed for
her job, and in the bin we were getting fixtures out of, there was a
fixture with something that looked like a chewed up and spat out tootsie
roll! So we can all imagine what that looks like, I'm not saying that's
what it was, but c'mon! I'd ask if someone was working in that
department, but I know there was, I saw him!
So later, as I was waiting for Michelle, sitting in the gift shop on the
first floor, I was looking around and I'm thinking to myself, for a
Swedish store in Schaumburg Illinois, they have a lot of spanish
language signs. Now I expect swedish, it's part of the "store culture"
but spanish!
Now I'm not xenophobic but, well, if you don't agree, what's the use
arguing, at least in english!
After IKEA, we went over to Woodfield and looked for the Origins store,
which apparently is closed, however there is one inside Marshall Fields,
so after eating at John's Garage, we went to Marshall Fields, and
witnessed the weird ass-compression of a woman wearing low riders bend
over a counter at the Mac cosmetics store, maybe that's why she got the
ugly lower back tattoo, to distract from the weird way the pants made
her tuchus look. Just inside Marshall Fields across from the cosmetics
counters (where the girls who work there might be more attractive, if
they didn't wear so much make-up) , sit's the Origins boutique. While
Michelle looked for some cosmetic that "had something to do with
chocolate" I watched the "brilliant parade" and as I was looking around
I was mightily distracted by the old woman folding clothes in the
woman's section. She was wearing a sleeveless blouse, and man, let me
tell ya, wrinkled old lady upper arms do not cry out for sleeveless
blouses! Quite the opposite my friend, quite the opposite! But on an up
note, God bless her, she's still working, yes, she still gets out and
goes to work, granted it's probably because she had an insufficient
retirement package, but that's another story.
We wandered around Woodfield a bit more, I was even coaxed into my
former ring of Hell, I mean place of employ, Illuminations. No familiar
faces, a few cosmetic changes, but essentially the same. A place I
would never shop for myself, and a place I can't figure out why I stayed
as long as I did. but, uh good news, they have halloween stuff...
After "the field of wood", she dropped me back off at my car, and I
drove over to the Library to see if I could find any good movies, but
alas, I think I'm pretty much through the percentage of the catalog that
I'd want to see. Now staring back at me from the shelves are seemingly
countless direct to video movies, cable movies, and movies staring Rob
Schneider, and Pauly Shore (not together mind you, although that movie
would rock!)! So I went home empty handed, got on the internet and
hours later started this here blog!
Okay that was just one day...I think I'm gonna have to do a lot more
boiling down from here on, otherwise, I don't know that I'll get much
else done.
