Fighting the big boss on my last day at Waterstone's

My last day at Waterstone's was New Year's Eve.  I wore black to mark the occasion instead of the festive red I'd been wearing for the whole Christmas season.

It was a funny day.  I felt victorious because I had outlasted all the other Christmas temps, but New Year's Eve is a very subdued day in retail, and this one was more so, especially with it being a Saturday.  There were loads of staff in.  I was doing some floorwalking (walking around trying to help customers find things) and so was Debs but there were hardly any customers to talk to so it was like being in a human version of Pacman, walking round the shop trying not to run each other over.

And it wasn't like before Christmas.  Most of the people who came in to buy stuff on New Year's Eve had only come to raid the 99p table, and they were buying crap by the boatload, so they didn't want any help picking anything, like normal book buyers do.  They were just buying anything, because it was cheap.  The only help they needed was carrying it.

We were promised an early finish, we thought we'd be able to shut at 4 pm, but as 4 approached the shop was still full and so we paced around, looking at the door and hinting.

And I thought I'd take it easy the last hour, but then Edith asked me to fill up the Top Trumps, and I tried but there was an old couple in, teachers I think, who were buying them faster than I could fill up the racks.  And then they actually started raiding the trolley I was filling them up from.  I wanted to leave the queue barrier and the children's section full of Top Trumps as my parting gesture, but they were like a plague of locusts and they kept rampaging through my personal space, and at one point I had to walk away, and I felt like a character in a video game. 

Some of the time they were like the blockers from Lemmings getting in my way and stopping me getting past, and some of the time I felt like I was in a platform game, like Sonic the Hedgehog, except instead of trying to collect little gold rings, I was supposed to be putting Top Trumps out. 

For 3 months I'd fought my way through every type of customer there was.  Ones that are smarter than you, ones that are stupider than you, ones that are smellier than you, ones that want a book with a purple cover with a woman on the front but they don't know what it's called, ones who wants books on the Kardashians and Strictly, ones who want dark fantasy and misery memoirs, ones that want Lee Evans or Peter Kay or ones that want Fry and Clarkson.  And I'd got through them all.

And now at the very end I was fighting the big boss, and I was losing, and if I lost I was going to have to start the whole game off from the beginning again.

And this big boss couple had already been in once, and taken a car full of stuff home, and now at nearly 4 o'clock they went to the till and I had to help scan and bag the 166 packs of Top Trumps and the Horrible Histories gooey eyeball kits and the make yourself some shite jewellery out of bits of string kits and the board games, and a Doctor Who shopping bag, and a Twilight saga keyring, and I just wanted them to go home, but I tried to show some interest, like I was still a bookseller (but this isn't bookselling, this is shite selling).

And 15 carrier bags later they had gone, and so had the other last minute shoppers and we ended up closing about half past 4, but only by all 13 of us walking round looking at our watches and tutting until people went away. 

And so, after 3 months of trying I had got to the end level, and fought the big boss, but I didn't win so now I have to go back to the beginning and start again. At a new game.