Anyone who thinks Circuit City’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection filing today has the least bit to do with the ongoing financial whatsits in the country doesn’t know the history of the company. True, if we were still in a boom time right now, CC might not have had to take this step…yet. But it would be coming. The company has been sliding for quite some time now, and this has been predicted for over a year by many who spent time there.

That said, don’t look for the company to totally collapse just yet. Welcome to K-Mart!

Envelope-to: peterstork@realcountry1230.com
Delivery-date: Tue, 04 Nov 2008 21:53:10 -0600

CBS ADVISORY — CBS RADIO NEWS

STATIONS— THE FOLLOWING IS AN ADVISORY FROM CBS NEWS:

***THIS CAN NOT BE REPORTED UNTIL 11PM EASTERN****

When the polls close at 11:00pm Eastern in California, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii….

CBS News will estimate that Senator Barack Obama will get the needed 270 electoral votes and will be the next President of the US.

Top 3 minutes of the hourly newscast will be devoted to Senator Obama’s projected win.

There will also be a 1 minute special report at 11:00pm Eastern, Channel 39…

CBS RADIO NEWS

Last night I heard our upstairs neighbor’s’ dryer shut down perfectly in time to my laptop’s screen fading to black in order to save power. After mulling the coincidence for a few seconds, I swiped the touchpad to light up the screen…and the dryer kicked back on right as the laptop went bright.  Hmm.

Earlier today at work I pressed a random button on the console (output selector to remote source) that had absolutely nothing to do with anything that was currently in use. At that exact moment, the audio from the Rams Radio Network suddenly turned very tinny, and remained so until the next break.

My apologies for anyone listening to the Rams pregame today who thought Steve Savard was interviewing Scott Linehan from the bottom of a tin can. My fault.

One of the only things I dislike about working at the radio station is our location out in the country, or, as the program director often puts it, “In the middle of a @#$% cornfield.” Working a 4 pm to 12 midnight shift is nice except when the backdoor swings shut just a few minutes into the new day and you’re by yourself in the middle of Central Illinois. Freaky. There could be wild dogs out there.

Today there were. I arrived just before 4:00 and almost ran over a scruffy-looking, dirty white thing that resembled a giant mop sans-handle more than a puppy. There were two identical mutts, actually, and they hounded me (intended) as I juggled my laptop bag, soda, bottle of water, plastic dinner bag and backdoor key. My attempts to shoo them away verbally were only successful for one of them, but I managed to sneak in without inflicting a canine invasion upon the studios.

Upon arriving inside, I was greeted with three pieces of news:
A.) The dogs had been there all day. Or at least since around 8:00 AM.
2.) One of them is blind.
D.) The other is deaf.

Wow. Hopefully they won’t be there when I go to leave. Not that I fear them - they’re not vicious. Just annoying.

We’re in Litchfield. I had to check my own website to remember if I’d actually talked about this, but then I remembered that I mentioned the radio station and Wal-Mart and several other things so I most certainly let the world know where we now reside. And I did. So yay me.

Perhaps my confusion results from the fact that I haven’t written anything in almost two weeks after I went through the painstaking kind of rough task of redesigning the whole shebang. Chalk the absence up to a combination of being busy and being lazy if that makes any sense. Doesn’t really to me, but there it is.

• I’ve been a member of the Route 66 Association of Illinois for a few years now but never got involved until January when Emily and I attended their quarterly meeting in Pontiac.  Now we’re involved in a big way, as after this last Sunday’s meeting in Hamel we’ve become the Montgomery County representatives for the Association.  It’ll be a good opportunity for us to promote the road and the Association at several festivals in the area, and it got me motivated to work on DigitalRoute66.com again - enough so that it may relaunch as early as Monday.  Shocking, yes. I’ll probably head out tomorrow to take pictures along the Carlinville Alignment as well and give Macoupin County some more love on the website before long.

• Being back on the radio is not as exciting as I thought it would be. It’s far more so.

• I picked the Cardinals to finish third this year behind the Cubs (1) and Brewers (2). I stand by my prediction.

I’m a big fan of navy blue and tan. Anyone who saw this website’s old color scheme can testify to this. As can anyone who’s ever seen me.

Jeans aren’t really my thing, so, except in the summer when I wear khaki shorts, I almost always wear khaki slacks. Comfy. Good looking. Me like. And one of my favorite shirts has always been a navy polo, a perfect combination of my favorite color shirt (navy) and my favorite type of shirt (polo). Riveting? Yes.

In other news, Wal-Mart last year implemented a formal dress code in lieu of their old blue-vest format. Three guesses what the dress code entails. The first two don’t count.

Three out of the last four times I’ve gone to Wal-Mart (an activity I try to avoid, but moving from the Giant Truck Stop to The Oasis several weeks ago complicated things) I’ve found myself happening to wear my favorite combination. On one occasion I was just there to kill a few minutes before an appointment, so upon realization I was able to book it out of there (and boy did I walk fast). But the other times I had to find merchandise and stand in line, all the time hoping - praying - that no member of the Walton masses emerged to try to get me to help them.

I got lucky.

This seems to be a pattern with me, though. Twice in the last five months I’ve gone to Best Buy wearing a long sleeve dress shirt colored primary blue, giving me a variation on the store’s uniform that made me happy I was wearing a jacket that I could cinch tightly. I half expect to walk into a Circuit City two months from now and found I accidentally wore one of my red work shirts from there that I shunned even in my last eighteen months of employment there (black polos are your friend). Though that could be fun.

I’ve always been a magnet for those seeking assistance. Once in a K-Mart back in 2003 I was stopped by two different people in separate areas of the store asking for help even though I was wearing (yup) a navy polo; K-Mart’s color is bright red. Late last year I was stopped in the Wal-Mart electronics department, as well, where a very embarrassed lady apologized to no end for interrupting my shopping experience. Oddly enough, that day I wasn’t rocking the navy and tan, though I doubt very few people if quizzed could actually tell you what the Wal-Mart dress code really is. They just track down anyone young and apathetic, a thought which saddens me after re-reading the earlier sentences of this paragraph.

Emily and I moved from Effingham to Litchfield yesterday, a migration that was, thanks in part to the help of her parents, Uncle Carl and cousin Tim, surprisingly efficient and not nearly as hard as we expected. Plus we have over two-hundred additional square feet of space as well as washer and dryer hook-ups. Yay us.

While the move was engineered to be closer to Emily’s family as well as in a (somewhat) decent place in the twenty-five county area she serves as a regional ecologist, the location was also chosen for its proximity to my new place of work: WSMI Radio.

I spent over eight years in radio (all at WHCO save a few month stint in college reading news at SIUE’s jazz station WSIE) and I loved every minute of it. (Almost every minute.) I made the decision in 2001 to get into teaching because it was something I thought I would also enjoy and I would not only find it easier to get a job but also procure one that paid more than the pittance that small town radio (or, very often, even big market radio) offers.

I was wrong on all counts. I didn’t like teaching; I loved it. But Illinois needs more history teachers like it needs George Ryan and Tony Rezko, and if you can’t coach, didn’t student teach at (or graduate from) the school you’re applying to or don’t have a man on the inside the odds of your resume being one of the few chosen out of the stack of 70 to 100 submitted is pretty slim. Subbing might help get your foot in the door, but it’s no guarantee. And if you do get there’s no guarantee it’ll be into a position that pays decently, at least from the start.

And as much as I loved it, I still loved radio more.

So with Emily getting a really great job and the subsequent ability to live anywhere in south Central Illinois, I applied for a part-time position at WSMI. Just walking in the first day to talk to the program director I got a contact high from the console, and the three hours I spent absorbing everything in the studio gave me a rush I haven’t felt from anything not named Emily in a long time. It helped that while WSMI is a small market, studio-in-a-cornfield stick it’s also a first class operation, and their studios are impressive. They get how to do great radio, serve the community and still make enough money to consistently improve. And I’m jumping up and down inside in anticipation over Tuesday when I get to start.

For the last four years, this evening has been a night without sleep for me, a dreadful prelude to the most hectic, mind-numbing day of the year for anyone who works in retail: the day after Thanksgiving.

You can’t fully appreciate the insanity of American retail until you’ve huddled in the trenches at a Best Buy or Circuit City on the first “official” day of the holiday shopping season. Everyone knows that the crazies start lining up as early as seven the night before, huddling in the cold and fashioning a crude shantytown of tents and bonfires in order to be the first to score a cheap DVD player. These people are often ridiculed, their greed placed on display as a perfect example of American consumerism. I can see the allure, though, for those who enjoy the wait and the temporary friendships that can result, as well as their makeshift modern American version of “roughing it” in the bitter cold. In fact there was always, for me the employee, a certain adrenaline rush as the opening hour approached as the flood of employees and waiting customers coupled with the early hour created an almost anticipation of the madness that only come once a year. It’s a unique experience, and no matter how unorganized and randomly horrid the morning can be, how can you not, to at least a small extent, not want to get a taste of this?

Then the clock turns five, and the people start running at you…and all anticipation starts retreating, replaced by the desire for all of this insanity to be over.

Not everyone is rude. Not everyone disregards the fact that most employees got little-to-no sleep the night before and came into work between three and four in the morning with no break offered until close to noon, and no promise of leaving for home until more than twelve hours have passed since their shift began. But those that do, while perhaps the minority, are the ones you remember for years and years. They take it upon themselves to be whiny, selfish bitches just because they didn’t get their free camera that the ad clearly listed as “limited time, limited supply,” or they feel it necessary to shout at a manager because “there aren’t enough cash registers open” even though every single till in the building is currently being used. As the day unfolds and all of the no-margin doorbusters quickly disappear, there’s nothing wrong with asking if a product is still available. You never know. But complaining, screaming and yelling when you’re told all of them are gone is a different story.

The weariness is the worst, especially because Friday isn’t the end of it. Saturday comes, and the store opens again at 8 AM and you’re barely recovered from the Shift From Hell the day before. Worse still is the absence of any leeway granted to the staff on The Day After, where customers are crabby and bitching right and left and a little bit of slack is given to employees who don’t feel like treating each and every Sue and Sammy Shopper as if their every need is our command. On Saturday, though, things slow down again and the level of respect shown towards customers is expected to rise. Unfortunately, the opposite in the relationship is not necessarily true, and with Sunday still to come the early hours on Saturday can be just as horrid - if not moreso - than the day before, where there is a quickness and an art to the madness. Saturday is just a dull, slow roar.

No longer in retail, I can sit back and relax this weekend, but a certain part of me is tempted to join the fray early in the morning, even if it’s on a more reserved scale at the local Rural King. There’s something quite American about the whole ordeal, as if someone who hasn’t experienced it all - at least on one side of the battle - isn’t a “real” consumer. I’ve done both, though, and if I venture into a store tomorrow it’ll probably be past noon before I do.

It’s not like anything on sale tomorrow is any good anyway.

After writing about my cute “offer” from Circuit City yesterday, I let Consumerist know about it and they ran this today. Nice to see the comments - at least so far - echo the truth.

• Subbing the other day in a 7th grade social science class, we were discussing the US Constitution and the various powers distributed amongst the Federal and State governments and divided between the three branches in Washington. When I would refer to the President by pronoun I would say “he or she,” prompting a question by one student:

Boy: Has there ever been a woman running for President?Girl 1: Duh, there is one right now!

Boy: Oh, yeah, Governor Blagojevich. I heard she was running.

*laughter*

Girl 2: That’s a man! He’s the governor of our state!

Boy: Really? Our governor is a man?

Me: …allegedly.

For those that forgot, or did not know, I left Circuit City at the end of March because the company decided that 3400 of its workers were making too much money and needed to be gotten rid of. Everyone over the salary cap for their position, most of whom got there because they were very good at what they do, were let go, overnight crippling the level of customer service at the nation’s third-largest electronics chain. Since then, the store has struggled, with morale in the toilet (due to not only the dismissals but many other reasons as well) and shrink (theft) up drastically because of the lesser amount of employees on the floor (and many of the ones there do not know how to be aware of such tomfoolery.)

Circuit planned to allow employees to be rehired after several months at a lower, starting rate (about $3 less/hour than I made) but since I planned two quit in two months anyway the whole thing was a windfall for me: get extra weeks to plan for the wedding and spend time with Emily, start substitute teaching early and get extra experience, collect a little unemployment in between, and get a three-week severance package as well as collecting all my unused time off. In all, I made as much as I would have working there for two months without, well, actually having to work there for two months.

Apparently their plan to gather much of this talent back hasn’t been going too well, because today I got this letter in the mail:

Dear Peter,This letter is a special invitation to rejoin the Circuit City team. We’re a new Circuit City with a lot to offer our customers…and you. If you’re interested - and I hope you are - we have a position waiting for you at any Circuit City superstore.

Over the past eight months, we have improved our customer service model, created new positions, and defined career paths for every store role. This means that at each stage of your career, you’ll know the steps that can get you to the next level. The new Circuit City delivers a superior experience for customers and associates, and that’s why we’re reaching out to former associates like you. You have the skills, talent, and experience required for this level of service, and we want you back.

Be a part of the new Circuit City, and join us just in time for the holidays - the most exciting time of the year. Because of your skills and experience, we’re excited to offer you a position comparable to your previous role at the most competitive rate possible. Simply present this letter to any manager at any Circuit City superstore. We will quickly complete the process and establish you as a regular - that is, not seasonal - associate.

Thank you and we hope to see you soon.

Sincerely,
[signature]
Andy Grosse - RVP

Ha! Good luck with that.