A Day At Mamilla

From the way that my manager had been talking about it, I had expected the machsan at mamilla to look like the remnants of a particularly devastating natural disaster. Instead of the epic levels of chaos that I had expected, I was greeted by (slightly overstuffed) shelves of meticulously folded clothing.

Dazed and confused I was introduced to my protege who immediately informed me that "she loved folding things". I tried to smile reassuringly and asked the manager for some paper, scissors, markers and a table to sort things out on. The manager complied with my requests and I began the task of trying to explain how to go about properly organizing the machsan.

After giving her a basic rundown of how it works I headed over to the shelves to see what exactly I was up against. Other than the meticulous folding, there didn't appear to be form of order to the shelves. It was at this point that I realized that organizing the place was going to take a miracle. Unfortunately, I was fresh out of those...

My protege watched skeptically as I began the arduous task of removing all of the clothes from the shelves and organizing them by code on the table before returning them to their rightful places. I then wrote the codes down on little papers that I had cut out and stuck them under the corresponding stacks of clothes. Feeling rather good about the whole ordeal, I turned to my protege to see what she thought. She just stared at me with a vacant expression, things were obviously going well.

I sighed and did my best to reiterate the process. She nodded and then got up to refold the clothes that I had "ruined" when I moved them. I was glad to see some enthusiasm on her part but disconcerted by her lack of comprehensive skills.

I explained that removing, organizing, coding and then refolding all of the clothes would not only take an absurd amount of time but was completely unnecessary. I suggested that we focus on getting things in order today and then fold it all at some other point and time (preferably when I wasn't there). This seemed to mollify her fears and she hesitantly agreed to the deal.

I gave her a relatively simple area to work on and then returned my attention to a particularly overstuffed shelf of t-shirts. After some trial and error, she appeared to have gotten the hang of things and we worked steadily for the next few hours.

We stopped for a quick lunch and then returned to the bowels of the store to continue our mission. About an hour later my protege was in quite a state, throwing bits of paper in the air as a form of amusement. The manager came to check on us and sent my weary protege home. I finished up the rest of shelves in the section that I was working on and then headed home.

I'm not sure how well my protege understood the lessons that I was trying to convey but I wish her all the best luck in her mission to organize the rest of the machsan.

As for me, I've got my own machsan to reorganize thanks to a surprise delivery that arrived early yesterday morning after a misunderstanding at the main offices.