It's OVER!!

Sigh! I just got home about an hour ago. Our event went REALLY well. I probably shouldn't give any specifics, but WTF. Between midnight and 1am (when the last customer was checked-out), we sold 920 copies of the new book. Pretty impressive, eh?

The only thing that could have been handled better wasn't even our fault. Let me explain...

You should all know that in the past, our store hasn't had a very good relationship with Mall Management. They hired a new GM last year, and he's pretty cool, so things have been pretty much okay. So, when we finally had a date about HP 7, we immediately scheduled a meeting with the Mall people to discuss what we wanted to do, and to see what they could do to help us out. Our plan, like last time, was to line up all of our customers in the mall, and we really needed the cooperation of the Mall folks. Unfortunately, they sort of blew us off. Even though we described the amount of people we were expecting, they really didn't seem to understand what a huge event this was going to be. They finally agreed to give us 2 Mall Security dudes, and let us borrow some stanchions from the movie theatre to help us a little bit with line control (you can see in the pictures further down that they only gave us a few stanchions). Long story short, the Mall wasn't prepared, they freaked the fuck out, and they had to call in their boss, the Mall GM, and two extra HPD Officers to "handle" everything. Keep in mind, this wasn't even CLOSE to the chaos that we had the previous release party. They also shut off the AC, which resulted in a whole bunch of sweaty, cranky people. There are so many details that I'm leaving out, but I'm just so tired! I've included some pics, but you really can't get an idea of what it was like unless you were there. All in all, it was a blast, although I'm tired as hell. Everyone got their book, the store was put back together, and, most importantly, I'M OFF ON SATURDAY!!!

PS...One suck ass thing that happened tonight is that I was officially passed over for a store manager position again. This time for an external hire from Target. I have a lot to think about this weekend. But right now, it's all about how we had a GREAT night! By the way, the photos of the crowds were taken about 10:30 pm. At my best estimate, we probably ended up with at least 1000 people waiting out in the mall at midnight.