And another piece of my past bites the dust

http://www.courierpostonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061010/BUSINESS/610100333

I started working at Tower Records in 1990, and worked there until 1992. I helped build this store before it opened. We put racks together, stocked all of the shelves, and told a lady to go away when she walked into the middle of the construction and asked if we sold batteries. Um, hello, do you or do you not hear hammering and see sawdust?

This was the store that said, on all of its printed invoices, that we were open 368 days a year. We always wondered where the other 3 days were. We could account for leap years, but what about the other 2 days?

This was the store where, one night in late December at 11:45pm, a woman approached me and asked me if we would have extended holiday hours. I asked her since we were open until midnight every day anyway, what the fuck did she want?

One day in mid-summer the management team (of which I was a member) bought a bunch of water pistols at Kiddie City next door and ran around the back employee area squirting the daylights out of each other. I thought I would be smart and run into a closet to hide. My general manager locked me in.

We had a kid named Omar Hassan who worked in the classical department, and he was going to school to become an engineer. He brought falafel with him for dinner one night, his mom packed his dinners for him, and I walked in to find him eating a small container of plain yogurt with a spoon. He was making faces, and he told me that for some reason his mom had sent yogurt for dinner. I told him the yogurt was supposed to go on the falafel. He was amazingly embarrassed. I adored Omar. I'll never forget how he had no idea how to use a manual can opener, and how he was so ticklish that you could stand in another room and make tickle motions at the window and he would collapse into giggles.

And this is where my friend Mike, bass player extraordinaire and ex-love of my life, has worked for over 15 years, and I wonder what the hell he'll do now.