Author Archives: Zevia

I know it’s been awhile since either Saate or I have posted anything, but I thought everyone would get a kick out of this. For those who don’t know, I work in a grocery store. Here’s an excerpt from an e-mail I sent to a family member earlier today:

“Still recovering a little from all the (literal) running around I was doing at work yesterday. People panicked over ice and water like nobody’s business, and both just happen to be handled by my department, which is all of two people. When the power went out at about 3:30, I ended up just going to work 15 minutes early, planning to sit in the break room until my shift started. I didn’t know the power outage was so widespread, so I thought I’d just sit somewhere that was actually air-conditioned if I was going to have nothing to do.

Well, they had me start as soon as I walked in, and between 4:15 and 6:00 PM, we sold over 11,000 pounds of ice [edit: for you non-Americans, about 5,000 kg, if my conversions are still correct]. It got to a point where I was just grabbing a pallet jack and hauling pallets out to the ice chests at the front of the store to load it directly, and I couldn’t even do that. As soon as it got anywhere near customers, it got swarmed like a zombie flick and people just tore it down. I couldn’t get a single bag into the cooler because there wasn’t a point, people were just ripping it down.

It actually got so bad that we couldn’t even get it out onto the sales floor – we just brought it about 30 feet from the freezer to the backroom doors and started handing it out to anyone who wanted to buy it. And, of course, as soon as we ran out, we had people swearing at us and chewing us out because we didn’t set a limit on how many bags people could take. Nothing like getting yelled at because of OTHER peoples’ behavior. My department manager mentioned it at one point, “Hey, make sure they can only take… 3 bags, let’s say, so everyone in line can get some,” but our assistant director just said to let people take however many they wanted. I think even if we had set a cap, we still would’ve been chewed out. We had people coming in and asking for ice for hours after we ran out.

None of the other departments really had much to do because all the refrigeration was down, so they started sending the dairy box and produce guys over to my department so it wasn’t just the two of us trying to keep up with the ludicrous demand. Water started selling like nobody’s business, and even with 4 or 5 of us running it out there, we couldn’t keep it stocked. We ended up blowing through about 3 or 4 days’ worth of water sales in about 4 hours.

We, of course, also very quickly sold the few flashlights and candles we had, then managed to run our rack of batteries out in a couple hours, as well as our styrofoam and plastic ice chests, which we got chewed out again for.

The great thing was, power came back on at the store at about 8:30 or so. Maybe 5 seconds later, I had customers asking me, “Is power back on everywhere or just here?” To which I had to just shrug, but in my head, I was saying, “How the hell would I know? Call someone who’s not here.”

I got home at 10:30, and power came back on at about 10:55 for the whole area. So all those people panicking and swarming over losing electricity are now going to have a lot of unnecessary ice and water. I guess the news had predicted the outage would last a couple days, but nonetheless.

All I have to say is, if that’s how people freak out over a 5 hour power outage, they are -screwed- if there’s ever an actual disaster – and I really don’t want to be the one working that day.”

As for game-related postings and news, part of the reason I haven’t been posting much is that I stopped playing WoW about 8 months ago, and I wasn’t really sure how interested all of you were in hearing about other games or general internet-related quandaries, so I left it to Saate to put the WoW back into the site. He and I have talked some Mass Effect 1 and 2 a bit in e-mails back and forth, if people would be interested in it as a topic of discussion.

What about the rest of you? Still playing? What’s the buzz about the game now?