And Then There Was Jim…

I know him only by Jim. The past two nights he has stopped in my department to pay for a deli sandwich and an orange juice around 3am foregoing the busier point of sales up front.  He is a heavyset and portly black man who spends his nights stocking the shelves in the grocery department.  Small talk comes easily with him.  He does most of the talking as I nod in agreement.  He mainly discusses politics – a topic I am not too altogether interested in, but I kindly lend him an ear.  He is a staunch democrat and Obama fan.  I hate to tell him this, but the Obama administration is not much different from the administration before it.  It is politics and business as usual. I hate politics, though, and often try to change the subject asking him questions about his job and life.

Tonight was very, very slow.  I assume everyone was tired after their Labor Day holiday foregoing any shopping at Wal-Mart after midnight.  I only had eight customers for the whole night after midnight.  I spent my time cleaning shelves and fronting the products.  Did quite a bit a stocking as well – working on getting our audio/visual cables organized and neat.  One fellow came in around three.  He works the night shift at the local Kia automobile plant and had the night off.  He asked me many questions about setting up a home theater.  He had recently bought an HDTV and ordered the HDTV channels from our local cable company.

“You need a home theater receiver with toslink optical digital inputs and you will get Dolby digital surround sound with all your HDTV channels,” I told him.

“How much will that cost?” he asked.

I told him not to skimp.  The cheaper options usually don’t have very good sound and the results are lackluster.  He looked at some of our options and said he would probably be back later after deciding if he wanted to spend that much money.  I was overjoyed to help and to have something for which to pass the time.  I refrained from telling him his better bet would be to go to Best Buy or Crutchfield.com to purchase a surround system.

Well, it is about time for my supervisor to arrive so I better stuff this laptop under the counter until my shift ends.  It has been another good, if slow, night.  I am slowly growing to like this – my job having very little stress involved.  I still suffered from some sleepiness around midnight when I would usually be sound asleep, but it is passing and bearable.  I am anxiously awaiting my old supervisor to arrive to find out about George getting a job.