Everyday Normal

As someone who was once a young boy I must say I am guilty as charged in this article.

It was an exciting time in life. Everything in the world was up. I had discovered that I could jump and actually touch things located higher than my usual reach. I must also bring attention to the fact that this stage also included, for me, the desire to brace my body between two walls in hallways and climb upward. This joyful and wondrous time came quickly to a close when I one day hit my head on the ceiling fan.

I saw two of my brothers fighting in the living room on the other side of the coffee table. In an effort to get to the other side of the table as quickly as possible to break up the fight, I jumped over the table which was below the fan. The fan was on and spinning at top speed and after my forehead hit the blade I fell to the ground hitting my head on the corner of the coffee table on the way down. This did break up the fight as my brothers were startled by all the ruckus and then began to laugh at me.

More from my time at CD Warehouse:

The next company policy was the “Hot Chick Discount”. When a good looking lady wandered into the store we found it necessary to insure that there would be a return visit. Hence there was a special discount. As long as we were still making money on the transaction we could discount away. Since the CD’s were used, and only cost us three or four dollars these ladies were getting a sweet deal. Now John demonstrated what not to do one day when his true love came into the store. Her name was Skylie and he was smitten. He gave her about sixty dollars in CD’s and only charged her two dollars. Then he didn’t even cash the check she wrote because it smelled like her. He was in love. She could bash his face in with a 2X4 and he would just be concerned that she might get slivers.

Another policy that my friend, Rob, and I came up with was the concept of $0. When people would bring in a big stack of CD’s to sell us we would tally up what we would pay and tell them the total. What we didn’t tell them is that we were taking some of the CD’s for free. Many of these CD’s ended up in the “Crap Bin” and then made it over to Hastings. If people ever wanted to know the price per CD we would act like we made a mistake and then actually pay them for the $0 CD’s. Most people didn’t care and didn’t want an itemized receipt so we drastically reduced what our inventory cost.

A few years back I was a huge fan of dry ice bombs. My friends and I would go around putting them in all kinds of strange places just for fun. The first time we did it, for some strange reason , we went to the local duck pond to set them off. We packed in the dry ice and threw the bottle out in to the pond. When we threw it we threw it to a clear area, but the ducks quickly gathered around the bottle. I guess if people are throwing things in the water it is usually bread. The ducks were hanging out around the bottle and we were waiting for it to explode. It seemed to take 20 minutes but it eventually blew sending ducks flapping and quacking in all directions. I still wonder how many we killed or if they all survived the blast.

We then went on to try several more things. We buried bombs in playground sandboxes and watched as they exploded with a muffled sound and sent dirt flying into the air. We got some helium balloons and floated them over peoples houses. We exploded the contents of a port-a-potty all over its walls. We would leave them on peoples doorsteps in the middle of the night.

This was all done pre-9/11 and I would hate to know what kind of huge massive trouble you could get in doing this after 2001. We almost got caught a couple of times. Once we were using hydrochloric acid bombs at a park late at night. We buried a 3 liter bomb under the sand and waited for a really long time. It never went off so my friend Rambo pulled it out of the sand and it was huge. It looked like it would hold 6 liters of fluid now. Rambo decided to throw it down at the ground next to him. I thought he had gone insane and that he was going to be seriously injured. Somebody up there likes him though because when he threw it there was no explosion, but rather the bottle sprung a leak that sent it flying into the air spewing a mist of acid behind it. It disappeared above the level of the lights and it felt like it was in the air for a solid minute. It was really probably only up for 10 or 12 seconds which is still impressive. For that time my two friends and I were looking alertly upward waiting for the bottle to hit one of us on the head. It came down a few feet behind Rambo and we looked at the deformed bottle and laughed about Rambo’s death wish.

We decided to give a glass bottle a try. We put in all the stuff, closed the bottle and then took cover in my friends car. After another long unfruitful wait we decided to shoot my friends pellet gun at it. He went back by his trunk and was taking aim to shoot when I saw a police car driving up from the other side of the park. I yelled at him that the cops were coming and he threw his gun back in the trunk and jumped back in the car. The police turned on their lights and we didn’t even move an inch. They had us get out of the car one at a time. They had me put my hands behind my head and they grabbed my hands with a fistful of hair then asked if I had anything in my pockets. I told them about my pocket knife and was anticipating getting my face slammed into the ground as had happened before with police. They set me down in a row next to my friends. We were all pretty close to the glass bottle that hadn’t exploded yet. We began to hear a hissing noise from pressure being released and I was just praying that the bottle would not explode with the police right there. The hissing continued for a couple of minutes and then stopped. Inside the car I had 2 bottles full of acid that we hadn’t mixed yet and when the cops let us back in the car after everything there was only one bottle.

The other close call we had was when we vandalized someones house and left a couple of bombs on their doorstep. We drove away and waited for the bombs to go off. The first one went off but we never heard the second one. We drove away in a hurry. We passed by a while later and saw police cars and an ambulance out in front of the house. Our imaginations ran wild with thoughts of someone getting burned by acid or picking up the bomb and blowing off a finger. We later found out that nothing happened. We were very lucky and very stupid.

More from my first job at a CD Warehouse:

In the store we had what we called the “Crap Bin”. It was our 99¢ bin. It was full of CD’s that were from really bad artists, CD’s that we had too many of, or ones that were just in bad condition. There was a lot of Hootie and the Blowfish, Snow, Green Day, Soul Asylum and other stuff like that. The crap bin just filled up, always waiting for that moment of exhilarating joy when someone would want to hear Colour Me Badd again.

Now as the crap bin continually accumulated more CD’s we needed to find a way to reduce the size of the crap bin. We thought of implementing a buy one get one 99 cent CD free promotion, and we tried improving the appearance of the bin and more prominently displaying them but nothing worked. The CD’s in that bin kept growing. One day John was inspired as he remembered the store across town that also buys CD’s. It was a store called Hastings and they had a relatively small collection of used CD’s. They didn’t generally offer as much money as we did for used CD’s. They were known for giving 3 dollars for the good stuff and we usually gave 5 bucks a pop for good material. John and my friend, Rob, who worked there too, loaded up about 30 CD’s and headed over to Hastings. Rob went up to the counter and John went inconspicuously over to the magazines and hid himself, as the Hastings management knew who he was. Rob went over to the counter and offered his stack of crappy CD’s to the girl at the counter. The girl instantly turned around and asked the manager for help. The manager began grilling Rob about the origin of so many CD’s that were from such a wide range of genres. Rob explained that he was very eclectic in his musical taste and that some of the CD’s were his sisters. After filling out an information form Rob looked around for John and saw him hiding his face behind a magazine. The girl told Rob that she could only give him 30 dollars for the entire stack of CD’s. They left with the satisfaction of getting 1 dollar for each of those CD’s from the 99 cent bin. Upon their return they relayed the whole story to me and we all laughed our heads off. I said that I wished I could have been there, John said, “Oh, you’ll get your turn.”

One week later we picked out another stack of about 30 CD’s and carefully positioned them in the stack so as to have the recognizable artists in strategic places. I walked into Hastings with my stack of CD’s and John came in a minute after me. I went to the counter to find one girl behind it and I looked around for a manager only to not find one in sight. I began commenting to the girl on how cool her job was and trying to make small talk. I had to fill out an information slip to make sure they could find me if it turned out that the CD’s were stolen. After I did that the girl handed me 60 bucks. I almost started laughing out loud. I kept my composure until I got outside and met John at his car. After that we just referred to our trips as “The Hastings Scandal”.

Isn’t it a real shame that no one will probably ever know the excitement of selling CD’s to a competitor?