I Survived Potter

Well, here it is – early Saturday AM, and I have officially made it through the Harry Potter 6 release. And lemme tell ya – it was a blast. Rhymes with Garnes and Toble was rocking last night – hundreds and hundreds of people were in our store, and for the most part people were very well behaved. I’m honestly surprised – and a little humbled. I figured the place would be a total disaster by the end of the night, but somehow we came out practically unscathed.

I ended up taking photos of the kids with a cheap-o HP cutout. The kids stuck their heads through a hole in the cardboard, and I counted them down, “on three say Gryffindor! One, two, three...” and then I’d snap their Polaroid. We’d then put the picture in a little cardboard frame (the Lovely Mrs. G. was my volunteer/assistant), and send the kids off to find another activity to do. It was hilariously fun, for the most part. I was kind of surprised by the number of kids though who were frightened to have their picture taken. Haven’t these kids ever seen a Polaroid before? Oh, yeah – this is the 21st century – perhaps not.

Anyway, at about 9:30 a couple of the actors from the Sioux City Community Theater came dressed as Hagrid the giant and Professor Sybil Trelawney, the fortune telling teacher from the books. So the kids then posed for the rest of the evening with them instead of Mr. Cheap-o cardboard. They were very good sports about the whole thing; I probably took close to 500 photos all together.

At 11:30 we wrapped up the activities, and I went to take my place behind the resister. Every register in the store was open – the only other time I remember that happening was during our grand opening. At 12:01 AM we had a 10 second countdown, then began selling.

Or at least we tried. The books were supposed to be 40 percent off - $17.99. Yet they were ringing up at their original price - $29.99. Somewhere, an IT guy had goofed.
So for the first few minutes it was organized chaos, as we tried to manually override the registers to give customers the proper discount. Finally, at about 12:15 AM, someone at the corporate office must’ve woken up and pushed the right button, because the books then started ringing up properly.

So everyone got their book, the TV stations got tons of stock footage, and by 12:45 AM the store was pretty much empty. We threw out the last of the stragglers, locked the place up, and then...looked around at the mess.

Yes, the store was trashed. But not nearly as bad as I thought it’d be. And there were enough of us there to clean up the mess that it only took an hour to put everything back together again.

So there it was – I walked out at 2:00 AM, tired and sweaty, with a new $19.25 (with tax!) copy of Harry Potter 6 tucked underneath my arm. I haven’t read one word of it yet; I’ve been kind of busy trying to sleep and come down off my wild night. My legs are cramped from bending down for photos all night, and I’m really in need of a nap (all ready), but overall I’m ecstatic by the way the evening went.

Why can’t we have a new Harry Potter book every month?