Birthdays, Thunderstorms and Surprise Inspections.

Things have been a little crazy since my last post. We celebrated Israels 66th birthday with waffles, ice cream sunday's and a delicious barbecue.

Patriotic ice cream.

A big ol' truck arrived bright and early Wednesday morning and stacked box upon box behind the store. My coworkers worked diligently to unpack the new collection while I enjoyed a day off, lounging about and watching TV from my air conditioned room. My fun came to an end when the manager called to ask me if I would be willing to come in and lend a helping hand. 

After much deliberation I decided that the TV watching could wait and hopped on a bus to save the day. I was greeted with cheers and applause (mainly because everyone was exhausted and delirious) and put in charge of organizing the machsan (which thanks to my coworkers inability to use common sense, was not an easy task.). 

Six hours later I had the place in some semblance of order. It was getting late and an unexpected thunderstorm had arrived to break the brutal heat wave that we had been having so the manager told us to go home and get some sleep. 

It was still drizzling the next morning as I made my way into work (thunderstorms and drizzling might not sound strange to anyone living outside of Israel but I assure you that it is very uncommon weather to have in May for our little Mediterranean country..). I spent the day organizing the entire machsan, making sure that each thing was in its rightful place with its code written beneath it.

After work on Friday I headed into Jerusalem for shabbos to spend time with my friends that I hadn't seen in a couple of months (or in some cases years...). Em regaled us with tales of her and her roommates misadventures and I was reminded that living at home might not be so bad after all. We were all sad when shabbos came to an end and it was time to say good bye. 

This week has been a little intense. Every once in a while Gap sends a fancy shmancy representative to inspect all of the stores in Israel. Our store is the first store in the world that opened solely for babies and kids so it was really important that it looked perfect when they arrived. We spent every second we had organizing, folding, cleaning and even steaming the clothes until the store looked like it was straight out of a catalog. 

I wasn't working on Monday when the representative came to inspect the store but from what I heard it went really well. In fact, they were so impressed at how neat and orderly our store was (especially the machsan) that they requested that my managers send me to the chain in Jerusalem to help them organize their machsanim. I've heard that the word 'chaotic' is putting it mildly when it comes to the machsanim in Jerusalem so I'm a little apprehensive of the whole ordeal but I suppose we'll just have to wait and see...