Foliage Season

The economy in Vermont is very much tourism based. Most towns and their small (and not so small businesses) make their bread and butter during peak tourism periods…. foliage being very much one of those periods. There’s usually one weekend, in particular, when the colors of the trees have peaked and the roads are saturated with out of state plates belonging to drivers who really shouldn’t be sightseeing and operating a vehicle at the same time. No one really complains since their wallets feed the economy. This weekend is one of those weekends.

Don’t ask me why the town of Johnson scheduled a planned power outage for today, Saturday, between the hours of crack-of-dawn and noon-time. My absolute bread and butter block of time…it being a coffee shop and all and people, for the most part, really liking their coffee in the morning. When I called the guy in the municipal office to bitch, the poor guy sounded exhausted from dealing with every other business owner in town who had also taken their turn calling him to bitch. I also wanted to find out if they had some kind of stash of funds to compensate business owners for situations like this…. situations when the town makes a dumb ass move and decides to put people out of business during absolute peak business periods. I figured the chances are slim but maybe it’d at least drive the point home. And no, they have no such stash.

I did get to sleep in a few extra hours… which was nice. I got to do some extra prep in the morning and decorate the front of the shop with my new mums and pumpkins and corn stalks.

I was sitting outside, eating a melon and hanging with the boys who do web design upstairs when the digital clock down the street started blinking again. We rushed in, brewed up the coffee and filled the register with the till just in time to get slammed with more cyclists coming through town.

I don’t know what it is about these people. I don’t know if they go to some kind of seminar before heading out onto the Vermont country roads or what, but they seem to have mastered the art of rude. Every week we get a delivery of a great Burlington paper called SevenDays and they get stacked right inside the door - free for the taking. It was pouring down rain by the time those bikers came flooding in, so they decided to take every single newspaper on the rack and use them to sit on. I guess they didn't want to get my chairs wet? They left them there, soaking on the seats, when they left....little blocks of typewritten words having imprinted into the wood from the wet paper. They also draped their filthy, muddy clothes all over my furniture to dry and proceeded to wring out their soaking wet socks and biking gloves right onto my nice wooden floors. Assholes.

What did I say about not complaining because their wallets feed the economy. Sssshhhhhh…….

I x’d out the drawer after they all left and the good news is that their arrival provided me with what I would have otherwise made that morning if we hadn’t had a planned power outage. That’s good. Any way to take their business without their company? Maybe exile them out onto the porch the next time they come? I can lay down some blankets on the lawn out back………… Give them each an umbrella?