Boxes, Boxes Everywhere

The number of boxes is infinite.
I went to work at 9 and started opening boxes. It's always the same feeling I experience when I ram in the cutting tool and slice open the packaging tape: Let it be anything, anything but children's clothes!
Why? Because normal clothes are bad enough. You have to find the already attached tag on every single piece of clothing, read the number on that, type it into the computer and find out the price, then enter the pricing information into the pricing gun, price tag every individual piece of clothing, and then security tag it with one of those metal spiky thingies wo come together with one of those plastic fuckers which, if you try to leave the store with it, make the alarm go off.
Compared to, let's say, a toaster, where all you need to do is put it back in the box (because the price information is already out there on the shelf) and have one of the Ladies take it to the floor, clothes are a lot of work.
Children's clothes, however, are on top of that also tiny. Small. Often made of polyester (hard to penetrate with the fucking metal spikes). So it's a lot of fumbling around attaching a plastic security device i.e. on a leg of boys' two-piece basketball suit. And they usually come in six or twelve packs.
Shoes are also bad, but not as bad. The thing about shoes is that the plastic things are hard to put on, because there's always a lot of shoe material between the metal spike and the plastic ufo. You have to press them together hard, which after a while is kind of tiring (especially to the fingers).

Well, if children's clothes hold the negative top spot on my list, toys make a close second place. The reason is not so much pricing-work-related as it is morally insulting: 99 percent of the toys are crap. Nobody should be buying this, and a fortiori nobody should be playing with it!
Conclusion: Nobody should be selling it and I shouldn't be pricing it.
But then again this is a free country blah blah, and everybody is free to blah blah blah.

So I'm always hoping for toasters and kettles and stuff like that, but usually I find, especially these days, valentine related crap. I opened boxes until 12, went for an hour of lunch (which is: walk home, take off jacket, gloves, tuque, sit down, eat food, stand up, put back on jacket, gloves, tuque, walk back to work), opened more boxes until 4, then finally did all the accumulated paperwork from box opening friday and today (every box must be received in the virtual world, too, and then the paperwork must be signed and filed away), went home at 5:30.
Then I made evening meal.

The most fun boxes are the ones from the electronics supplier. They usually contain DVDs and Video Games and are very quick to process. Also they are usually small.

Sometimes people call on the phone. I don't know how they end up calling my extension instead of the store service or at least the store's main number. The thing is: I cannot help them, whatever they want, for the simple reason that I mostly do not understand what they are saying. They have their weird accent, which over the phone makes every word totally incomprehensible, and the fact that people seem to prefer one-word-communication doesn't make it easier, because if you don't understand the one word and they didn't give you any context either... I really have to learn how to transfer them to the main store phone. But I always forget to ask. So people: Stop calling me. I'm sorry, I cannot help you.

There are still lots of boxes left to open, and tomorrow they will also deliver new boxes. Yay.
While working today I often thought about Jack Bauer, and how peaceful a life of opening boxes is compared to his life. Nobody dies, nobody has to stay up for 24 hours all the time...
On the other hand, he has a gun.
And he doesn't have to open boxes ever.