See, BookWorld is a statewide chain. All the stores are supposed to go through the entire store once a year, and count absolutely everything. It seems like a total exercise in futility, because presumably, things are sold, and other things are arriving almost constantly. How can the number we arrived at yesterday at 12:36 be even slightly relevant to anything?

But, all the stores gots to do the inventory, because The Man says so. Damn The Man! Because Inventory sucks, it's traditional for all the stores near you to loan out an employee or two for the day, so the inventory process can go that much faster. That's still apparently not enough incentive for someone to drive an hour out of their way to do this mind-numbingly tedious stuff, so the travelling employees get paid from the instant they leave their house until they next cross their threshold.

Yesterday, we went to Appleton. I was on the clock from 6:45 am till 3pm. I was only making minimum wage, of course, but when you figure out how much of that time I was actually doing any work, it's a pretty sweet deal.

Inventory itself is pretty boring. You work in teams of two, with one partner going down the shelves reading out prices and the other partner writing it all down. I so wanted to say, just once, "Four at $12.95, one $9.95, one $14.99, and 4691 irradiated haggis." but I don't think Patti would have gotten it.

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