The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese

I have a mouse problem. I've spotted mice in all three levels of our house, from the basement to the kitchen to my attic bedroom. But having mice in the house is not my problem; the problem is that I like having mice in the house. My mom freaks out. My dad kills them. I want to watch them. Everytime I turn the light on I scan for rodents hoping to see one.

I think this is due to pet deprivation. I have never once in my life had a pet. That makes me sad. My dad is allergic to cats, but he had loads of dogs growing up. So why do I get stuck with a deprived childhood? I think my mom vetoed pets because she figured she'd be the one to take care of it all the time.

I just think mice are cute, with their tiny brown faces peeking out at you before they run away and hide. My mom asks if I still think they're cute after they poop on my stuff. Yup! I don't care if they were on my computer desk. (I think they like computers because they have a mouse.) But it does bother me to see one stuck in a trap, still alive and wiggling to get free. I may be traumatized by that. Maybe I'll just teach the mice to do this:
After all, they did manage to get peanut butter off one of our traps without springing it. ;)

Say it! Say it!

"Good afternoon, shoppers! It's 4:00/5:00/6:00 and you know what that means? Time to stroll over to the bakery department and check out some of this week's featured items. Don't forget to grab a loaf of French bread for your dinner table! Hot, fresh, and baked right here, every day for you. So be sure to stop by the bakery department, and thank you for shopping with us today."

I have heard this Genuardi's announcement so many times (about 14 times a week) that I have memorized it. At first it was annoying (Me: "The Pane de Friuli is Italian bread not French bread!") but now I look forward to it. Now that I've memorized it I have to say it along with the announcer. Much like The Baby on the TV show Dinosaurs, I find myself chanting "Say it! Say it!" ("We're gonna need another Timmy!") A customer caught me saying the announcement one day. He gave me a thumbs up and said "You've got that down pat." Yes. Yes I do.

Lunatics & Imbeciles

In movies, sometimes writers are the victims of psycopaths (Misery), and sometimes they are the psycopaths (Secret Window). Here's hoping being in the former category doesn't turn me into a member of the latter.

One night I had a woman who was looking for a strawberry shortcake. I told her I could pull one out of the freezer for her since there weren't any on the shelf. This is something I've often done for customers and no one has ever reacted like this woman. She says, "So you have them, just not where customers can buy them." Excuse me for not having every single item we carry out on the shelves at all times! Then she goes on, acting like "freezer" was a dirty word. She didn't believe that freezing things keeps them fresh. I tried to tell her that this is the point of freezers, but she wasn't buying it. Once I told her that we freeze all our cakes, she "threatened" to never shop at my store again. (Promise? Don't let the automatic door hit you on the way out!) Won't she be in for a shock when she finds out all other grocery stores freeze their product too.

So besides crazy people like her, we also have stupid customers. We sell double and single layer round fudge cakes and one day the double layers were on sale for $5.00, which is a good deal. It's an even better deal when compared to the single layer cakes which cost $7.29. You could get twice as much cake for less money. Even if you got the double layer and threw half of it away you'd still be ahead. So at the end of the day I checked the table, and the stack of double layer fudge cakes were still there, while the single layers are sold out! Who are these people who shop here?! I just hope insanity isn't contagious.

Strays

One of the occasionally amusing things about working in a grocery store is finding stray items. Ice cream left melting on a table, a piece of fruit carried from one end of the store to the other before being abandoned. Things that people changed their mind about buying and couldn't be bothered to put them back where they belong.

I work in the bakery department, so it's particularly interesting to find non-food items, like an umbrella or a magazine, next to the muffins and danish. Sometimes I decide to return items, so the other day I went to put a Teen Bop magazine back. It had Taylor Lautner and Justin Beiber on the cover so I was looking for one that matched. After realizing there were at least eight different teen mags with pictures of those two, I narrowed my search to include covers that also featured Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus, and Selena Gomez. The search was not narrowed. Apparently all magazines for teens use the same collage formula. But I digress.

The most surprising strays I've found were two pregnancy tests, of different brands. Imagine, someone goes to the store thinking they're pregnant, picks out two different tests to be sure, and then abandons them in the bakery department, presumably to drown their troubles in chocolate cake! So I opened up my cake decoration book to the "Welcome Baby" section and slid it over right next to the pregnancy tests sitting on my counter. ;)