J. Palmer

I’ve been in retail way too long. I read a really short, nothing of an article which spoke about someone who bought a bunch of seeds from a Dollar Tree for pennies; later, the grateful customer brought the store manager some vegetables that were grown from those seeds. It’s a nice little story, I guess, however my unfortunate first impression was that the manager broke the rules.

“Pennied” items aren’t supposed to be sold, but destroyed and tossed out, as the company has written those items off as a loss, and the penny sale value assigned to the items are a placeholder in the books, not an actual price. Further, I’m not sure it’s necessarily true in this case–though it might be–but various items, such as seed packets, are not inventory owned by the store or company, but items that are sold on consignment; it is very possible that the manager technically cost the company additional money by selling the seeds–assuming they were rang through the register by the UPC and not manually keyed as something untraceable.

Do I really care? No. Really, my feelings on the situation are, great for the customer, and awesome to hear the seeds were used rather than tossed in the trash. I just hate that my mind went to the stupid business side of things–and that’s the point behind me writing about it.

I dunno.

I hate retail.

I had a dream the other night that I wanted to make notes of, but too much time has passed, so many of the details are now fuzzy. It was an odd wannabe apocalyptic sort of thing, I guess. Something about a monstrous, gusty and tornadic storm. For whatever reason I was near my parents house–but their previous residence, which they were still occupying. I roll down the main driveway in some sort of open vehicle (like an old Jeep with the top removed?) and park under the tree at the corner of their drive and the main driveway. I hear their voices, though I never see them–Dad’s somewhere in the garage monitoring radio traffic, and mom’s somewhere in the house watching the weather on TV. I wander around the yard, making sure things are tied down or placed up against the house or down by the fence. At some point, as the gusts get CNN or Weather Channel reporter in a hurricane strong, I take note of the indigo colored sky turning near black and the rate of pea-hail increasing; it’s at this time I announce that I should go home, as I’d better go look after Ashlee and the children. Mom yells back in reply that they had arrived there a few minutes prior, and then yells at Rhiannon to get back in the house; I look over to the driveway as I walk back up the hill on the left side of the house, and see Rhiannon running back to the house. Right after I make my way through the threshold of the backdoor, a woman in a nightgown calls for me outside. I turn ’round and head back out. The woman leads me to the parking area down the drive, and tells me she’s not sure if the storm is really over or just beginning, and that some odd things are happening and have happened. I push past her as we pass (my? dad’s?) truck and look to the left and take notice of one of the oddities as she calls it out as an example. She says that a lot of the animals are somehow living, yet dead, and apparently cannibalistic, and that it seems to be a fear response. I see a creature bovine in size, though I cannot identify it, void of skin, biting at a the flank of a smaller version of it, while another small one bites at the flank of the larger one. I turn my look away and keep walking down the drive toward the barn while that woman’s voice fades into the distance. And then, I woke up.