Fire extinguisher damage anyone?

This week I have been given the coveted schedule at work. 9-5:30 every day with a Tuesday and Friday off. Doesn't get much better than that for retail, folks. It seems most of the good stories happen in the evening, so I wasn't surprised when I came in Monday morning and a whole isle of product was gone. I was looking forward to a good one, and definitely got my news fill when the other framer came in later.

Apparently a woman was shopping (I know, right?) and... bumped the fire extinguisher with her purse. Which made the thing fall from the post it's attached to and pop the pin just enough to spray down a whole isle of product. I guess it sounded like an air gun going off with a lot of wheezing in between. That's not all, though. Apparently even with this disaster not happening very often, people were smart enough to see the powder fill the air and go up toward the front so that when Morgan got off the phone and was able to investigate there was no one to ask what had happened. That would be kinda creepy, hu? They had to call in both the manager and the assistant manager (who hadn't even worked that day) to help get things under control.

Later that evening when there was caution tape up and a few associates were bagging up anything and everything is when the comical part of this fiasco starts. Not being prepared for air raids like back in the 70s we had no face masks so the two bagging wore a couple of bandannas around their mouths and looked more like looters than anything else. Craft store looters. Too funny. The caution tape couldn't keep a woman from her yarn and when they found her on the other side in the 'danger zone' she claimed that there wasn't enough caution tape for her to be aware of any danger. That it was too easy to slip under. Oh my.

That morning I was asked to help damage out all the product. This included dragging 13 bags from the back storage, back as in through two locked doors, a hallway that smells faintly of Christmas left overs and into a barren room that could easily hold hostages for years. As I drug bag after bag of kid projects the woods would break open all over the stairs and I would have to take a few more trips back and forth to gather up the pieces that had gotten left behind. When I first entered the scene they had one girl working on it. She had set up camp in the doorway, trying not to take up any room from the yarn and basket section and was bent in half in the frame, a full bag of stuff to her right and am empty bag to her left. She would scan an item, find as many of it as possible, type in a number, and put all 6 of them into the empty bag. This was indeed a job for two people and I demanded a table and a stool. So after a quick re-set we were going 3x as fast as original as I sorted product out on to the table and she scanned and typed numbers in. I sat on the stool to pull stuff out so that I didn't have to use my stomach muscles more than needed. I mean, seriously, you can get light-headed from bending and straightening so much. We got the whole bang of it done in 7 hours. Yuck. And I have been coughing up snot ever since. My body done me good to keep that stuff out of my system.

Luckily I didn't have to go to work today, so I hope they got the next step done, which is pulling everything BACK out and going through it AGAIN and anything with a wrapper that would keep the product from getting direct contact with the dust gets to be scanned AGAIN and put back out on the shelf. That, my friends, may be a two day project and may be my project since I started on the damaging of it all. GROSS. Makes me want to hurl everything into the garbage.