Winter Wonderland

[Get up to speed with Winter Wonderland, Part 1 and Winter Wonderland, Part 2]

Monday, December 22 2003:
Over the last two days my instincts have proven correct. I haven't seen Fatman since, and my attempts of working through the mall's hierarchy have proven to be a fucking nightmare. We're apparently independent contractors now, or something. I don't know, it's a fucking mess. If we don't get someone to do something by tomorrow I'm either going to have to do something drastic or I'm going to have a bunch of pissed off sixteen-year-old girls and their parents breathing down my neck, if not physically beating the ever-loving shit out of me. Not to mention Santa and Photo Joe, who will seriously beat the ever-loving shit out of me.

Tuesday, December 23, 2003:
Well fuck. Everyone got paid except for Photo Joe, Santa, and myself. Not to say we couldn't have made it, I didn't include today's take in the dole. I paid everyone in cash, though, which was something I was desperately attempting to avoid. As I was handing it out I was telling everyone to pay their taxes and giving them little scraps of paper with the taxes worked out by hand, but seriously, I handed teenage girls several hundred dollars each... in cash... in the middle of a mall... right before Christmas Eve. I'd be honestly surprised if any of the money made it out of that building. I had three people who didn't show up to get their cash at all, and I seriously considered just saying "Fuck it" and forgetting about the whole thing. That's not my style, though. Throwing a gift-wrapped brick with the cash taped to it through their window in the middle of the night is more my style. Anyway, I managed to track them down and even handed two of them the cash personally, although I had to jam an envelope full of one dollar bills through the mail slot for the last one. Certainly hope that was the right house. Merry fucking Christmas!

As for Santa, Photo Joe and myself, we've worked out an alternate means of resolving the situation... and, more importantly, no one's ass has to be stomped or chainwhipped tomorrow.

Friday, December 26 2003:
Needless to say I don't remember all that much about the 24th. We had a three-man crew, the largest lines I've ever seen, and a titanic booze collection that just couldn't remain. At some point in the day Photo Joe decided to only communicate through puppetry to hide his slur, and, following suit, I quickly adopted my best munchkin accent. Santa simply became the jolliest bastard this side of an "I love myself" jacket. Santa can also hold his booze. Seriously, Santa drank twice as much as either Photo Joe or myself and I don't remember him vomiting even a single time. At about 8:30 or so the place was empty. Our area was empty for the first time all day, and anyone else in the mall was the "get the hell out of my way, this Christmas thing just snuck up on me!" type of person.

If I recall, there was limited talk of working the Christmas day crowd, but ummm... FUCK NO. Photo Joe was packing out his equipment (good Christ, I hope that was his equipment), I was doing the Mentat thing over the lockbox/cash drawer, and Santa was putting bottles in a trash bag and just generally cleaning up. Of course by "putting bottles in a trash bag" I mean "putting bottles, timesheets, and applications in a trash bag." And by "just generally cleaning up" I mean "destroying any evidence we had ever existed, let alone been in that general area to begin with". You see, the innovative solution we had come up with to the payroll crisis was really quite simple: we decided to split two days worth of cash three ways, then dust off and nuke the site from orbit.

I tried, goddammit. I tried to be a good manager. I spent most of last Monday and Tuesday trying to get someone to take care of the goddamn situation. I talked to the head managers in the other stores. I tried to bludgeon my way into the mall offices. The alcohol thing did get a little out of hand, however... Ummm.... I don't actually have an excuse for that. The alcohol thing got out of hand. Look, the customers I served in this job were the worst people I've seen in all my years in the service industry. Not just the worst customers, the worst honest to God people. Scum of the earth. And the bells, the fucking jingle jangle everytime I took a step. You'd drink too. I should have quit days ago, weeks even. Embezzlement, theft, tax evasion. I have no idea how many felonies I committed on Wednesday, wouldn't even know where to begin, but hopefully I'll be out of here before the shitrain starts. We left a four-foot stack of folded elf clothing on the floor of the cottage and I have somewhere around 4,000 dollars in cash sitting in the desk drawer next to me. It's over man. Game over.

Epilog: And that was the Christmas season of the year of our lord Two-Thousand Three. I've kept in touch with Photo Joe over the years, more as an early warning system than anything else. I figure it's a good policy to keep in touch with the people you committed grand larceny with. Oddly enough, he now runs some sort of Photo paraphernalia / developing store in that very same mall. From what he's said our antics were utterly dwarfed by the antics of the higher-ups. Someone was attempting some avant-garde  accounting, and they really put the meaning of words like "embezzlement" and "tax evasion" into context compared to our piddling little haul.

I'm not exactly too sure how I feel about what I did that year, but I AM fairly certain I'm not going to be caught even if what amounts to my confession is thrown all the hell up over the Internet. Photo Joe agrees. We don't know what happened to Santa. Neither of us have seen or heard from him since Christmas Eve, however I like to think he's still out there somewhere, making children happy while under the influence of the spirit of Christmas.