At work on a Thursday night

One of my problems with consistently writing is timing.

When the idea first appears to when I can actually jot it down vary dramatically. Most of the time, ideas spring forth at work. This is typical. When I should be focusing on the task at hand, be it inventory, shipments, or other tasks, I seem to have part of my head gravitating towards creation.

At the moment, I am at work. Normally, I would be doing something productive for the betterment of the store. I am not doing such things because I lack my tools. See, I tend to leave Thursday nights for inventory preparation. I have binders with the titles and amounts of most of the comics that come into the store. I say most because, I don't cover everything. I probably should, but that would mean a ton more work for very little pay off on my end. Still, my binders are missing. Well, I know where they are. They just aren't where I want them.

Once a month, new orders for comics get placed with our distributor. We place the orders for comics on average two months before they are on sale. My boss takes the binders with the inventory numbers home to work on the monthly comic order. Unfortunately, they wind up staying longer then they should. It's mainly a case of importance. Since the order is done, the binders serve an importance no longer for my boss. They just get ignored. They get forgotten wherever they fell.

I hate that I have to remind my boss that I need them. He understands their importance, but usually doesn't suspect the time when they are used. Since I normally do inventory on Mondays, I will need them on Monday. Unfortunately, since he took them home last Monday, I haven't had them to do the inventory this week, let alone prepare for next week. So, I write this instead.

Back to timing. Well, I guess I filled some time. Most of my ideas come at work, but I can't remember them when I get home. Or, since I now carry a notepad with me, I usually don't feel the original inspiration to expand on an idea from work when I am home. At least I wrote something this time, right?

I don't want to know who you are.

Why is it that when I finally take the initiative to write something here, all escapes me?

I guess that's just what happens. I usually want to do things precisely when I can't actually do them. It's all about timing.

I started carrying a note pad in my back pocket for when ideas strike me. For the moment, it has things I have to remember for work and a couple movies and bands I need to check out. Sure, I wrote a few ideas or quotes or something too, but the inspiration to expound on them is devoid of my presence.

One of the things in it so far, is that I hate when people have "See ID" on their credit card's signature line. It's a minor thing, but probably about 80% of the people I deal with have it. They expect me to always check IDs. Guess what? I personally don't give a shit. As long as the card works, I'm fine with it.

In actuality, the card is technically not valid if it isn't signed. I doubt most people go by the name "See ID". It would be amazing if someone just signed the receipt with See ID.

I can always tell the annoying ones. They usually have their ID almost at the ready to be checked. When I flip the card over, I am not looking for a signed line, I'm figuring out where the magnetic strip is for the machine to read it correctly.

There was one time a guy had "See ID" in his card, but he also signed it. I was fine with checking that one. Also, I'm usually fine with checking cute girl's IDs. That usually just to be creepy and to make it more creepy, to see if they're legal. For the record I have never hit on any customer. I know I'm a creepy guy in a comic book store. I don't need to reinforce more creepy stereotypes.

Anyway, if your card is actually stolen, you can report it. Most of the time, form what I've heard< the credit company can eliminate those transactions. People are just paranoid.

Also, do you really want me looking at your terrible license photo?

Writing Subject

Something interesting happened today.

My co-worker is currently pursuing a masters degree in English. Most of his classes are either at night, on the weekends, or some kind of thesis thing. Occasionally, I get to work with him and talk about how annoying people are that come into the store. Sometimes discussions come in the for as to how he's a pescatarian and only eats fish meat. Apparently, it's more eco-friendly than eating real, grade-A American beef. He does miss bacon though.

Anyway, he told me today that he needed my help with something. For one of his classes, he has to write a paper on someone who is a writer. I thought it was funny. He said he didn't really know anyone who really writes. even knowing me, he still doesn't. In any case he is going to do it on me. He just has to figure out the questions or something to interview me about.

So, I guess I have to be the subject of new media journalism. That's a fancy term for people who write blogs and other internet ramblings. It's like saying "executive assistant" instead of "secretary".

There's the whole process of my writings. When I write. The space where I write. Topics. Style. Influences... what have you. Granted, I don't think I could be the subject of an accurate, 8-10 page paper. I am most assured that I can fake it.

Well, I thought it was interesting.

What have I been up to?

What have I been up to lately?

Not all that much really. Or, at the very least, not all that much that I would consider interesting. Well, I don't think it would be interesting enough for people to actually care about it.

First and foremost, I play World of Warcraft. It gives me something to do. I live a boring life and many of the people I know, that are near or around my age, have families or significant others at the the very lest. I have a computer.

Also, I haven't really been drinking much for 2 reasons. Well, there are probably more than 2 reasons, but I'll stick with that for now. One reason is that I have gout. Gout can get aggravated by alcohol and yeast (read: beer). Since, I know what the pain of gout can feel like, I want to avoid feeling it if I can help it. Two is that there is a lack of reason to drink. I don't drink alone, and typically only do it socially. Since, I have lacked in the whole social thing as of late, drinking has been reduced. A positive out of the situation is less money being spent, so more potentially saved.

What dips into the wallet is car problems. Now, I love my car. It has been better to me than it really needs to. It is just lately, there have been some I say "costly" repairs. Granted, hey are not the expensive repairs some people have to deal with like transmission or something going. Thousands of dollars are not leaving my bank account for this purpose. Still, I don't make a lot of coin, so when hundreds of dollars leave at once, it gets significant.

I work a lot too. If I am not doing that, I tend to be sleeping. Next week has me pulling a few days worth of working from open till close. My boss and one of the major coworkers are heading to a convention over the weekend, so I get to fill in the time. Being in a mall, my store has no chance of closing for even a little while. I will have some back up, but they cant be there all the time either.

On the entertainment front, I am trying to watch Angel when I can. It took me forever to finish up he first season. It was just losing me. Thankfully, it picked up at he end and made me want to watch the second season. I have all of the seasons from various sales over a few years. I still should finish Buffy as well.... and the fourth season of Dexter.

I will probably go into more depth with these topics at a later time, as well as the reasons I make up as to why I don't write. Well, that's all I got for now.

Back Issues

Boo. I should write more. At the moment, I am subtlety starving myself to have food as a reward for writing this. I got home from work about half an hour ago, and already mowed through some for the usual prattle of my internet reading.

I was working on back issues today. For those who don't know, back issues are old editions of comic books. Most of the ones in specialty shops have them in clear plastic bags with a white card board backing, to keep them from being bent. A lot of the times they vary in price from the original cover price to 5, 10, 100s of dollars more. The record for a single comic is somewhere around a million and a half, but that was for the first appearance of Superman.

Still, I was sorting and picking out all the extra ones we had doubles and triples, if not more, of in our current stock. I recently made a fairly through list of some of the more popular ones we were missing. That was an ordeal in and of itself.

The problem of a store's back issue bin, is organization. Granted Spider-Man should be with Spider-Man, but people turn into retards sometimes and just shove things wherever. That's a slight on retarded people. I apologize. Some of the mental deficient people that actually frequent my work are pretty good about putting things back where they belong. It's the mongoloids that can't spare two extra seconds of neuron traffic to put the comic where it's supposed to that annoy me.

Comics are typically arranged alpha/numerically. That's just a fancy way of saying alphabetically by title of the comic, and then with each title numerically by issue number. Every comic has an issue number corresponding to the sequence in which the comic was published. Just because the comic has a 63 on it, doesn't mean it was published in 1963, but rather, it is the 63rd issue of that series. There are 62 issues before it.

So, tonight consisted of reorganizing some of the different sections of the back issues. Making sure they were in the right order. Then removing some of the copies with which we had multiple. And finally, restocking the ones we were missing into the correct spots.

Handling old comics is fairly dirty. My hands felt like they were playing in mud after an hour or so. I like doing it though it makes me tired sometimes. I like looking at the old stuff. It makes me want to read some of the older storylines from my youth or earlier. It almost seems like sometimes, older comics still have a simple quality about them that just want a story. Today, a lot of the comics I see mainly focus on marketing and sales. I don't mind that a comic company wants to make money. I just want them to do it with quality stories, not gimmicks. I want to keep restocking the back issues because people are buying them because of how cool that one issue of something was, not because there are rumors that something about may be made into a movie.

And, for the record, that is not my collect at the top. I think I have more than that.