It did not take me long to acclimate myself to the crew inside of the Revco in Strongsville.
Within weeks, I was throwing jokes around with the best of them and often being referred to as the "peanut gallery." It helped that most of the mainstays had strong senses of humor as well as it made it easy to fit in with them. Most of my comments were directed at Mike, but virtually everyone was a potential target, including my store manager.
The only person that was spared most of the time was the assistant manager, a person (and position) that was eliminated within months of me starting there. I don't remember much about him, but he was someone I just simply didn't like, and it felt like most felt the same. I remember one particularly nasty exchange he had with one of the pharmacists, who ended up telling him to "get out of my pharmacy."
The rest of the crew were pretty laid back, funny, but also hard workers. The work would get done, then the games would begin, and since it was a relatively slow store (and getting slower by the week), there was plenty of downtime to cause chaos.
I made my mark in my own way, whether it being one-liners directed at anyone who said something silly, or in some situations, pranks. Sometimes the prank was really subtle, other times, I went for a slightly more direct approach. Either way, it was memorable and probably caused my manager more than one heart attack.
One of my earliest pranks involved the security tags that we'd have in a big strip that we had to manually place on high-ticket items (remember friends, this is prior to 2000, so things were a bit more relaxed back then). They'd send us a bunch of these with each warehouse order and most of the time, the strips were placed where corporate preferred them to be place.
I had a better idea though.
In an initial attempt to prank Mike, I started placing the strips upside down on the floor under the desk in the manager's office. Mike had been elevated to shift supervisor (along with myself and the other pharmacy tech), so we all had access in there. The prank was pretty simple in design: get at least one of these to stick to the bottom of the target's shoe(s) in hopes of setting off the alarm and causing mild panic as they tried to figure out what item was setting off the alarm.
As Mike went to leave, the alarms went off as expected and he spent several minutes trying to figure out what happened. Meanwhile, I was dying of laughter, which tipped him off that something was amiss.
He astutely checked the bottom of his shoes and found several of these strips attached. He called me a jerk, I laughed some more, and he went home for the day.
Not content with just getting Mike with this, I took aim at my store manager. In retrospect, it probably wasn't fair. He was a good guy, albeit a bit behind when it came to changes in retail, but he was friendly and good-natured and didn't deserve what I was about to do to him, but I couldn't resist.
I once again laid several of these strips upside down under the desk and waited for the moment. Finally, late in the afternoon, he went to leave. He had a bag of stuff that had been rung up earlier in his hands, went through the alarms, and about fell over when they went off.
After several minutes of rooting around, he shrugged his shoulders and left.
What made this great was this went on for several days. Every time he came in and every time he left, the alarms went off. He was baffled and nearly called the alarm company in to check them when for some reason, while sitting at the desk, he happened to drop something on the floor. It was at that moment he noticed the stray security tags still sitting under the desk, then noticed a corner of one sticking out from underneath his shoe.
He came out of the office, a smirk on his face, and a clump of these tags in his hand. He looked directly at me, chuckled a bit, and said "That was a good one."
He then added to not do it again.
I wasn't done with the poor guy sadly, although this next one wasn't directly intended to get him, it just kind of worked out that way.
One fateful delivery day, I managed to get my hands on a ton of bubble wrap. Having finished up my allotment of totes, I proceeded to head to the back room, grabbed this stash of bubble wrap, and very carefully spread it out across the floor of the stockroom. I mean, I covered the entire floor with this stuff, even being smart enough to work my way from the back to the front by the door to avoid accidentally stepping on any of it.
I laid the last piece down by the door, then high-tailed it out of there. My money was on Mike getting there first, but he ended up taking longer than I thought to finish his section.
I happened to notice my manager was heading straight for the door to the backroom, his giant cart full of finished totes in front of him. I knew what was about to happen. He was going to push the cart into the door and go straight on in without a second thought. For a brief moment, I felt bad.
The feeling didn't last long.
As soon as he pushed into the backroom with the cart, the bubble wrap started popping so fast and so loud it sounded like a fireworks show was going off back there. In his panic, he pushed the cart in even faster, thus causing even more bubble wrap to pop. Even with the door now shut, you could clearly hear it all the way up in the front of the store.
The pharmacist stopped working long enough to look at me and ask "what did you do this time?"
Before I could answer, my manager opened the door, walked out so I could see him, and held up several sheets of popped bubble wrap, shook his head while smiling, and walked back into the backroom.
He later told me that he appreciates a good prank, but if I kept this stuff up, I was going to give him a heart attack.
I was also banned from going anywhere near bubble wrap in the store from that point on.
Another frequent, but less impactful prank, was after I finally bought a new car, I took full advantage of it having a panic button. See, Mike and I often parked next to each other, so when Mike would head out to his car, I'd wait for him to be bent over, reaching into it, then hit that panic button, thus sending my car horn blaring and his head into the roof of his car. It took him a few times to figure out what was happening, but the look on his face was priceless.
After leaving that store to go to the Berea location, the pranks became more elaborate, but I'll cover those at a later time.
I had fun at the Strongsville location in my 3 years there, but a major change was about to unfold just shy of a year on the job, one that completely altered where I was heading with the job.
Stay tuned.
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