Sassy's Up Late Again

Ah, spring. Rain, flowers, tornadoes. Monday was S-hole's first day back after a week's vacation, so he was chagrined to be back, but in better spirits than he was a couple weeks ago. He and I had the closing shift. Around 4 o'clock when everyone else's shift was ending, S-hole pulled up the weather radar on his phone and showed it to me. There was a huge wall of red headed right for us. I knew Rusty would be sound asleep and the kids would be plugged into their whatevers, headphones on and completely tuned out. At just about 6pm, the online news reported that a tornado had been spotted about 35 miles SW of us--and of course the storm is moving NE. I called home and told the kids to turn on the TV news and watch the weather updates, and if they say that "our town" should take cover, to wake up Rusty and get in the bathroom. This whole situation is just about the worst feeling a mother can have--are they in danger? Will they do what I told them to do? Will they be OK? Will the storm completely miss us and make me sound like an overreacting chickenshit? Rusty has a very laissez faire attitude about tornadoes, and I tend to get a little too nervous--so between the two of us, we're probably just fine, but without me there, would he just tell them to let him go back to sleep? All the news about the killer tornadoes this spring has turned up the nerves a little, too. And being stuck inside the bank in Major Retailer didn't help either--the closest thing to a window we have are the skylights throughout the store. The store seemed like any other day at first, but very quickly, it took on an weirdly green cast from the skylights. Even in the worst of storms, it's not often that the light levels and even the "tone" of the light changes from day to day, so we took notice quite quickly. We decided to make it a priority to get "branch capture" sent off--basically, we run all the paper copies of checks and deposit slips and whatnot through a scanner that gets uploaded to corporate and they process the transactions--if they didn't get the batch, the transactions we'd done wouldn't post to people's accounts, and that could be a giant headache. S-hole and just clicked "Send" when they announced that everyone in the store should move to the back of the store. Cashiers immediately stopped checking people out, and started ordering everyone toward the back--I was actually impressed with how quickly and orderly they managed it. Only seconds later the power went out. If patrons weren't taking them seriously before, they certainly were now, and not 30 seconds later, not a soul was to be seen up front where we were. S-hole and I were trying frantically to get Boss on the phone. [What is it about that damned phone? I swear, the more urgently we need to reach him, the less likely he is to answer it.] We weren't entirely sure how to handle this--yes, I know we were supposed to go to the safe area, but everything was unlocked, the alarm couldn't be set with the power out, and the vault was still open. We were sure we'd have to lock everything up. We tried briefly to lock what needed to be locked and started moving toward the back. S-hole stopped about 5 yards away from the branch. "Wait!" he said. I stopped and turned to him.It was like something out of a disaster movie: that moment when someone makes a decision that is bound to look either spectacularly stupid or heroically brilliant by the end of the film. Here we were, standing in the midst of abandoned cash registers--with abandoned groceries on the belts and in carts, half bagged items stack up and waiting, the only light came from the skylights above, a dark, ominous green, and it was shockingly quiet. Far off in the distance I could hear voices--it sounded to me like they were hundreds of yards away, and an occasional pelt of rain would hit the skylights. I'd grabbed my purse and we were both on our cell phones--him trying to reach Boss and me trying to reach VP. "I'm not leaving the branch." he said.

Now DAMN. I KNOW we're supposed to go to the safe area. But I also know that we're not supposed to leave with the alarm off and the vault open. And I ALSO know I can't leave anyone alone in the branch. If he stays, I have to stay. In that split second I decided I didn't want to huddle in the fitting rooms with God-knows-who was back there anyway, and our back room with a solid security door seemed safer to me than simply standing in the middle of the store--I mean, if the roof came off, wouldn't all the products on the shelves start flying around??

We went back to the back and finally reached Boss. He was short on ideas of how to really handle this. We could hear the wind howling loudly outside--I have NEVER been able to hear the wind from inside that building--you can't even imagine how scary that was! We even heard what sounded like the building shifting--a low, slow moan. I thought for sure I was going to start hearing things breaking. But it passed as quickly as it came on, and pretty soon we could hear the people approaching. They immediately all came back to their carts and registers. The registers were on a backup battery, and they were quickly trying to check out as many people as possible before the backups died. They lasted about 10 minutes and they were all shut down. They immediately cleared the store, and started shutting everything down--pulling tarps over the produce, closing register drawers and sending employees home. A CSM told us the power company estimated it'd be about 3 hours before the power came back on.

VP finally called. She was trying to talk us through the procedures--with no power, how do we balance our drawers and the vault? We'll have to do it all manually. There was some chaos and kvetching trying to sort out how we were going to go about this--all of our final paperwork would still have to be scanned, if the power doesn't come on, who's gonna drive to another branch? The branch across town is already closed! The next closest branch is in the path of the storm, and the NEXT closest branch is off of a highway that just got closed "for several hours" because a semi got blown over. AAAAAArgh! In the midst of it all, S-hole says to me, "You know, the two of us have the WORST fucking luck, don't we? Everything something crazy like this happens, it's the two of us here trying to handle it." He's not kidding, either.


Just about the time we were really starting to get irritated, the power came back on. We breathed a HUGE sigh of relief, and immediately started our normal closing procedures. Lesson learned: I'm brushing up on emergency protocol and making a cheat sheet for everyone.