potter maddness from the epicentre

the past 2 days have been crazy.
friday night, shortly after 9pm, i got on the eurostar to com back to london, for one reason: harry potter. from waterloo station, i grabbed the first cab i saw and headed straight for work. i knew when i arrived there would be a huge queue, i had seen images of it on french tv: the dutch teenagers who had waited for several days in the rain so they could be the very first to get the last ever potter book, the endless chains of people wrapping around street corners in central london, and so on. but i was still surprised by how excited people can get over a book. i arrived to a long chain of people who were clearly annoyed i could go inside the shop and they couldnt. inside, the shop lookied like something out of a war zone with boxes and wrappings all over the place. the management fed us pizza, sweets and coke to keep us as awake a hyper as possible, since every one knew it would be a very long night. we spent the hours before the opening setting things up, while the manager periodically shouted out the minutes until midnight. we practiced the till procedures and got paired in twos: one person to face the customers and push the buttons on the computers, and another to grab the books and bag them.
at midnight the crowds outside began screaming adn we turned of the lights, letting the first woman come running in, screaming, in the darkness. from then on the next several hours was total maddness. people came running in screaming. one girl grabbed the first copy of the book she saw and stood there screaming "i touched it, i touched it." a man fainted. other people cried. many took pictures of us, with the flashes of their cameras flashing in our faces annoyingly. the funniest was a group of 30 school children from india who showed up with their scary teacher. they were all dressed identically in uniforms that looked like people worn here when india was still part of the empire. each grabbed their book and went running off , jumping, while their teacher (a white lady, of course) tried to maintain control.
by 3 am i was zombie and the manager finnally locked the door, announcing no more copies would be given out that night. we straightened a little while the managers called for taxis to take us home.
i came back home at about 4am with my bags, and flopped into bed for a 4 hour nap...then i had to get up again to go back to the maddness. the shop was again like a war zone all saturday: people running every where trying to grab as many copies as they could get their hands on. by 7pm, the thousands of copies we had started with were all gone and crying children could be heard everywhere. scary stuff.