I forgot one. It was only a matter of time. This was a doozy, too. 2 and a half years. How could I forget it?! I don’t know. Shall we continue? Let’s…

After my sad position at West49 came to a close, I wasn’t ready to jump into bed with “the real world” so I decided to get another skate shop job. So in two weeks I had it. It was a local shop that had been around for a bunch of years. There were two of them in the area but they were basically completely different shops except for the name. I started working on the floor, selling everything. Decks, clothes, shoes, snowboards, and everything else they crammed in there. We always had so much stock. It was never empty, ever. It was a cool job because corporate reps would come in and show us what next season’s line was going to look like. Sometimes we would get stuff for free which is always awesome.

After a while, my boss caught on that I was computer savvy and hired me to do the site for the company, which when completed, he paid me $63. To this date, I find it hilarious and wouldn’t have it any other way. I also started doing the eBay store. That was fun at the start when it was like 75%/25% working the floor vs. working online. That quickly switched, though. Soon, I would be coming in and working all day on the computer. Answering hundreds of emails and selling a few items. It was a lot of work. A lot of running around finding what I could sell. It got tough because there was only so much in the store that I could sell and then resell.

It went on like this for a year and a half or so. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t desirable. My boss would start buying things specifically for eBay which he got God knows where and paid next to nothing for it. I wish I had his guys because he was getting stuff cheap. So cheap that it led to his next endeavor…the flea market.

This was something else. Here was my schedule:
Get up at around 6 on Saturday
Drive to my boss’s house to get his truck
Drive to the shop to get all the merchandise
Load it all up
Drive to the flea market and set up by 8am
Sell all day
Pack everything that was left over at about 3.30.
Drive back to my boss’ house
Get my car and drive home.
Get up on Sunday and do it all over again except at the end of the day, bring everything back to the shop and unload it.

It was tedious and at one point, when it was raining I sat under the tent by myself, with no customers, surrounded shoulder to shoulder with moist merch hating my life.

So the end? Lame, to say the least. My boss was getting these snowboards for wicked cheap. Like deck and bindings for $120 or something. A person came in and I sold them to her for $250. My boss came in, saw “what I had done” and fired me on the spot. I left without saying a word. It was nuts. I had no idea what was going on. I drove home and didn’t say anything. I really did bend over backwards to do everything for this guy and this is what I got. Shortly afterwards he called me and told me that he’d pay me for two weeks until I found another job which was his way of saying sorry. I’ve seen him once since then which was…summer of ’05.