Perhaps you would like to place an offer on a 1957 Gibson J-200.

I know I would, but at least now I know what it's like to tune and play one.

Another good thing about working at the shop.

That is so pretty. Not much wear?

Very little for a 56-year-old instrument! I tuned it up and played it and IT WAS LIKE BUTTA I TELL YOU

Most beautiful tone of any acoustic I've played... which is about 20 of em, but anyway!

Gorgeous, a real beauty.

Calm down, Brando.

Today was hate whitey day at the shop.

There is a weird rhythm of the shop. I've mentioned this before. Some of it is the monthly checks that are received, which create a flood of people buying money orders and reimbursing their pawn tickets.

Those are the good days. But somehow, today's rhythms led to hate whitey day, where every deal I suggested was met with being accused of ripping people off. I even got a reaction to the $2 key duplication price. $2 a key! That's pretty much the going rate, and if you're pissed off at $2 a key, there's something more than the price of a key that's pissing you off.

Well it could have been predicted that at 2pm in the afternoon, somebody was pissed off about the price of $2 per key duplication.

Was it because today was Lincoln's birthday, not recognized as a Federal holiday until next Monday?

Or is it just a normal cycle of desperation, one that happens until the 15th of the month?

Look to the moon

Lincoln's birthday? I don't think so. I doubt any customers at the pawn shop know Lincoln's birthday. They probably don't even know President's Day, since they don't have jobs and won't get the day off.

I bet it's the weather. Yesterday was the first kinda nice day after several days of crappy weather. So people were out and about and carrying that cooped-up bad feeling with them.

On Friday night a guy got shot and killed a half block from where I park. I left at 5:40 pm, the guy got shot at 7:40 pm.

Yesterday as we left there was massive police activity across the street from the store. Like cops running in, cops running out, 5 cars, couldn't find any information on it but it looked like it was in or next to the Chinese place where we get lunch.

Good times!

This would concern me depending on the nature of the shooting. Was it a robbery gone bad, or was it a dispute between two people who knew each other? I think most shootings in a city are between people who know each other and there's a reason one wants the other dead. Not a cause for immediate personal worry.

If it was a robbery gone bad, then I would be very concerned, because that could be you.

"No one has been arrested in Samuel-Bey’s killing, and police have not released a motive."

http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/d...ladelphia.html

Bingo! New moon was on the 10th

I had two people pick up glasses late Monday. Both whined about their new vision

it MIGHT be the moon (I always swore it was when in nursing practice) but it's more likely that the windfall of the 1st of the month is down to beans for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

when you only get paid once a month it's very hard not to run out and buy all the things you need/want right away and save a bit for the last two weeks.

I just paid a guy 53.50 to tell me the flap on my furnace filter was what was making the buzzing noise in my furnace. A less than one second job. I feel like a fool. but I know NOTHING about home ownership----and housecalls from tradespeople ususally start at 100.00 just for showing up. I have a non-working disposal, non-working dishwasher, and two leaking faucets. No landlord. He's 85 and a psychokiller [ psycho killer qu'est-ce que c'est ]

UT- I sincerely hope you don't get shot or otherwise maimed while at job, walking to or from said job and I hope you don't lose your sense of humor over it. Working with pawn people is probably a lot like working with the mentally ill----hell, they probably ARE mentally ill---a good portion, anyway.

I am trying. I am really, really trying not to be a psychopath-----(thanks, Dana, for the reading suggestion)----but it's hard once you've been around the wrong side of the tracks one too many times. It begins to wear off on you, like a stink you just can't get rid of and before you know it...well, for me, I was becoming LIKE THEM. Also, the culture of health care in this nation is such that you don't want to know. Lunch? uh.....take a bite of sandwich in between patients. Sometimes I was still swallowing my turkey bite when I entered a pts. room.

I kinda wish the END was near. I was very happy floating about space being nothing and unconscious. Like I've said before---mafioso in another life. I pay. I pay. As do we all.

I was being fast and loose with the metaphors up there in that post.


all apologies. "once you've been around the wrong side of the tracks one too many times..." sounds like a hobo ho.
what the hell kind of saying is that?

"Now I got the earrings, now you can get you some pussy."
-- woman leaving the shop with her man yesterday

Happy Valentine's Day!! People are coming in for VD jewelry today.

"What's the cheapest engagement ring you got?"
-- man on Valentine's Day last year, before even approaching the ring section

Ah, love is in the air.

Hey, Undertoad! Can we go pawn shopping?

What, what, what, what...

Bada, badada, badada, bada...

I'm gonna pop some tags
Only got twenty dollars in my pocket
I - I - I'm hunting, looking for a come-up
This is fucking awesome


Nah, Walk up to the club like, "What up, I got a big cock!"
I'm so pumped about my junk from the pawn shop
Ice on the fringe, it's so damn frosty
That people like, "Damn! That's a cold ass honkey."
Rollin' in, hella deep, headin' to the mezzanine,
Dressed in all pink, 'cept my gator shoes, those are green
Draped in a leopard mink, girls standin' next to me
Probably shoulda washed this, smells like R. Kelly's sheets

...

(vid nsfw)

Wha...oh, like for a Prince Albert?

Today a woman came in all completely high and was just freakishly happy. She wanted to look at guitars, but what she really wanted was to freak out and have a fun interaction with somebody. I enjoyed helping her get her freak on by playing her a few chords on an acoustic while she made up some lyrics on the spot. She told me, secretly, that she likes country music. "Don't tell nobody around this neighborhood!!" Then she wandered around the store, and looked at shiny things with "Ooh shiny" sort of reactions, and left after doing no harm.

We guessed crack, but there's no way of knowing for sure.

Xtacy?

is that the same as or different than not stacey?

It would be, but not really in favor in this neighborhood.

I always have more difficulty selling in the week leading up to the new moon. The week before the full moon, the fish tend to jump into the boat.

A white guy and a black guy walk into the pawn shop. This is not the beginning of a joke.

They walk in with a 32" Emerson TV. White guy asks how much we would pay for such a thing.

Firstly, Emerson is amongst the brands that is well understood outside the ghetto to be a piece of shit. Although if you, the reader, own any Emerson-branded goods, I mean no disrespect to you. You made the calculation you needed to make when you bought it. I myself have been there.

We have a general protocol for dealing with people who want to sell things. We try to ask the person how much they're looking for, early in our interaction. If they have a DVD player and they want $100 for it, we will turn them away before evaluating their stuff. They may become irate when told it's worth $10 to us.

In this case the guy suggested that it should be worth $200. And it should be, because any used or thrift goods shop selling such a TV would price it at around $200.

So when we told him we were nowhere near that, and were closer to $50 on such a thing, he immediately asked how much we'd sell it for.

Now, typically this question is confrontational and we deflect it. But this guy wasn't confrontational, he was more curious. OK, we'd hold on to it for 90 days by law and then try to get $200 and probably end up making a deal for $180.

Cool, white guy says, and they leave with the TV.

Alan, the veteran, immediately understood what had just happened. They never intended to sell the TV to us. White guy was trying to sell the TV to black guy, but they had to figure out what the right price was. Once they got some information, they moved back out to the street to make their street deal.

Alan is happy with me these days...

One of the first things I evaluated for purchase was an expensive acoustic guitar. A really important model, one that's been made for decades.

We intended to sell it on eBay for $3000 because that was about what the average that model was generally getting. But when I looked closer at it, I realized it was MUCH older than we'd figured. I used a serial number tracker to figure out that it was a 1957 model. We had it up for sale for the last two weeks, with an accurate description and 40 pictures, and Alan finally accepted an offer of $6000 for it.

That totally makes up for that $200 Vita I let get stolen at Christmas.

That was the a 1957 Gibson J-200 you posted earlier, yah?

I was going to ask how much it finally went for - and how much you guys paid to start with.

Can you tell us?

Hey, how much can I get a current model xbox fo?

Do you have any Wii (Nintendo, not The Big War) or Wii parts?

I don't think it's polite to ask a guy about the size of his parts.

Short arm inspection?

We paid $500 for the J-200. So that was a good deal. In the end I tuned it up and played it a little and it was awesome, amazing sound, worth every penny. Elvis played a J-200.

We sell the used black 4GB xBox for $150 with one controller and all needed cables. I think we have one in right now. They are always coming in and out -- we buy 1-2 every week and sell 1-2 every week.

We sell complete Wiis (I forget the price -- $70? This is my day off) but we don't sell any individual parts for any systems.

People ask for individual parts all the time, and specifically they ask for every charger for everything ever made. We don't carry these things, only because it would be exhausting to manage.

There's a thrift store near here that has a huge bin of used wall worts. It's like $2 per charger, but if you look through it, there is nothing in there you would ever want.

How much are the Wii bits? Do they have a separate Wii bin, like mounted to the wall off to the side?

The ghetto is a very different place from the place than where you and I inhabit. The problem with "regular people" going to the ghetto is that we don't know the rules. Even after years and years of working there, Alan doesn't know all the rules. He can sense danger in the shop, but not on the street.

And so the one-block walk from the shop to the parking lot is always unpredictable, occasionally scary, and we must pretty much ignore the surroundings as much as possible. It is like watching a movie. The stuff happening before your eyes is not happening to you. You go through it and drive out the other side.

And so it was when, yesterday night, in the middle of the walk, there appeared an unaccompanied 4-year-old boy in the middle of the sidewalk. A boy starting to show alarm.

Three of us stood and asked a few basic questions of the lad, until a black woman came and asked whether that was his mom, a half-block away. She sort of took over, but not really, and ushered the boy towards the lady.

The boy looked well-kept, and was properly dressed and prepared for the nighttime cold air. His hoodie was pulled tight and tied. Did he come from the day care right nearby? Did his mother pick up 5 children, and forget one in all the confusion?

At this point, if it is not the ghetto, you might take an interest and make sure things end OK. In this case we overheard that the woman at the end of the block was NOT the child's mother and thus there continued a dilemma. So, things were NOT OK.

But we do not know the ghetto rules, and thus we don't know the different ways we could be put in danger ourselves. The boy looks like someone in trouble, but so do we. We don't know the different ways people will victimize you or take advantage of you. In any other place in the city, we stay with the boy and call 911. In the ghetto, the boy seemed to be in somebody else's hands, and so we all drove briskly away with no known resolution to the situation. Even after one of us overheard that the woman was not the boy's mom.

Fucked up - oh you bet.

On the very other side of this situation, a few weeks ago a white suburban lady came to the shop, and while she figured out whether she was getting a parking ticket, she boldly left her infant on the store counter for five minutes. We looked at the baby and the whole situation in amazement, because in the ghetto you never ever ever leave anything unattended that you don't want to be completely ripped off and/or destroyed. We briefly discussed putting the baby behind the counter until mom came back, but instead just watched it. In amazement.

Just wow.

This was generally me experience of living in the UK, you couldn't leave anything out, even behind the house that wasn't locked up, somebody would nick it. Even if it was locked up they would probably bust it .

We lived in some low rent/student areas, but even in later years this was true in the nice area my folks lived.

Unlikely to get shot, but the constant wariness of petty crime was a grind.

This was true in various areas of Ontario I lived in. People built high fences with locks and alarm systems and if you didn't, too bad for you. You could expect to be ripped off. Thugs drew knives on kids in the local high schools with impunity. Police didn't respond to calls; they were stretched too thin. I never felt unsafe while living in the US, but I felt unsafe every day during our last stint in Canada.

Taint like that in the part of town where I live.

The Evil Ex's family lived in a part of Nottingham that was like that. Then again his older brothers had been to prison (armed robbery and GBH) and his younger brother was known to the police for vandalism and anti-social behaviour so they fit right in.

Never lived anywhere like that though.
I wouldn't leave anything I valued outside overnight in the rougher parts of town, but I'd consider that taking care rather than fear of crime. Talking an unlocked bike etc, not Christmas lights or a BBQ out back. There's occasional vandalism (telephone boxes, bus shelters, new trees) but it's not yet endemic. And not common even where I live - which isn't considered high class.

In some ways I think the farmers get it worst because they are easy targets with expensive machinery sitting in isolated locations. Farmers might be armed, but it doesn't seem to help much. You simply cannot stay up all night, every night when you're working the land. And those are organised gangs as opposed to petty criminals.

The part of Salford J and I lived in for a while in the early 90s was a bit that way.

Think: Chatsworth Estate, a la Shameless. But less lovable.

We lived in (rented) reclaimed and redeveloped council flats. They'd been bought up, painted up, gated and given security guards etc, and sold to people under the pretence that they somehow classed as the new Salford Quays development. They weren't. They were the outer edge of Salford's notorious Ordsall estate - cheek by jowl with the people that the fence and guard were intended to stop :p

One of the memories of living there that always sticks in my mind, was walking at night down to the little precinct to use the cashpoint machine. And yes...it was to buy drugs :P

Along the way I walked past a patch of wasteground on which small children were whooping and squealing and having a jolly old play time on and around the still smoking wreck of a burned out car. The only adults in sight who appeared to be taking on some kind of supervisory role with them were the four or five assorted unleashed dogs of Scary Fuck breeds.

A few nights later, the Ordsall riots kicked off and they burned down the big Carpet Warehouse and a few other places. We watched the smoke rising in the sky from our window.

Ha! Found a news clipping from a couple of years after that about 'No-Go Britain':

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk...y-1370749.html

That's one of the reasons I left the city. I like that peple can leave their stuff out around here.

I think I already posted about one time my BIL came to visit and saw a huge pile of carpenters tools on the grass near the curb in front of my neighbor's house. He asked me what was up with the tools. I told him someone borrowed my neighbors truck and took the tools out.

At lunch, they were still there and my BIL was surprised. At dusk they were still there and he couldn't have been more amazed.

The only thing that was stolen from my yard in 12 years was a raccoon trap. WTF?

Organized gangs going after farm equipment? Yikes. I read about a farmer who tried to defend himself against a home intrusion and ended up being charged rather than the intruders. That's what happens in Canada as well.

Although the firearm death rates may be lower in Canada, the predicament of not being permitted to defend yourself coupled with the high incidence of violentl crime (and no legal recourse) was what made me feel unsafe in Ontario. No one was looking out for the law-abiding folks; if you became a victim people figured you hadn't been careful enough, or shrugged and said, 'What can you do?'

My father, who is 79, has had his home robbed twice in the past few years (nice suburban area of the nation's capital). The second time he returned home to find the criminals loading a small truck with his belongings. He pulled across the driveway to prevent them leaving and they drove across the lawn, digging up his garden with their tires. When the police came by a few days later to take a report, he told them he'd thought about pulling into the driveway and rear-ending their truck to disable it. The police told him in that case they would've charged him, and not even to think about it if he didn't want to be arrested. Not because it would be unsafe to confront criminals! But because they would consider him a criminal. You're expected to lie down for this kind of thing and do the Canadian shrug.

For Dana - ah, memories....


http://youtu.be/8eswiifPgi0

Oh, bloody hell. Ha! Indeed.

Surrounding Salford Crescent train station (a bizarre little no place station that feels like it is entirely separate from the world around it) are a slew of 1960s tower blocks. They'd been renovated some by the time we were living near, but a few years after they were built to house the residents of streets cleared in the slum clearance project, the conditions were so bad that the residents co-operated in sending a message. Spelt out with a letter per window, running across the blocks was the message: Get Us Out Of This Hell!

The flats we lived in were lovely. nice little places. We had the ground floor. They weren't high rise, but maisonette type flats, with four floors.

But by christ some of the housing we were surrounded by was truly appalling.

In February so far, 3 of the 7 homicides in Philadelphia happened within 10 blocks of the shop.

Azaban's litter was due soon, and he thought it make a good nursery addition to the den.

Do you wear soft body armor to work and if not, can I take a life insurance policy out on you?

This, combined with the light threats issued regularly by thugs, means I am not long for the shop. I just can't take it. I don't know if I'll be out in 2 months, 4 months, 6 months, but I have to find something else to do.

Wise I think, Tony.

maybe you can open your own pawn shop and cater to the college kids near your home?

Or better yet, a prawn shop, so the thread title will finally mean what I read it as, every time I see it.

Hahahahah.

Imaginary Like to that post!

Do a barrel roll...

Selling and supporting computer systems to the college kids?

As you are probably aware, the black community has gone mother fuckin' insane with the naming of their children. Today a new winner: "Orphialasertrell".

Or you'll asertrell what?

That's my mom's name!



;)

Phoenetically, please?