Lost Keys

Tonight it was a half hour to close and I was making my rounds, ensuring that my employees were on schedule with close-out duties. When I got to the front I saw two employees helping one customer. OK, that sometimes happens, but something wasn't quite normal. "Hey guys, how's it going?" Interpretation: "What are you doing?/Is everything OK?"

Well, the customer lost her keys, supposedly somewhere in our store, and so suddenly it's our responsibility to help her find them. I put one employee back to work and grudgingly let the other one help the lady, realizing it probably meant I'd be working late. Fifteen minutes later, and they had retraced the lady's steps through the store, and still no keys.

"I don't have any other keys to my car or my house. This is terrible! What am I going to do?" asked the bird-brained woman who should have had supervision while in public places. The lady's 6-year-old continued playing his video game, unconcerned. I'll admit I'm not very sympathetic to these kinds of situations: people are STUPID, IRRESPONSIBLE, and besides, I've been driving forever and have yet to misplace my keys (besides in my own house).

At that point, 15 minutes to close, I sent my employee back to work and I took over, knowing that the keys were probably somewhere really stupid. It reminded me of the time one of my crazier employees "lost" her paycheck when she had a lot of bills to pay that day. She checked the store, her car, her apartment, her purse, and where did she find the paycheck? In her back pocket!

So I asked the customer, "Did you check your son's pockets? Yours?" Yes, already done. "Did you go to the bathroom at all?" No. Then she went into the parking lot to look on the ground around the car, leaving her son inside, still playing his game. I went to the register and looked on the floor, around the displays, and then I spotted the shopping bag on the counter. "Is that her bag?" I asked the cashier. Yes. I opened it, suspecting what I would find. Yep, there was the stuff she bought, along with THE KEYS.

How can you buy something, put your keys in the bag, and then forget that they're there in the 30 seconds it takes to walk out the door??? HELLO?! Anyone home??

Luckily the evening was slow so we only got done a couple of minutes late. After a 10-hour workday, I'm ready to go HOME, not search for some idiot's keys.