As some of you know, I finally got round to volunteering to work in a charity shop, which is something I've wanted to do for ages and is also on my list of things to do before I'm 30. I started at the beginning of March with the PDSA and I'm loving it so far. It's just across the park from my house which is even better! Tuesdays I'm normally upstairs sorting donations, pricing goods, or taking old stock off and putting new stock out; Saturdays are my shop-floor days where I work the till, serve customers and generally do things in the actual shop itself. It's a reasonably busy shop with a very high stock turnover and some very entertaining customers.
So far I've served:
An actual midget lady who had to buy children's clothes
An old man who bought a copy of the Kama Sutra
A portly gentleman who adores really gory horror films
A drunk couple - the drunk man tried to demand that we give him the hanger (which we aren't allowed to do) and then tried to haggle the price of the very reasonably priced goods
A very strange man who carried a large bag of tin foil with him "to keep the aliens from hearing his brain waves"
and various other colourful characters!
Sadly, there's a lot of shop-lifting that goes on there too. I don't understand the mindset of anyone who could steal from charity. They often work in teams - one particularly despicable excuse for a man used his little daughter to distract us at the till while he stole a nice jacket near the door. There isn't a whole lot we can do really as the Police aren't really interested and we're not supposed to tackle the thieves; we just hustle them out the door and demand they don't come back. According to the manageress there, we lose around £100 of stuff A DAY to shop-lifters on average which is unbelievable!
Anyway, it's fun and really great to be out of the house doing something again!
In other news, plans for my birthday party are coming along really well :) More details to follow...
