but wait, there's more!

so you thought you'd gotten rid of me?

Sorry I haven't been around for a couple weeks. When I haven't been at work, I've been busy dealing with some irl shit that I can't explain because it could very easily dox me. But I'm here today.

Had a few fascinating things happen the last few days. First off, the milk guy got into a car crash, so we've been out of milk for a week. That's the vendor's story, anyway, but it doesn't really add up. Apparently the accident destroyed all of the product, but didn't hurt the milk guy at all, and the vendor asked him where he hadn't delivered to yet, and he gave them two of the three stores he hadn't been to yet, but forgot about us, so everyone got their milk except us.

Where this falls apart is that the day after we were told this story, we got a call from three other stores in the area who told us they were told the exact same thing. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see how that turns this whole thing into a giant lie. And it doesn't help that even after we were told they had remembered us, they've waited five days before catching up.

I don't entirely know how to explain these facts. All I can think of are the following explanations:

the vendor stopped buying from farmers as part of a negotiation to lower price under the assumption that farmers would be desperate enough to take any deal because of covid19

the farmers stopped selling as part of a negotiation to raise price under the assumption that the vendor would be desperate enough to take any deal because of covid19

they ran out of product because of mismanagement (potentially due to lack of workers because of covid19)

the milk truck crashed before delivering to anyone and they couldn't possibly catch up so they told every store that they were the only store they failed to deliver to

???

No matter the reason, it has left all the little old ladies who come in for milk in utter dismay.

The store was also visited by an old man wearing half a bra over his face yesterday. He didn't seem to think there was anything weird about using that as a mask and didn't apparently notice every other customer laughing at him.

Other minor plotlines involve individuals from the halfway house.

First off, there's this dude "named" Jimmy who comes in once a week or so and buys up a lot of our bags of tobacco and rolling papers. Well, New York State banned pharmacies selling tobacco a month or so ago, so we're completely out. But this guy came in anyway, and asked me how he could start buying tobacco under the table from our store. When I told him this wasn't something that was possible, he went, "Oh, oh, of course, of course, I must be mistaken, yes," then asked if he could speak to my manager. I was like "Are you just going to ask him if you can buy tobacco from him?" and he told me no, so I called my manager. Jimmy greeted him and asked if there was somewhere they could speak privately. They emerged from the backroom like a minute later and Jimmy left in a huff, and my manager told me he had in fact asked if we were still secretly selling tobacco to special customers. Given that other types of stores still can sell tobacco, I don't understand what market incentive Jimmy thinks pharmacies would have to continue secretly selling tobacco, but the most shocking thing about it is that he was legitimately surprised that this wasn't something that was happening. He had gone so far as to assume that perhaps I wasn't cut in on the deal and he had to go to my manager. lmao

The next halfway house guy story from this week is more interesting. There's this guy named Matt. My introduction to him was when he tried to get me to help him use the Kodak machine to print softcore porn off his phone. He comes in most days and buys several Cashword Doubler scratch-offs, and knows all of the cashiers' names, and whenever he sees me, he suggests loudly that I should be the manager of the store.

For those who don't know, the way Cashword Doublers work is that you have a bank of letters in the bottom left that you have to reveal, and you use those letters to see how many words you can spell with them in a pre-filled crossword puzzle that makes up most of the card. If you can use those letters to spell three of the words, you get your two bucks back, and you get more money the more words you can spell. If one of your words has a star in it, you double your money.

Well, Matt came in the other day and bought one of these tickets with a twenty, and asked for all his change in ones. He also asked me if there had been any big winners. Both of these things are things he does literally every time he buys a ticket. How the fuck do I know if the ticket has had any big winners? He leaves, and comes back in less than a minute later with the ticket torn up and says it's a loser, and has me throw it away. He proceeds to buy another ticket with some of the ones I gave him.

This process repeats two more times.

The fifth ticket he bought, he took one look at and said, "Loser, I can tell it's a loser already."

"Oh really?" I responded.

"Would I lie to you?" he asked rhetorically in answer. "Tell me why I'd lie to you."

I laughed politely and said, "Alright, alright, fair enough," assuming he was just fucking around.

"Tell me why I'd lie to you," he said again, with a totally straight face.

"I have no idea."

He said thanks and left for like forty-five seconds, then came back with the ticket ripped up and bought another. "This one's a loser too," he prophesied.

I didn't even respond, because honestly I didn't know how to.

He left, came back thirty seconds later and bought another. "Loser," he said. "Wanna know how I know it's a loser?"

"Sure," I responded.

"I can see right through them," he answered, and left for another half a minute.

This is when my brain started short-circuiting, because that explained why he was doing these so fast. Cashword Doublers take some time to do. He has no idea what he's doing and isn't able to tell whether he won or not.

I dug into my trashcan, but the fragments of ticket that he had ripped up were all mixed together and I couldn't tell which ones went together. Would have taken some time to figure it out. The one thing I _could_ tell was that he wasn't scratching them off all the way.

When someone scratches off a Cashword ticket, they scratch off the letter bank, then scratch off all instances of their letters in the words above, and see which words are filled out. This guy was scratching off most of (but not even all of) the letter bank, then not even scratching off the crossword at all.

There had to be like five to ten dollars sitting in the trashcan, unless the guy actually was unlucky, because it was clear he had no idea how to play this ticket.

He came back in with more ticket fragments and bought another ticket... "This one's a loser too."

This time, I held onto the ripped up ticket. He'd ripped through the scanner barcode, but the code on the back and the pin were still visible, so I could check it by typing in its serial code manually. Loser. Okay, so he'd gotten lucky on that one.

The process repeated like ten more times (he'd run out of the ones I'd given him, and was now using quarters). I have no idea how he could have gotten that unlucky, but I was checking the tickets for him after each one, and they were all losers. [Sidebar: I wasn't going to take the money. I couldn't take the money. I was on camera at all times, like I would have gotten so fucking fired. I was just going to tell him if his ticket was a winner and give him the money.]

Somewhere in there, he said, "I should just quit right now. I'm never gonna win big on this. Some black guy already probably won it." I had no idea how to respond to this. I ended up saying, "Maybe..."

He answered with "I should go rob him."

After buying a total of like twenty tickets, he got super pissed and yelled that he was never coming back to our store because we don't sell winning tickets to white people.

Granted, this was a hollow threat, because he had told everyone working at the store multiple times that he was moving to another halfway house a county away in like two days. He doesn't know that I know the reason he's being moved is because he was arrested for publicly masturbating while lying down under a table in a restaurant downtown (where my mother is a waitress).

The next night, I was working again. It was the night before he was to move away and I didn't expect to see him. But the doors opened, and there he was. He repeated the twenty dollar bill changed into ones thing, he asked me if there had been any big winners, and as soon as I handed him his ticket, without having scratched it, he looked at it and said, "Holy shit, this one's a winner."

I was like, "Oh really?"

He answered with surprise in his voice, "Yeah, I told you I can see through these. Wait a sec."

He scratched off the letter bank and immediately handed it to me, saying "It's a two hundred dollar winner."

I scratched off the barcode, and scanned it, and it fucking was.

I gave him his money and he left, whooping and hollering.

Now, I have no idea how the fuck he knew it was a winner beforehand. He was probably just lucky. But the fact that he knew the exact dollar amount signifies one of a few things:

he has superpowers and could in fact see through the tickets

he is a fucking genius and can track all of the variables on the card in his head without having to keep track by scratching off his letters in the crossword itself

I'm leaning toward the latter. That would also explain why he didn't always scratch off the whole letter bank. Apparently, he'd scratch off one letter at a time, see if it helped him with any of his words, then scratch off the next, and continue like that. But if he didn't have three words, and he was more than X letters away from completing three words, and he had X letters left to scratch off, he just wouldn't scratch off the whole letter bank.

I'm still in shock about this shit.

On the coronavirus front, we have finally gotten thermometers back in stock. They're cheap-looking at they cost $99.99. We haven't sold any. Yesterday, we had 45 people come in without masks. We've had 500 in the last week. We only have a couple hundred shoppers per day anyway.