Sam and Kevin

When I lived in Boston once upon a time, I had two guys who worked for me in the stockroom. I'm going to call them Sam and Kevin, just because they're quite guilty and I probably should protect them from undue ridicule.

Sam was my big problem at work. He has a learning disability and he tends to take a long time to process information. In some cases he doesn't process it at all, in others you wonder exactly was processed, because it surely wasn't the information that was given him. Great guy though, heart of gold. He'd worked at that store for about 5 years at that point, first helping the designers move merchandise around, then later moving to the stockroom. He usually had a pretty one-track mind, but he was a real workhorse because of it, would just keep working and working and working (even if sometimes he was doing it completely wrong).

Kevin was a little Southie punk, except he didn't actually hail from south Boston, he was from Cambridge, living in the shadow of Harvard University. He could have easily been a stand-in for any of the friends of Matt Damon's character in Good Will Hunting, except he's kind of short so he would've looked pretty funny next to the others. He had a real thick Boston accent and always called me Mahk. He told me once he wondered why autistic children got a lot of attention just because they can draw nice. Maybe you're getting the picture of this guy just from that last statement.

Now these were my full time stock guys at this store. It was a little store, and while we could have definitely used a little more help in the stockroom, the three of us did a decent job of keeping things up, along with a couple of part-time night workers.

The whole purpose of this introduction is that I have some pretty good stories to tell about my time there, but I realize it's midnight and I have to get up early in the morning, so I'll stop there and resume tomorrow.