Friday, September 29
the haunting
So this is a work related post. But it's not the boring part of work. Herein, The Haunting will be discussed. Intriguing, n'est-ce pas?
I firmly believe that my store is haunted. At first, I thought it was just my imagination. But now I don't. This goes pretty far back, I think February is the earliest I can remember anything strange happening. This would be the Case of the Shorts. We had some orange and grey shorts folded lengthwise on shelves to the right of the cash desk, orange side up. There were days when, about once an hour, I would look over and see the top pair of shorts folded exactly right, but with the grey side up. This would happen all day long. This is the kind of thing one would attribute to a customer looking at the shorts. But February is a horrible, dull, boring month where very few customers enter the store on a given day. There are long stretches where nobody enters the store. And the shorts would be flipped just the same.
Then there's the Back Room. Our back room is always cold. Sometimes freezing. Perhaps this indicates...a presence.
Let's not forget the fact that I, and others, frequently see movement out of the corners of our eyes, but nothing is there. This happens most frequently in two sections of the store. One is the front girls section, which is by the window, so it wouldn't be unusual to think you saw something when it was just someone outside the window. But it also happens in the very back section, near where we had those infamous shorts folded.
Now, let us move on to the Case of the Disappearing Shirts. About a month and a half ago, we were doing a pretty big layout. Tanya and I were working on Girls Shop 2, which is the middle of the wall, basically. We took everything out of that shop and either hung it on the adjacent rack, or threw it on the counter. One of the things we put on the counter was a set of shirts. There were pink ones, white ones, and blue ones. When we went to put everything back in the shop, we could not find the blue shirts. I thought someone had taken them and hidden them as a joke, and went and asked. As in, the jig's up guys, give the shirts back. Nobody knew what I was talking about. We searched the entire store, top to bottom for those blue shirts. We never found them. We have not since found them. The blue shirts vanished. Tanya and I have since wondered if we were delusional--did we really have any of those blue shirts left? But we both distinctly remember putting three colours--pink, blue and white--of that shirt on the counter.
This brings me to last night, when I was happily playing with numbers at the far end of the counter (incidentally, the end near the infamous rack and where the infamous blue shirts were put). Playing with numbers entails putting the daily budgets for the next month on a tracking sheet and adding them all up. For this, I was using the calculator. I was happily punching in numbers and getting answers and writing them on the sheet, when all of a sudden the calculator reset itself to zero. Well that was weird, I thought to myself. Maybe I accidentally hit the zero button. So I started happily punching numbers in again. And a minute later, the calculator reset itself again. And I knew my finger was nowhere near the zero button. Well fine then, I thought. It's the ghost. Leave me alone ghost, there are no customers and I'm having a good time here playing with my numbers. And that was the end of it.
Rumor has it that other stores in the mall experience weird occurrences from time to time, so you see I am not entirely crazy. It's just that logical explanations only stretch so far, and the thing that really did it for me, without a doubt, was those shirts disappearing. I know there is something. I just know it. And that, my friends, is The Haunting.
~Currently playing: Derek and the Dominoes-Layla; Eagle Eye Cherry-Save Tonight; Lynyrd Skynyrd-Sweet Home Alabama~
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I firmly believe that my store is haunted. At first, I thought it was just my imagination. But now I don't. This goes pretty far back, I think February is the earliest I can remember anything strange happening. This would be the Case of the Shorts. We had some orange and grey shorts folded lengthwise on shelves to the right of the cash desk, orange side up. There were days when, about once an hour, I would look over and see the top pair of shorts folded exactly right, but with the grey side up. This would happen all day long. This is the kind of thing one would attribute to a customer looking at the shorts. But February is a horrible, dull, boring month where very few customers enter the store on a given day. There are long stretches where nobody enters the store. And the shorts would be flipped just the same.
Then there's the Back Room. Our back room is always cold. Sometimes freezing. Perhaps this indicates...a presence.
Let's not forget the fact that I, and others, frequently see movement out of the corners of our eyes, but nothing is there. This happens most frequently in two sections of the store. One is the front girls section, which is by the window, so it wouldn't be unusual to think you saw something when it was just someone outside the window. But it also happens in the very back section, near where we had those infamous shorts folded.
Now, let us move on to the Case of the Disappearing Shirts. About a month and a half ago, we were doing a pretty big layout. Tanya and I were working on Girls Shop 2, which is the middle of the wall, basically. We took everything out of that shop and either hung it on the adjacent rack, or threw it on the counter. One of the things we put on the counter was a set of shirts. There were pink ones, white ones, and blue ones. When we went to put everything back in the shop, we could not find the blue shirts. I thought someone had taken them and hidden them as a joke, and went and asked. As in, the jig's up guys, give the shirts back. Nobody knew what I was talking about. We searched the entire store, top to bottom for those blue shirts. We never found them. We have not since found them. The blue shirts vanished. Tanya and I have since wondered if we were delusional--did we really have any of those blue shirts left? But we both distinctly remember putting three colours--pink, blue and white--of that shirt on the counter.
This brings me to last night, when I was happily playing with numbers at the far end of the counter (incidentally, the end near the infamous rack and where the infamous blue shirts were put). Playing with numbers entails putting the daily budgets for the next month on a tracking sheet and adding them all up. For this, I was using the calculator. I was happily punching in numbers and getting answers and writing them on the sheet, when all of a sudden the calculator reset itself to zero. Well that was weird, I thought to myself. Maybe I accidentally hit the zero button. So I started happily punching numbers in again. And a minute later, the calculator reset itself again. And I knew my finger was nowhere near the zero button. Well fine then, I thought. It's the ghost. Leave me alone ghost, there are no customers and I'm having a good time here playing with my numbers. And that was the end of it.
Rumor has it that other stores in the mall experience weird occurrences from time to time, so you see I am not entirely crazy. It's just that logical explanations only stretch so far, and the thing that really did it for me, without a doubt, was those shirts disappearing. I know there is something. I just know it. And that, my friends, is The Haunting.
~Currently playing: Derek and the Dominoes-Layla; Eagle Eye Cherry-Save Tonight; Lynyrd Skynyrd-Sweet Home Alabama~
