...in retail.

I've held a lot of jobs. My longest tenure, sadly, is with Walgreen's. If I do a bit of math real quick here...I can tell you that I've spent approximately 1.14 years of my life working at a Walgreen's store. In contrast, I've spent maybe 7.5 years sleeping, 1.19 years eating, around 2.5 days watching Heroes (it's good again this season!), 64,608 hours thinking about my wife, and 1,026,720 minutes worrying, in some capacity, about my son. Sorry, the math kinda took over there for a second.

The point I was getting too was this: that's a long time to spend in a retail pharmacy. A lot of it was spent wandering, looking for something to do, or something to pretend to be doing. About 20% of it was spent working third shift, while my wife and son were at home sleeping (this accounts for a small portion of the 64 thousand hours and one million minutes). This was the worst of it.

The best of it, believe it or not, was the customers. Those of you that know me know that that's a funny thing for me to say. And while I was dealing with them, I hated life. But now that I look back, some of them were just crazy enough to be funny.

There was Victor. Possibly paranoid schizophrenic. He would come into the store and literally talk your ear off for hours. Hours! He'd follow a certain few employees around the store if he found them working and talk about how he knew Michael Jordan, about how he was moving, and about how he knew Michael Jordan. Then he'd call you Michael Jordan and ask you to help him move.

There was Old Man Eyebrows. He was a gruff, grumpy, incredibly old man with eyebrows like wings. He'd yell at you about something that happened across the street at the competition. Actually yell, like he was mad at you about it. After he'd finished yelling at you, he'd buy a five pack of Muriel Magnum cigars and go about his business of smelling like cigars for the rest of the day.

And then, my favorite of all time, there was the old Russian lady. I only ever saw here one time. It was 2003, I believe. Easter had come and gone, and all of our Easter candy was down to 75% off. Except the Easter M&M's that we'd horribly over-ordered. Those were 2 cases of 12 1lb. bags for $5. We had pallets of them. Not sure what happened there. Anyway, this tiny, frail, old Russian lady comes in and fills a cart until it is literally overflowing with Easter candy, and then fills another one most of the way full. She checks out, and the whole thing comes to under fifty bucks. As she is walking out of the store with her second cart, she turns around, as if to address the entire store, and yells, at the top of her lungs, "This would never happen in Russia!", and turns to leave.

Am I glad I'm not in retail anymore? Absolutely. The hours sucked, the pay sucked (although it was better than I'm making now), and most of the people sucked. But there were some gems of people thrown in the mix, and they always made my day.