Exhibit A!
There Were Magazines In the Ceiling
If you can imagine such a thing.
It was a normal day at Victory, for the most part. Things were going according to plan, all jobs and breaks were running smoothly. All was well. It was a typical Monday night, no-nonsense shoppers and a clean-slate attitude for a new work week. It was somewhere between 5:30 and 6, Darryl was working on cleaning the bathrooms. And then things got weird. I turned the corner, and saw Brian handing Darryl magazines he was pulling from a hole in the ceiling. That's right. You did not misread that. Read it again if you do not believe. There, finished? Let's get back to it, then. Yes. Brian noticed a footprint on the toilet seat and the next thing you know he had removed a panel in the ceiling, revealing this:
Exhibit A!
Over 200 old magazines compiled over the last three years. That's right. Enough to fill a shopping cart. If you were to try to bag them up in paper shopping bags, you'd likely fill around 10 or 12 of them. I'm just guessing there, but I've been bagging stuff for almost four years, so looking at that carriage, I can sort of make an estimate. An untold amount of merchandise just vanishing over the years, unchecked and presumed MIA. Until today.
A closer look.
Yep, we've got Allure, Vanity Fair, Us, People, Glamour, Cosmo, Seventeen, Lucky, Elle, Home Living, Country Living... pretty much every magazine you might see on our shelves was represented up there. We were all quite puzzled by this turn of events, for many reasons. For one, we just want to know what the hell this stuff was doing up there in the first place. If there were so many of them, why didn't the ceiling just cave in? Didn't we notice that there were magazines unaccounted for when we went over them when it was time to send the unsold ones back? And why were all of these mostly female-oriented magazines in the MEN'S ROOM? The more we analyzed, the more confused we got. And the mystery led Brian to go on another ceiling hunt later in the evening, which yielded these findings...
Exhibit B!
Empty boxes, trash, and such, but wait a minute... isn't that our old friend Vivarin sitting down there?
YES!! Yes it is. Now, I'm not gonna point any fingers here, but LONG ago, there was a bit of a Vivarin abuse going on at the store for a while. Most of the perps have since departed the victory, but just seeing the little yellow and blue boxes brought back memories of kids who thought they were really stickin' it to the man on their Vivarin trips. Great bit of nostalgia, there.
The Suspects
So the question is, how'd all this stuff get up there. Well, we've had some interesting theories develop over time. The first theory was provided by Darryl, who said that Smurfs™ were taking the magazines and putting them up there. However, I can't truly say this is true, only that we can't really come up with a reason the Smurfs™ need them. That's why Stacy's theory was much more plausible: an old homeless guy must live in our ceiling, and he steals the magazines to start fires to warm himself at night when he gets cold. BINGO. She has gone on to practically map out where his living room is up there and everything. Jeremy contributed to the idea, as well, saying that there's a stairway somewhere in the ceiling over the bakery. There's also a gaping hole in the carriage room:
Portal of entry/exit?
So could it be true? Is there a creepy homeless dude in our ceiling? Is he watching us up there? Will we ever know for sure? Well, people, I have decided that it is now my mission to get an interview with the homeless man. Why? Because it's your right to know and my duty to tell you, that's why.
To be continued...?