Black Friday Shopping – the Best Training Grounds

Published in The Fauquier Times-Democrat, Weekend Edition, on Fri. 3/30/2012

I’ve never been to a Black Friday Sale the day after Thanksgiving, but I think I know how those shoppers feel.  In lieu of conducting interviews and doing background reading, I’m going to base my understanding of said shoppers’ psychology on myths, legends, and sensationalized media reports.  For a column like this, that’s practically the same as conducting interviews and doing research.

We’ve all read about shoppers stampeding for discount electronics and people emerging from the fray with the last $ 15 DVD player clutched as tightly as if it were the Golden Goose herself.  The victorious shopper might end up wearing the imprint of the less successful bargain shopper’s shoe stamped on their backside, but who cares?  Shopper Superior has got that DVD player at what amounts to a steal, so if a little violence was involved, that’s to be expected.

Of course, you’ve read those stories about those kinds of shoppers.  Admit it.  Reading about someone’s egregious or bizarre behavior usually takes precedence over reading about the advances in medical research, developments in the Middle East Peace Process, or the latest blip in the economy, like watching for vital signs in a patient who has been comatose for years.

Let’s examine the characteristics of these shoppers: They line up at ungodly hours; they tend to pounce on any bargain that isn’t moving; they tend to pounce on any bargain that might be moving, too.  Sometimes, unfortunately, getting to the bargain requires that they step over, or possibly even on, other shoppers who might be slower and less efficient.  They are a little desperate.

As a bona fide substitute teacher for Fauquier County, you can have the experience of being a Black Friday shopper every time you try to land a position.  The system works like this: all the substitutes have access to a website where “jobs” are posted whenever a teacher posts his or her expected absence.  Since this is web-based, it can happen at any time.  Access to this website is restricted to those who have submitted an application, completed the training, had their backgrounds checked and their fingerprints cleared, and submitted transcripts and reference letters.

At last count, there were 770 substitutes for the 898 teachers employed by the school system.  This means that you, along with 769 other people, might be viewing this webpage all at once, waiting for that sole vacancy to be posted.  If you click on the job first, and immediately pounce on the button that says “Accept,” you get to be that teacher’s substitute.  After you accept, you can bother with the minor details of which school, what day, and what time to report.  Also, very helpfully, the teacher’s name, the subjects taught, and any other notes are posted.  According to more heavy-duty research conducted for this column, the average time that elapses between a teacher posting a vacancy and it being nabbed by a substitute is eight minutes.  Eight minutes. 

But that was back in the days of the Pony Express, I believe.  That data was announced in the fall, and it had to have come from last year.  I would love to get updated data, because I have watched that Aesop website off and on, and there has only been one job that sat there longer than three minutes.

Once, when I was young and innocent to the Aesop system, I was looking at the details of a job.  I turned momentarily to ask my husband whether he thought this sounded like a good idea.  By the time I turned my head to click “Accept” the job was gone!

If you are the careful and considerate sort of person who is going to contemplate whether or not you truly feel qualified to serve as a substitute for a language class in which you have neither expertise nor experience, you can forget it.  Someone else will have clobbered the job first.

Most of the times, the “Search for Jobs” page of the website is blank except for a message in red:  All qualifying jobs are currently filled. However, please review this web site periodically for new job listings.

The wording here should be revamped to: “Sorry, Slowpoke, someone else beat you to it again.  Why don’t you keep hitting refresh, and work on improving your hand-eye coordination in the meantime?”

So watching this page is imperative.  It is also vital that you have nothing else to do , like actual work, that could interfere with your latest work of watching this page like a hawk, or like a vulture.  When a job is posted, the whitespace will be filled with glorious data announcing details of the vacancy.  It’s like seeing a shooting star!

At this point, you have five seconds to jump on it.  Let’s hope your fingers and your internet connection are fast.  And woe to you if you have never been a Black Friday shopper.

School supply shopping: DONE!

Published in The Fauquier Times-Democrat Weekend on Aug. 5, 2011

I don’t want to shock you, but we are finished with the infamous, annual August ritual: school supply shopping. I know, I know. Had I waited until this weekend, it would all have been tax-free, but there is downsizing and desperation in the bureaucratic atmosphere. Should I deprive our government of a few tax dollars? I’m not ruffled by giving them ten dollars. At least I’m done shopping.


If I had needed to pinch pennies, I would have waited. But I can justify my extravagance. I am neither flying around the world nor running off on cruises nor buying expensive designer clothing. On the other hand, neither am I standing with a tin cup in hand along with the woeful dangling placard on my chest, so I feel it’s okay to have “indulged” in shopping earlier than usual. Waiting, for a procrastinator like me, can have its pitfalls.

I might have put off the trip indefinitely. Then, I would be dashing through the aisles at the same time as every other school year: The night before school starts. Going shopping the night before school is pretty much a bad idea. You are left to wander the aisles that look like they’ve been mobbed. They are strewn with spilled book covers. College-ruled papers are found in inappropriate relationships with the much younger wide-ruled set, tossed about in mislabeled boxes. This forces you to read each label as opposed to grabbing reams or composition books and tossing them, carefree, into the cart.

Shopping late leaves you to discover that those big, huge, bins of supplies aren’t actually filled from the ground up. They have a false cardboard bottom that is about thigh-high. You are going to be seeing way too many of these bare white cardboard bottoms than should legally be allowed. Last-second shopping leaves you squinting in the artificial night-shopper’s brightness well past the children’s bedtime. Invariably, there is some other procrastinator in the store who is carting around an unhappy and overtired toddler who cannot stop howling. This intensifies your painful experience. You want to howl too.

So this year, I have decided to forgo the pain that has tainted my perspective on shopping. I loathe shopping. I dread shopping. But shopping is a necessary evil, especially when you do not possess the skills and patience of a prairie settler.

I took the children shopping early because I had an idea of such sheer brilliance that I am now filled with fear and self-doubt. I turned over the lists as well as the chore of buying school supplies to each respective child. (Even the not-so-respective ones, for that matter.) I gave each child a cash allotment of thirty dollars. They were free to spend all of it or none of it, but their backpacks needed to be loaded with all the necessities. The thrifty could keep the surplus funds. The spendthrifts who require decorator binders would need to dig into their own savings.

The moment I called out this plan, the most miserly children (or the most ingenious, depending on your perspective), darted off. They checked the over-the-door, clear-pocket, shoe organizers where I had stuffed all those clearance, ten-cent book covers, as well as last year’s nickel-a-box crayons. They dashed down to the basement where I keep our overstock of school supplies for the school year. Then, they tackled the bins stacked with lined and graph paper as well as binders and portfolios. These rascals figured the quicker they pilfered our home for freebies, the smaller their cash outlay would be later on.


Watching my most eager children grab the last of the glue sticks, ferret out red pens, and strike gold with a pristine pencil pouch, I felt a mixture of shame (at hording supplies) and pride (at devising a plan that encourages them, instead of me, to do the hunting.)

Last year, I was reading a book on organizing and de-junking the home. Unfortunately, midway through the book, I misplaced it. I’m not trying to be funny; that’s the sad truth. In it, the author (whom I cannot acknowledge, since she has chosen to go AWOL amongst our other books) said we shouldn’t succumb to the myth of saving money by buying things on sale and then trying to make our homes into a place to store all these great finds. She said that’s why they have places called “stores.” Instead, we choose to live in junk-piles where we lack shelving and the full-time employees to keep them organized.


My children’s school shopping is DONE. We even finished shopping for the child we “adopted” through our church’s outreach. I’m glad my children have divested me of my hoard. Now all I need to do is find that book.