This was an exceptionally long week at work– it was decided (not by me) that yesterday needed to be a Move Every Single God Damn Thing in the Store day, and I spent the majority of it out of breath and sweating, which are exactly the characteristics you want in a purveyor of fine furniture and furniture-related goods and services.

I am old and fat and out of shape, guys, and I signed up to be a salesman.  If I wanted to work as a mover I would have made sure to be 20 years younger and substantially more svelte.  And yet.

But that’s not the point of this post.  The point of this post is that in addition to being fat and old and out of shape and sweaty and out of breath, attractive characteristics all, I am also an idiot.

So this lady comes in and wants four $75 dining chairs.  She wants to buy one of them from clearance at half off (fine) and order the other three new.  No problem!  She’s already decided on everything before coming in so everything ought to go really fast, right?  I write the ticket, call a manager over to drop the price of the clearance chair, and tell her how much the sale will be.  She is writing a check, and blinks a couple of times and then, visibly embarrassed, asks me the name of the store.

I tell her and her day immediately gets worse as her brainfart continues and I have to spell the name of the store for her.  It is obvious that this woman is not a moron and is just having a bad couple of minutes where the synapses aren’t firing right.  We cool.  I make a joke about having made a stupid math error earlier in the day.  It is worth pointing out that the joke wasn’t true, and I was just trying to make her feel better.

I tell her how much to write the check for.  She pauses, thinking, and comments that the number doesn’t seem right.

“The one chair is half off, remember,” I say.

“Oh,” she says, and writes the check for the agreed-upon amount, takes her clearance chair, and leaves the store.

Two minutes later it occurs to me that $75 times three and a half is not $118, which is what the check she wrote was for, and I look at the invoice and discover that I only sold her two chairs.  She not only noticed the error but pointed it out to me and I still looked at $118 and went “Yeah, that’s definitely the right amount to charge someone for four goddamn chairs.”

I had to call her back and tell her she’d need to either call me with a credit card number or come back to the store and write a second check if she wanted all four chairs.  She was back in ten minutes, having figured out on her own that I wasn’t able to math.  Luckily, both of us blamed ourselves for the mistake getting through.

Earlier today, I sold something to someone who lives on a street very near me.  She asked me what street I lived on and I forgot my address.  I literally could not remember the name of the street I live on.  It took way too long.

I am not having a good week.