The Need For Kickstands

I was given a key today. It opens several of the glass cases around the shop. I no longer have to ask a fellow co-worker to borrow their keys. I now have the power to open cases on demand and remove items such as digital cameras, Ipods, gaming units, watches, GPS units, belt buckles, portable DVD players, guitar distortion pedals, and a whole slew of other things to show inquiring customers. It makes me feel kind of special. How many people get to open those cases? Not many. Yeah. I'm pretty much the man.

As all pawn shops, we conduct a large number of pawn loans. For those who don't know what this means (as I didn't until a few days ago), it means that we loan people money and the people give us personal items to hold as collateral. We take televisions, gaming consoles, musical instruments, jewelry, and just about anything that is worth a decent chunk of money. And, as I learned today, pawn loanable items also include bicycles. Today I was give the chore of organizing thirty-six bicycles so that they would be in ascending order according to their loan code. There were various factors that made this task very difficult: a cramped space to work in, a poor memory which kept me crouching through the bikes to search out the individual numbers much more than what should have been necessary, new guy nervousness about getting the order wrong, front tires that would swing around if I didn't hold them just right, handle bars that kept getting caught in everything (even my clothing), and missing kickstands. If I owned a pawn shop, it would be a requirement that if I was taking a bike as collateral that it would have a functional kickstand attached to it, enabling me to avoid the frustration of having to lay bikes on the ground or having them slide off items they had been leaned on when I was trying to reorganize them. I will keep this bit of information in mind for future use. More kickstands could have saved me so much time, energy, and curse words because when I wasn't having to hoist bikes over my head and then daintily step through and around other bicycles I was trying to balance kickstandless bikes against other bikes that actually had kickstands. At one point I had to balance three kickstandless bikes against one "kickstand?yes!" bike. It was a precarious, nervous affair, and it took several attempts, but I accomplished the task without totally destroying my new khaki pants. And then when I thought I had everything done, I found one bike that I had set aside (it was a kickstandless one and was flat on the floor where I couldn't see it, imagine that) which needed to be inserted two-thirds into the row. This required several more minutes of bike shuffling and balancing.

At one point in the day, I was coming back from a break and someone told me to go stand over by a specific female co-worker because a strange man wouldn't leave her alone. He was older and wore a light blue button up shirt that showed off his wisps of white chest hair very nicely. He complimented my co-workers hair and said she looked pretty but then said he shouldn't say that because he could get into trouble. Then he asked if he could get into trouble for saying that and my co-worker, playing along in order to be polite and partially out of a desire to appease the man so that he would leave, agreed. He then told her that he should say she looked good. I didn't quite understand this. He was maybe saying he was willing to get into trouble over her? I have no clue, but he repeated himself and it didn't make any more sense the second time around. He was very strange, but harmless. I was very ambivalent when I learned he was a regular customer because I found him entertaining and looked forward to future encounters but I doubt my female co-workers share the same sentiment.