I’m a sucker for office supply stores.  I could spend hours exploring the aisles, stroking the soft leather briefcases and fancy planners, reverently touching the pens, admiring all the different kinds of paper.  I happen to have a friend who shares my strange addiction.  We’ve taken to referring to office supply stores as pr0n shops.  :-)

Between my first and second years of college, I got a part-time job at an office supply store in the local mall.  It wasn’t one of the big box stores like Staples or Office Depot, but a family-owned business.  The owner had four stores, two at malls in Virginia Beach, one at a mall in Chesapeake, and one at a mall across the river in Hampton.  The store I worked at was the first one she’d opened.  I was very fond of the manager there.  He saw his position as being a buffer between us employees and the whims of the owner.  The owner is a smart lady, but sometimes got whims that didn’t work out so well for her people or sometimes for her customers, and B was good at helping her take the time to think them through before rushing them into action.

I worked at the store all through my sophomore year, and I had a great time there.  I’d noticed that the aisle with all the pens, markers, and pencils was in complete disarray.  The shelves stayed messy, and the backstock in the drawers underneath was totally disorganized.  Nobody knew what we had in stock, what was selling well, and what we needed to order more of.  So on slow nights, I would straighten things up on that aisle and organize it all.  Soon enough, the pen aisle was my baby - I think the others were relieved that someone had adopted it, so that they didn’t have to.  It could be a pain - the one aisle in the store with the largest number and variety of items.  But I got it into shape, and I started taking care of putting in the requests to the lady who did the ordering.  I was pretty proud of my work there.

I loved the display case with the fine pens.  We had some really nice Watermans and Crosses  Parkers and Mont Blancs.  I was actually not so fond of the Mont Blanc pens.  Yeah, they’re an expensive status symbol, but they’re made of plastic and fairly easy to break.  I remember admiring (and eventually buying, with my 25% employee discount) a knock-off made by Colibri that was made of metal, very durable, and that took the same refills as the Cross pens.  I loved to play with the fountain pens.  We would only use them with dipped ink for demonstrations, and then had to go clean them very thoroughly afterward.  It would make my night when a customer would ask to look at one of the fine pens.

One month we had a sales contest on the fine pens.  Those of us who worked part-time complained that the full-timers had an advantage, since they worked 40 hours to our 16 or 20.  And the full-timers complained that we part-timers had an advantage, because the big spenders came in at night or on the weekends.  It turned out that I came in first (woo hoo!), and one of the full-timers came in second.  It was a lot of fun.  I had been fortunate enough to have a big spender come in, admiring the pens, and to talk him into a gorgeous $300 Parker rollerball.  (This was 1991 - it was before gel pens.)

I was quite fond of selling the leather goods, too.  They were in the back corner, rather than up front by the cash registers, but if a customer started paying attention to them, we knew we were a lot more likely to make a sale.  There were some gorgeous briefcases and planners in that display case, some with buttery smooth leather, others in velvety soft suede.  And they smelled so wonderful - leathery goodness!  It was an absolute dream for someone as sensually-oriented as I am.

During that year, the manager of the store at the other Virginia Beach mall left, so B transferred over there.  Around the same time, he and his wife split up, and he had to move out on his own.  It was sad.  We had a couple of managers and assistants for a short time, and then the owner decided to take over managing the store.  In April of 1991, just as my second year of college was ending, she suddenly put up signs saying that everything in the store was 25% off.  We became rather worried and asked if she was getting ready to close the store.  She said no, she was changing suppliers, and she wanted to clear out some entire segments of inventory before buying from the new supplier.  This did not ring of truth to us.

In May, the school year ended for me, and I was taking a two-week trip to Spain.  Figuring that the store may not still even be open by the time I got home, I turned in my resignation.  It’s not hard to pick up a part-time retail job in Virginia Beach in the summer, so I wasn’t worried about finding work when I returned.

When I got back, the store was still open, but the signs now read “Everything 50% off!” and the employees looked rather dejected.  I was unsurprised.

I stopped by the store at the other mall and happened on B there.  He was doing well - he already had work lined up for when his store closed - and he asked if I’d like to see a movie with him.  Now, I was 19.  B was 12 or 15 years older.  Not having a clue how to respond, I said yes.  He chose the second Naked Gun movie, which was out that summer.  When I thought about this, remembering all the innuendo and imagery in the first one, I got a little scared.  I had a serious boyfriend at the time, but he was away on a cross-country trip.  Besides, this was just casual, just former coworkers having a nice evening.  Right?  Nothing to worry about.  Right?

Well, B was a perfect gentleman.  He listened to me prattle on about school, about my trip to Spain, about my boyfriend.  He really listened and heard me, which was somewhat of a new experience for me.  It was a nice evening.  And there never came a second nice evening with him, which was a relief to me.

In 1999, I returned to the church where I’d grown up.  Guess who were prominent members of the congregation by then?  Not just B, but also the owner of those stores.  They’d been working together for the years in between, and B had gotten remarried… to her daughter!  The coincidence amazed me.  I wasn’t sure whether they would remember me, but they did.  But by this time, we all had very different lives, and we never really connected again.