Killer Balloons

Ari says:

Ok, no I didn't hurt myself in the past couple hours, but I actually had something rather amusing happen and thought I'd share it with you and attempt to dig myself out of the "boring" hole I started digging earlier. Here goes: from time to time, my job requires me to send decorations to my stores for sales events. Sometimes these are posters, table cloths, pennants, basically anything to help garner attention and improve shopping morale. One of the easiest things to send (because everyone loves them) is balloons. I usually buy them by the thousands, literally. I have enlisted the help of these buoyant baubles time and again and have found that not only are they easy to have made and to send to the stores, but they are also an easy item for the stores to implement. Just trust me when I say that we've had our issues with other items. Please don't hear me say that my managers are incompetent or unintelligent, but there are times when I wonder if they just "didn't bring their A-game" that day (we actually have a "Wall of Shame" at work with "those" kinds of emails). We recently sent the aforementioned accoutrément to the stores for an upcoming event. Considering I have never had any questions about the balloons (they're fairly self-explanatory), I was rather surprised when I got an email from a manager saying that after filling her balloons with helium, they were just lying about listlessly. "Ok, bad batch" I thought and sent her more. Problem solved. The second email, though, took the proverbial cake. A manager actually emailed to ask if our balloons were latex-free. Apparently he had a customer in the store who was allergic to latex and was "very concerned" about their presence in her shopping abode. It took everything in me not to respond that if she was so concerned she probably shouldn't eat them. I mean really. If you know you have an allergy, don't touch, bite, lick or carouse with something that may endanger you. I know balloons are prone to jumping out at unsuspecting bystanders, but I think (just maybe) that if you keep from touching or inhaling one, you should be ok. Honestly.