Bam goes the Mylar!

POP!  

You could hear the sound from the exploding balloons from all parts of the University Bookstore I used to work at...We had a very popular balloon department and as a cashier, it was also my job to help out there.  I seemed to have a talent for popping the balloons I meant to fill with Helium and put into pretty bouquets...I used to love the colors in the balloons, how the light went through them...the bright, vivid designs on the foil Mylar balloons...Trouble is, if you put too much air in them, or let them touch the ceiling (metal shards in the tiles), KABOOM, no more pretty rubber balloon!  

After working at the store for a few years, my boss let me help her pick out balloons she would order to sell in the store...I loved looking through the Mylar picture-balloon catalogs.  There were balloons with cute slogans on them: Happy Birthday, Good Luck, Welcome Back... 

Others had cute cartoon characters on them, or animals, or smiley faces...

We also had balloons for anniversaries and baptisms...

Most of the time, she'd order anything I picked, but occasionally she'd veto my picks... 

For some reason, my boss didn't like the Birthday Balloon featuring a Grim Reaper with the caption: "Don't worry...I'm just here for the Cake..." 

We were pretty fast at blowing those things up, but even when we were really hopping, we could only blow up 20 balloons per hour...Most of the time people didn't care, but sometimes you'd get a customer who'd call up and say, "Can I have 100 balloons in an hour please???"  

One time I told a customer that was impossible and about how many we could do per hour and she said crisply, "Is that your best?"

I didn't say so, but I thought, "No, Lady...we're just slowing down our pace because you have an annoying voice..."  Just for the record, I did NOT say that out loud...

I wasn't always good at blowing those things up...It took practice...there's a science to it...too little air, and the balloons look limp or sick...too much and the thing's libel to burst in someone's face (not good)...It took me two years to perfect the size...I always liked to make the balloons really big so they looked like giant light bulbs...oddly enough, that didn't sit well with my boss...She didn't like it if I let helium out of them either...waste of gas apparently...I suggested letting me use the extra gas to make my voice go high and squeaky, but she reminded me that I could suffocate that way...bummer...there's always a catch...

We also had this clear, goopy stuff we'd put into the balloons before we blew them up...supposedly it made the things last longer...I DON'T know if it was true or not, but it WAS fun to play with -- as long as I didn't get it on my clothes...If you accidentally put too much in the balloon, when you blew it up, it would be heavy, and hover in mid-air instead of floating happily like it was supposed to...this was ALSO a mistake I made a lot at first...

Then there's the ribbons...They look SOOO innocent...those things look easy to curl and tie onto the balloons, but the truth is that Balloon Ribbons are evil entities bent on making store clerks insane...

You have to slip knot them just right or the balloons escape...then curling them is an absolute nightmare...The trick is to run the sharp side of a pair of scissors across the flat side of the ribbon, making them curl (I cut myself a lot...do NOT try that at home...).  I was never very good at that...when I first started out I had the nasty tendency of shaving off half the ribbon, so it hung limply like a wet tea towel...not exactly festive...Finally my boss showed me the trick of using a letter opener instead of scissors...this kept me out of the insane asylum...

Then comes my nemesis...

Arranging balloons in a bouquet...

This is another activity that LOOKS easy...

It isn't...

You have to know exactly where to put each balloon or they all end up on the same level...or spaced unevenly...

It took me forever to figure out how to do this...

At one point, I was CONVINCED that the balloons would move on their own...I'd have them just so and they'd be unevenly spaced again...

My boss seemed to be a natural at this...

She was one of those elegant, capable ladies who did everything easily...I think the balloons secretly feared her...

The only thing that didn't make me crazy were the clips that we used to hold the balloons closed...we just twisted the bottom of the balloon three or four times and snapped the plastic clip into place...VOILA....that helium wasn't going anywhere...
When I was a kid and would blow up balloons for birthday parties or something, I'd get stuck tying the ends of the balloons into knots...I won't waste TOO much time there...except to say that I spent most of my time chasing the balloons around the room when they shot out of my hands like a jet every time my fingers got tangled up and I lost my grip...

Holding the balloon bouquets down was always a challenge too...for one or two balloons, it was pretty easy: you just needed a light plastic weight and everyone is happy...

For bouquets of 50 or more, things got harry....they tended to try to float away in spite of the weight dangling from their ribbons...

We had these weights that looked like giant Hershey's kisses...without the chocolate though...bummer...They'd work for moderately large bouquets, but sometimes the best thing to use was a stuffed animal...

For a while I was thoughtlessly tying the ribbons around the Teddy Bear necks, but my boss told me that looked like cruel and unusual punishment for the stuffy (like we were trying hang it or something)...so then I started tying the ribbon around the bear's waste...this was great unless I tied the ribbons too tightly...then it looked like a warped advertisement for a weight loss program...

If you're waiting for a point to this blog entry, or a punch line, you're going to be sadly disappointed, but I'll end with a quote from Winnie the Pooh that used to grace the back wall of the University Bookstore balloon department: "No One Can Be Uncheered with a Balloon..."

That's probably always true unless you're a teddy bear and some moron ties a bouquet of balloons around your neck...