Multiply 365 Day 207 - Brought to you by the letter "C" (Camcorder, Correctional Facility)

 

I guess I better get this underway. The clock is ticking and all that jazz. For the record, this evening I am opting for 977music.com instead of the normal Pandora offering, so the peeps on Facebook will not be all annoyed with my music updates. Yay for that I guess.

Not really a lot to talk about, not that starting one of these things with no plan is any sort of determiner for how long the final length will be. It usually isn't, if for no other reason than the page can take on a “Seinfeld” like quality, an entire blog about nothing.

So let's see if I can pull a little nothing out of my ass, shall we? (For the record, if I do pull something out of my ass, it is probably something you didn't want to see anyway.)

I guess today was more of an Ed day at work, I don't know if that is a good thing or a bad thing. Certainly there was some good to come out of it. It seems Ed became privy to our little camcorder drama from yesterday. I know I didn't say anything to him about it, maybe Dee did (most likely) or maybe he just overheard something (less likely, his hearing isn't that good) but for those not in the know, it was a fine display of the dynamics with which I work almost every day. As some of you know, Brian owns the store, having purchased it from his dad a while back, but over the spring and summer months Ed basically runs the ship, he is there every day, putting in real employee like hours (Brian's hours are far fewer, usually 2 to 3 a day tops), so while it would seem that Brian would be the guy I should answer to, over those 6 months that Ed is around, he ends up being the guy that I deal with most often. But there is also a dynamic between Ed and Brian as well, and usually Brian caves into whatever his dad says (though there have been some interesting blowups in the past, they are not relevant here), so when Ed found out about Brian going through Dee's desk and taking the camcorder out of there, he apparently was none too pleased, because one of the first things I heard today was Ed telling Dee not to worry, Brian was on the way in with her camcorder. The funny thing is, Brian already apparently has one, and this was a freebie from Pepsi, it wasn't exactly a top of the line model we are dealing with, so Brian took it not so much because he needed it or it was significantly better than anything he has currently, but simply because he could. Well that problem is now officially solved.

If that was my only dealing with Ed than it would be a good day, but instead I became office secretary as well, a job that I don't like much but I did help create the situation I was in, so I guess I have to see it through now. Before Ed left for Florida a couple of weeks back, I introduced him to a website that I have joked about in the past, www.womenbehindbars.com , a site that has profiles of prison chicks looking for pen pals and what not. I should never have mentioned this to Ed, usually I read the site because I find the profiles to be comedy gold, and Ed didn't see it the same way. Instead he had me send in a payment to get three addresses from from prison chicks that he hoped to communicate with. The service is such that you view a profile, add it to your shopping cart and then check out at the end and send a payment for the number of addresses you wish to get. Ed had me send away for three of them. I was almost hoping that the website would turn out to be a scam at this point, it would have cost $18 but it would have been better than the alternative. The alternative of course being the site is legit and they send Ed addresses. Because if they do that, then I am going to be drafted into letter writing duty, Ed doesn't want to actually hand write anything and he is so far down the computer literacy scale that even Wordpad would be a challenge, so typing isn't an option either. And apparently I am good with words from time to time, because anytime Ed wants something written he comes to me to do it. My method is pretty simple, he starts dictating something and I just grab bullet points from it and write around those things that I found were important. Of course I have to get approval of a final draft but by and large I don't get handed many rewrites.

Well, so far the site seems legit, Ed was sent a letter and, sure enough, in it was three addresses of women in prison. So I was told that I was going to have to draft a letter to these women (which I assume means three letters, I am lazy but I will not go the form letter route, even with prison chicks) and today was that lucky day for one of the ladies behind bars. Ed calls me to the office and hands me the letter with the addresses and picks one of the names to be written to. Of course I have to enter into this conversation with my own brand of snark, suggesting I start the letter with “Hi, I'm Troy McClure. You may remember me from such prison letters as “Release Dinner Date and a Movie” and “I Want to Appeal Your Clothes Off”. Sadly my comedy gold was lost on Ed, who apparently doesn't watch The Simpsons. Instead I had to come up with a letter introducing Ed to a prison chick. That isn't as easy as it sounds, on one hand you want to show you are interested without being a pervert about the fact you spent at least part of your time looking at profiles of women that are locked up, while also not giving away too much information about yourself (or Ed in this case) because at the end of the day you are writing to a convicted felon and most likely they are behind bars for a reason, and the reason has nothing to do with a housing shortage. And you thought writing a blog was tough, try doing that. This is simple by comparison. But eventually I think I came up with a brief but serviceable little item that should do the trick at breaking the ice. Of course this is all presupposed on the fact the addresses sent to Ed are legit. It could still be a scam after all.

I guess this means I still have two prison letters to go if none of them write back. If they do write back, well, I am going to need more stamps.