What a rough night at the store, last night.
So I put my birthday photo cake order in Wednesday of last week - days before last night, when I'd pick it up, and take it to my store. I'd put it in with the supermarket behind my store - they'd done a great job, year before last. And last year, we had that massive ice storm that hit Dallas-Fort Worth, and shut the whole city down to where the supermarkets were literally running out of food.
Fast forward to last night...
They'd literally lost my cake. The supermarket's bakery only requires 24 hour advance notice - I'd put my cake order in days ahead of time, so that mishaps wouldn't happen. Ya' know, that whole ounce of prevention thing? Yeah, no.
I'm outwardly polite - I do work in this business, after all. But I'd be lying if I said that my patience wasn't being tested.
So a manager has to come out and find my cake. Turns out, it was buried in one of the walk-in bakery dept. coolers. The manager apologizes and hands over my cake - it is so miscolored from what the digital artwork I had printed looked like - I think their photo cake's caketop printer ran out of the edible ink. What was supposed to be a bold red, was red on one side, and yellow on another. The photo of my face on the artwork piece came out Kermit The Frog green.
I don't argue, I just get my cake and go. I get to my store, out in the parking lot. I thought I'd have plenty of time to cut cake pieces and get to-go bowls saran-wrapped for my regulars that I wanted to share some birthday cake with. Nope. I get there 10 minutes before I have to clock in at 10pm.
When I walk in the door, I see both women customers and women employees all saying something about a suspicious man making them all feel uncomfortable, and he's acting creepy.
So I handle the situation and call 911. The police are on their way. He leaves my store headed for the supermarket behind us. I let the police know.
OK, so the coast is clear, so I can do my beginning of shift duties - take out the outdoor trashcans at the front door. In the middle of me doing that, a woman walks up with a prescription in her hand. I'm trying to tell her politely that our pharmacy closes at 10pm, and has since March 1st, back in the spring. In the middle of that conversation, we hear a crash right in front of us. Both the customer and I stopped and looked. A guy tried to pull into a handicapped parking space right next to this car, and instead rear-ended the car. His right-front headlight met the already-parked car's left tail light. The guy in the car, along with his gf stop for a minute to try and decide what they are going to do. They don't get out of the car, but instead crank the car back up, and start backing up. They continue driving in reverse throughout the parking lot, until they get to a spot where they can make a one-point v-turn, going the other direction toward the supermarket behind us.
I tried to get as good of pics as I could with my smartphone, but they didn't reveal much. I go inside and get the young girl and her friend - it was their car that got hit. I broke the news of what happened, texted them the one good pic I had, and, inside, I gave them the store's phone number, and maybe the store manager can pull security camera footage this morning. With the person who hit their car now gone, it's a hit-and-run.
After I get through dealing with that, our creeper guy comes back from the supermarket, mouses around my store, and at the Redbox machine outside my store, then leaves for the 7-Eleven diagonally across the street from us. I update the police again. I thought he'd be gone.
Nope, he came back. He asks for the evening cashier, who'd gotten off at 11pm. I told the guy that he'd just missed him, but that I'm the overnight cashier, and would be happy to help. He goes off to putter around the store again. When he comes back up, in come Dallas Police. I immediately turn on the guy, and tell the 2 officers the situation - that both women clientele and women employees complained the he was acting creepy (I verified - he actually was acting very predatorily, as if he wanted to kidnap somebody or get somebody alone off by themselves), and that the man needed to be "no-tresspassed". My manager's standing right beside me, behind the register.
After that, the night ran quite peaceful.
Plans - Now that I have the rest of the week to myself, I plan to live it up! I'm going to watch JJ Swift's cam show this afternoon, dinner at my friends' place (with a night off from the housekeeping). By the end of this week, I'm pretty sure that if all goes according to plan, I'm getting the Triforce Of Courage tattooed on my left bicep - my second one. I really want to make that happen. I might go to the gay district, or play around in the skyscraper district downtown. I also want to let my foodie side come out and play - I might be hitting up Whole Foods, or some of the nicer restaurants I've seen around town.
Really excited for what lies ahead.
