(Twenty Years) Part 2: Into The Fire

November 30, 2007 marked 20 years to the day since I started at Record Den, which has inspired some thought and reminiscing on the person I was then, what the job was like as the years went by, and what has kept me around until now ...

Christmas 1987 at Record Den, like many that followed, was a nonstop blur of activity from the moment you clocked in until you finally staggered out the back door of the Newberry's pet department at a few minutes past ten (or eleven). You drove home feeling beaten, winded, and looking forward to nothing else but getting some sleep before getting up the next morning and starting all over again.

My only experience with this kind of retail craziness before this had been bagging groceries at Fazio's, and even a busy streak on a Saturday afternoon at the supermarket was nothing like the weekend before Christmas at the Great Lakes Mall. Hours tended to fly on by when you weren't paying attention, and it and the pace rarely slackened. A second cash-only register was set up on the opposite end of the counter from the main register that helped split the crowds into two, but it was still all you could do to keep up with the flow while ringing out and writing up sales one right after the other.

At first, I was mainly consigned to the floor with a couple of other co-workers, answering questions and helping direct the people jostling up and down the aisles (2/3 of which were still taken up by vinyl albums, incidentally) towards whatever items they were after. I am told that during even busier times (if such a thing can be imagined), we would have employees stationed near the entrance to the store who would simply relay requests from customers who didn't feel like braving the crush of humanity in that little hat box of a record store.

Even with this kind of teamwork happening, you could still only go so fast at the main register as any credit card or check transaction had to be phoned in to an authorization service (usually one person did this for most of the day), and every single piece of product sold had to have its stock number scribbled down on an old-school duplicate sales form: one for the customer as an itemized receipt, and the other for Beth (or Dave) who would do the subsequent inventory adjustment by hand.

At the time I was hired, there was still no computerized inventory system at the Den (that wouldn't get going until 1989, if memory serves), and every album cassette and CD we kept in regular stock thing was tracked in a large bin of stock tickets, each one roughly the same height as an old CD long box. These tickets, at times, dated back well over a decade, though records that had been cut-out or quickly dropped from inventory would often have their cards flipped around and re-used when the occasion warranted. During slow times, I'd sometimes idly flip through these cards (some perennial sellers had 3 or 4 tickets stapled together and recorded sales and orders going back what seemed like prehistoric times) and goggle at the days in the go-go 1970s when new releases were ordered (and then sold) in the hundreds, rather than the dozens I had became accustomed to. I wish these cards still existed, but they were all tossed out and lost forever when the company adopted the Telxon as our store inventory manager and moved towards a more centralized buying system ... but we'll come back to that later.

At the risk of sounding cocky, I felt pretty good at the time about my musical knowledge, though looking back from now, I barely knew my ass from a hole in the ground as far as rock music was concerned. Sure, I was comfortably fluent in the music of the years 1982-1987, but almost anything pre-dating that time (not counting Pink Floyd) might as well have been Bulgarian folk music for all I knew. Regardless, my mastery of contemporary pop music gave me a pretty good feeling of confidence to do this job and answer questions from customers, and I began to learn the older stuff through osmosis and an ever-growing respect and admiration for classic rock and pop over the years.

There had been no discussions or hints as to what would happen to my job once January 1 rolled around and, quite truthfully, I had not yet decided what I'd wanted to do, either (this was largely due to a certain person I worked with back then whom I did not get along with at all). With school off until the middle of January, I was able to commit to a 40+ hour schedule at the store over the holiday break, and it was long, breakneck slog, but it was also a hell of a lot of fun (even the days I worked with the person I had a problem with). One factor that was working in my favor was that Greg had given me a shot at learning and running the main register after a couple of weeks of getting acclimated to the job. Luckily, I'd picked up the hang of it quickly enough to "graduate" from a warm body on the floor to someone who could quickly help knock down a line of people at the counter. I figured that, if nothing else, this would be experience that could come in handy elsewhere.

Another hint that this might not be a temporary gig dropped on Christmas Eve. To my considerable surprise, I found myself offered a Christmas gift from Greg in the form of a 12" single and import CD single (though I had yet to even own a CD player) for Pink Floyd's current hit "On The Turning Away." There was a longstanding store tradition of a brief after-work gift exchange on the night before Christmas, and I discovered over the following years that being asked to work on Christmas Eve was usually a sign that you had been accepted into the Den crew. Though I didn't know it just yet, I had passed the audition and was about to be offered a regular job after the holidays were over. My temp job was going to be anything but.