the trolly wars part II...

You don't really get life until you understand the importance of shopping trolleys in a big shopping centre. They weave the very fabric of whatever civilisation exists in those woeful hellholes that some call malls, criss-crossing the various corridors, rolling helpfully here and there, and just generally making life easier for everyone.

Think about it. Just as the earliest humans leaped up the evolutionary ladder the day they realised that you can carry a LOT more food on a little cart than you can on a piece of bark balanced on top of your noggin, so we progressed several rungs further when we began to gather our food in shopping trolleys. Mothers use them as mobile cages for unruly offspring. Shop keepers take their rubbish out to the garbage compactor in them. Everybody loves shopping trolleys!

The other day, I had a one of those Where-the-heckfire-is-my-camera moments. A window dresser from one of the clothes shops had taken delivery at the loading dock of a bunch of naked half mannequins. Yes. You heard me. Not half naked mannequins. Naked half mannequins. The bottom half. She passed The Incidental Bookshop with a purposeful though slightly self conscious air about her. 'I know I look strange,' her body language said, 'but if you so much as mention it, I'll push a life size plastic foot down your throat.'

And how was she transporting these naked half mannequins? In a shopping trolley of course. She'd shoved them in waist first and it looked like a garden of alabaster feet had sprouted out of it. It was a surreal sight. Especially when she passed behind the waist high wall of the coffee shop near my place. It hid the trolley and made it appear as though she was simply striding along herding a gaggle of floating legs before her.

Yes, trolleys are indispensable - and like every other precious resource in the world, the trolley power is concentrated in the hands of a few at the top of the food chain. Or should I say the food chain stores. Woolworths and Big W own all the trolleys at our centre. They are, generally speaking, beneficent trolley rulers and most of the managers have no great objection to serfs such as The Incidental Bookshop staff borrowing a trolley or two now and then.

But there is 'most of the managers' and then there is...

Clayton!

Clayton, a small man, manager of fruit and veg, was temporarily promoted last Christmas when his superior had a mysterious accident. Yes. We suspect foul play. Anyhow, there was an unfortunate confluence of events around the time of Clayton's rise to power.

1) In the three weeks leading up to Christmas coming, The Incidental Bookshop suddenly began to receive four or five pallets of stock every week instead of
two every fortnight.

2) Shoppers began to shop in ever greater numbers. (as they will over Christmas. It apprently has something to do with good cheer but really, you ought to try spending about forty hours a week in a shopping centre at Christmas time and you will soon learn to say words 'Bah humbug' with feeling). And when shoppers begin to shop in ever greater numbers, ever greater numbers of trolleys are required.

3) A furore broke out in the local paper accusing trolley boys of loafing around smoking cigarettes and selling drugs instead of doing their jobs. This, it was claimed, was the reason there were never any trolleys in the Woolworths shopping trolley bay.

Can you see where this is headed? I bet you can. It has a sense of heavy inevitability about it, doesn't it? The trolley boys weren't loafing any more than usual! The missing trolleys weren't lying fallow out in the car parks!They were in the back of my shop filled with books!

As I said in Part 1 of The Trolley Wars, I had pioneered the trolley packing method of restocking The Incidental Bookshop and everyone agreed that it was a breakthrough in human endeavour pretty much on par with the discovery of fire or brylcreem. We watched sadly, guiltily, as the trolley boys bore the blame for the dearth of trolleys. We knew we were being selfish. We knew we should come clean. We knew that if we were any kind of decent human beings we would go back to carrying those books by hand and stop letting the down trodden boys take the heat for us.

But we couldn't give them up, damn it. Once you've unpacked books using shopping trolleys, you can never go back.

On stock morning, we would arrive at about 7 am and set out across the various empty car parks, ranging far and wide over the tar and cement, gathering the trolleys that hadn't made it back inside the centre the night before. Sometimes we had to bring them in one or two at a time. Sometimes we would hit a gusher and stumble upon a corral that hadn't yet been emptied. When that happened, we could fill our trolley needs in a single trip. Either way, between the the lot of us, we would bring thirty or so trolleys into The Incidental Bookshop as surreptitiously as possible and whiz them as quick as we could out through the back door into the spooky abandoned IGA supermarket where they would wait patiently to fulfill their destinies as book movers.

We even had little arguments among ourselves about it. Sir Laurence the Indispensable liked to use only Woolworths trolleys - they were bigger and brand new and so, much easier to push. I wanted to use only Big W trolleys - Big W was on the other side of the centre and their managers never got over to our part of the building; we were never going to get caught with the Big W trolleys.

I won that argument and to tell the truth, I think Sir Laurence still secretly resents it...

to be continued...

for terminator fans only...

I saw Terminator Salvation tonight and lo! It was good. I just took a quick spin by Rotten Tomatoes to see what The Critics are saying and sadly most of them aren't saying anything too much good.

For example:

The ingenious plotting of the first two Terminator films, and the skill and visceral energy with which James Cameron directed them, are a thing of the past.

David Stratton of At The Movies

And then there's:

It’s a catastrophically bad movie whose aggressive dullness and dumbness can best be reproduced by picking up a brick and slamming it against one’s forehead for two hours.

Sukdev Sandhu of the Daily Telegraph (the British one, I expect, with those manners)

and just for third time lucky kind of thingo, I give you:

This latest Terminator may well please the committed obsessive, but the rest of us are left feeling simultaneously beaten about the head and yet slightly underwhelmed.

Boyd Hilton Heat Magazine.

Well, phooey on them, I say. I must be one of those committed obsessives because I'm just lovin' it.

Mind you, I'm not saying it was a perfect film. Of course it wasn't, but name me one that is. The kid was ridiculously cute and completely unnecessary as a character. Kyle Reese left me utterly unconvinced that he would ever have the testicles to impregnate Sarah Connor when the time came. And the Schwarzenator insertion - well, that was just sad.

But who cares? Who cares? Was the plotting as obvious as some critics claim? I don't know - there were a few things I saw coming and a few I didn't. About par for the course for me. Was there zero character growth and no heart to the characters as some of the others say? Well, I'm not sure what they want out of a film that looks like Mad Max on a particularly apocalyptic day. We don't need continual characterisation here - we all know who John Connor is and what makes him tick. We all know what's in the heart of the Good Terminator whether it's played by Sam Worthington or Our Arnie.

Do I think it's as good as Number 2? No, of course not. But I didn't expect it to be. In fact, I made sure to keep my expectations very low going in. In fact, I almost didn't want to see it at all in case it was so bad it spoiled the series.

Remember The Matrix Revolutions? I was absolutely hooked on The Matrix and I waited for the next installment like a girl waiting for her first date to pick her up. When it turned out to be so very very bad, I felt personally betrayed, as if some one had promised me something I wanted very much and then switched it for a lump of coal at the very last moment. I certainly regretted going to see it. It almost took away the pleasure I felt over the original film. I've never seen the third installment. Maybe it's not so bad - but I just don't have the heart to try.

So yeah - I went along to the cinema tonight with nothing more complex on my mind than to see some robots get blown to smithereens and man, I got what I paid for!

I've loved all of these films. As the show was starting, I remember thinking 'What an epic saga this is!' Would I have liked it as much if I'd never seen the other films? What does it matter? Me and about a million or so other complete obsessives will never have to have that experience.

And, oh yeah - I was pleased to see a move away from the cute sassiness of the Terminator as Gay Stripper Leather boy back towards the the darkness of the first.

Christian Bale rocks and Sam Worthington is too sexy for his cyberdene chip. There is an actress named Moon Bloodgood in it and I want to know what drugs her parents were taking.

Overall, my rating is - hurry up and make the next one because ... I'll be back.

update ...

My next blog was, of course, supposed to be part 2 of 'the trolley wars...' but what can you do? Life happens and you must either record it or let it go by without so much as a 'how's yer father?'. Nope. Not for me, the unexamined life. I blog therefore I am.

Anyhow...

Yesterday, The Princess Bookaholic did the afternoon shift. It was actually her turn to do the coveted morning shift - we both like the morning shift best; it means you get an early mark in the afternoon - but she gave it up to me at the last minute. She was wandering around the house with her hair like a madwoman's and whining about how tired she was, so what was I to do? What would any good mother do?

I said, "I'll go in for you if you like."

She hesitated a moment, yawned and whined a little more and then said, "Yeah, okay."

I then did a little dance and said, "Yippee! I'll be out of there by 2 o'clock."

And why was she so tired by the way? Because she was up all night reading the Count of Monte Christo off the classics table is why.

But that's not why I'm writing this.

Later, after all was said and done at The Incidental Bookshop for the day, when the last book was sold, the till closed down and the millions tallied, The Princess bookaholic said to me, "Oh yeah. A little blonde lady came in looking for you. She said you helped her and she wanted to thank you."

Oh, really? "How'd I help her?"

"She didn't want to say," said P.B.

She didn't want to SAY? How mysterious! Surely I would remember helping someone with something they didn't want to talk about in polite company?

Anyhow, there I was today, loafing about behind the counter, reading a book called The Answer which will apparently make me a billionaire, when up rushed a little blonde lady that I wouldn't know from a bar of soap.

She said, "I just wanted to thank you!" She put a box of chocolates on the counter for me.

Hmmm. I looked at her carefully. I couldn't say to her, "I think you have the wrong person." I didn't want to risk losing the chocolates.

She looked embarrassed and leaned in close to speak to me. "I'm the one who... um... well, a few weeks back... er ... my grand daughter ... she ... oh, she vomited on your floor."

"Oh! YES!" I said in happy recognition (as if it had forged a bond between us, as if from now on we would be forever spew-sisters, united in the memory of the trauma of that day. In fact, I think I'm going to call it 5/27 from now and carry a bucket around all day on the anniversary in order to commemorate it.)

"You were so kind and nice," she said. "So gracious." Me gracious? "And it was so awful! What a mess! All that vile red bile!"

"Well, I have to say, I did wonder what...'

"Beetroot and watermelon," she replied sadly, as though it was something to be ashamed of that her grand daughter had only eaten beetroot and watermelon whilst under her care.

We had a great laugh over it and after she had gone, I ate all of the chocolates by myself because it was so quiet and boring and because they were there. It was only a small box but it was more than one ought to eat in a single session before the sun is even over the yard arm. After that, for a short while, I felt in danger of barfing all over the floor myself.

the trolley wars...

Like I said, stock day is a big day - not least because of the voluminous amounts of heavy books you have to get from the pallets at the front of the shop to the tables all over the rest of the shop. By voluminous, I mean lots. Big big lots and then some more on top of that. The stock is delivered at 7:30 a.m. and has to be unpacked and hidden away from the delicate eyes of the public by 9 a.m. at the latest. It's well over a thousand books we have to move by hand in an hour and a half. How do you do that? How is it possible???

Well, sneaking off with about twenty Woolworths trolleys helps enormously.

You see, we don't have a delivery entrance where those big ugly pallets can be slipped in secretly and unpacked under cover so that the public is never forced to confront the ugly reality of restocking. No. The big ugly pallets are rolled up on a pallet jack and unceremoniously dumped out front of the store to sit there like big ugly blocks of crap, four foot by four foot by four foot, jamming up the doorway and threatening to injure the unwary customer which would of course, force up the company's public liability coverage. If you have ever worked retail, you will know that this is the biggest disaster that can possibly happen. Bigger than North Korea and their pesky nukular bombs. Bigger than that game the Western military are still getting beat at - Where's Osama? Bigger even than Susan Boyle's nervous breakdown.

When I began the job, they told me that the best way to do this crazy little thing called restocking is to get the books stacked away under the tables as fast as you can and then simply take them out again, a few at a time, at your leisure and put them wherever it is that you've decided they should go.

Now, this is a beautiful dream of course and if only all the things in life that sound simple actually were.

But the fact is, as difficult as it is to carry over a thousand books around a very big shop, there is something even more difficult and that is bending over to put them on the floor and then pushing them under a table at the same time as you try to hold up the damn plastic tablecloth with your shoulder. And just in case you're not tired and sore just from thinking about that, then there is the part where you have to reverse the process and take the mongrel bloody things out again!

But I am smart! What is the use of being modest about it? Some of us have it and some of us don't. I solved the problem of the bending down while carrying twenty kilos of books and then having to do it all again backwards in a way that is efficient, fun and cost effective.

What we now do is get about twenty shopping trolleys and one by one, park them right beside the pallet we're unloading, stacking the books straight off the pallets and into the trolley. When we are done, one of us runs the trolley to the back of the shop and out through a door which leads to a magic land known as the Old IGA Supermarket.

It's an enormous space dotted with the things from all over the shopping centre that are no longer useful. It's almost spooky. Correction - there are times when it is definitely spooky. Princess Bookaholic and her fertile imagination have been known to get decidedly uncomfortable out there. The base of the old supermarket aisles are still there, stretching away to the back of the mostly empty space - they make it look like an abandoned bowling alley. Old wiring hangs down from the roof and unwanted shop fittings from hairdressers and such like lie about in untidy heaps. If you thought the decor for Dollar Hair looked cheap before, you ought to see the sad pile of busted green and black neon signs and excess navel rings that lies just beyond the back door of the Incidental Bookshop.

Ours is the only business that opens onto the old supermarketand we use it to our advantage in every way we can. The very best use we have found for it is to stow trolley loads of unpacked books in there till we get around to packing them properly on the tables. It reduces the lifting and carrying to a very manageable level and in return, all it takes is a little wheeling and dealing and a lot of hiding.

Hiding, I hear you ask? What on earth would we need to hide from?

Well, for a start the Woolworths managers who very unreasonably think that if we need trolleys to run our business we ought to buy our own. Let me tell you, it's not easy taking twenty trolleys in the front door of a shop on the sly...

... to be continued