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Originally posted: November 2005

Crooks - A - Million    

     Back in 2002, both Jared and I worked at Books A Million. Him in the "book" section and myself in the "coffee" section. The "coffee" section was cleverly called "Joe Muggs." Maybe you've heard of it, I don't really know. Maybe you've heard of this column, which also has a clever name.

     From the beginning when I lied and said I didn't know anyone currently employed by the company, my employment history was plastered with awkward experiences. The company was located next to

 the dumpy Wal-Mart in Baton Rouge that everyone liked to make fun of. On the other side of Books a Million was a store called "Only a Buck" and it was only open for 3 hours a day and smelled like cat.

     My very first day on the job was pretty boring. I was brainstorming ideas for this very website, writing article headlines on a piece of notebook paper. There was no need to be discrete, as I was the only person behind the unnecessarily large coffee counter. One of the article ideas I had was for our very first (and smashingly popular) Multi-Perspective Articles. The headline was "So Many Things Make My Penis Feel Funny." The coffee shop manager, Scotty, walked up to me, and he was pleased to meet me! We exchanged generic hellos and then he said, "What's this?" He picked up my notebook paper. He turned around, looked at me, and walked away.

     That was the beginning. Read on for more of the beginning, the middle, and the end:

     The Man Who Ate The Cake - One of my jobs as a barista was to cut slices of cake for my customers. This was always annoying because my managers were very picky about inventory (weird, right?) and kept a close eye on my cake sizes. They noticed when I went through an entire cake in one night when I only sold 5 pieces. I like being generous, though, especially in situations where it won't hurt the company but really benefit the customer. One night I was feeling especially generous and when I got a young couple and their kid into the cafe, I told myself I was going to hook them up. The man ordered a slice of cake, my specialty. I cut him a piece that was slightly bigger than the plate, which is bigger than my hand. His eyes got really big, which made me laugh. He told his family to go on without him, he was going to try and eat this cake. I got to watch this guy work on a single piece of cake for almost 30 minutes while his family waited around for him. He kept looking up at me and saying, "This is really big." I think he felt obligated to eat the entire thing since he knew I hooked him up. I respect that.

     Visit From Main Office #1 - In addition to serving enormous portions of said cake, we also liked to generally mistreat it. We would punch the cake really hard sometimes because it looked really funny when it had fist marks in it. Also our fists looked funny when it had cake on it. But the best cake story was when fancy BAM employee came in to some sort of manager meeting. She left all of her stuff in the coffee shop and went about her business in the office. Jared came over to visit and he had this great idea to throw the woman's jacket into the cake. He did and I told him who's jacket it was and he refused to clean it up. So did I and we left work that night as soon as possible.

     Store Meetings - Once a month on Saturday mornings we had attendance-mandatory store meetings. This was always really funny because everyone would come all casual and relaxed. And seeing middle aged women working at a dead-end job act casual at their work place was always entertaining. Especially Melanie, our store's general manager. She always wore this little hat to the meetings, letting her hair down and getting relaxed! We laughed at her a lot behind her back. That's all.

     Making Announcements - One meeting our manager made a really bad decision - forcing the baristas to make loudspeaker announcements about current specials. These announcements went unnoticed because they were corny and boring. I did my best to make them fun by reading specials from the wrong season. It was the middle of summer and I was encouraging customers to warm up with some Hot Tea and using horrible puns. Every announcement was usually punctuated with my cackling hyena laugh and my manager screaming at me from across the store, "You too much, get off that speaker!" I was eventually banned from making announcements.

     Scotty Scotty Scotty - There was always something funny happening with Scotty. He came to work everyday with a briefcase full of Yu-Gi-Oh cards and he was always making fun of the other managers, trying his best to get people on his side. One of the managers told us a story about how Scotty and his wife keep posters of attractive men and women above their bed and take turns looking at the posters while they have sex.

     Visits From Main Office #2 - The second time someone from the main office came to BAM didn't appear to be a big deal at first - but it ended with the police. After serving this gentleman a simple cup of coffee, I was called to the office. Apparently my account had been red flagged because I had so many voids. What's stupid is that Jared and I used to void things all the time. Silly things like when I'd go to the bathroom, I'd come back and see that someone rang up 75 cups of coffee, 12 pieces of cake, and 49 cookies. So I had to go and delete them. I explained this to the fancy main office man who suspected that I was stealing. After extensive questioning, they managed to get me to admit that on occasion I gave away a cup of coffee to a loyal customer. I think they were hell bent on firing me, so they used that information and asked me to leave the store and never come back. When I walked out of the office, the police were there and escorted me out. I didn't drive to work that day so I had to walk home.

      That was in 2002. In June 2005, our general manager Melanie got busted for embezzling thousands of dollars from that very same store. Then she somehow got a job at Barnes and Noble. But then they found out and fired her from there, too.

      Oh, I almost forgot. One time there were some stray dogs hanging out in front of the store and we lured them inside with muffins. It was really funny.

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