The boss lady where I work, Village Pawn & Gun Shop in Wadesboro, NC, is a little dynamo named Jennifer. She's about 5-feet-nothing and wouldn't weigh 100 lbs. in a wet raincoat.
Technically, she's not the boss. Her dad Billy has been in the gun shop business for more than 20 years, first as a partner and for the past 18 months or so as owner. His wife Dorothy, Jennifer's mom, is a retired school teacher who got no retirement at all as she went to work full-time at the gun shop immediately. Jennifer's husband Jonathan helps run the gun shop, so it's a mom and pop and daughter and son-in-law business.
Me and a couple or three other nonfamily members make up the entire staff. I've only been there full-time since January, but I quickly figured out that Jennifer is the boss. Nobody there, including mom and pop and husband Jonathan, can do hardly anything without asking Jennifer how to do it.
The whole family is a gaggle of work-a-holics, working 12 hours a day seven days a week with few breaks. They go to a gun show almost every weekend, putting in long days Saturday and Sunday and then returning to the shop Monday to start all over again. They love it and so do I.
As you may have heard, since the election -- and really for several months before -- the public has been on a guns and ammo buying binge and it shows little signs of easing off any so far. A slim majority of voters were foolish enough to elect Obama, but the gun-buyers were not fooled. They know a gun-grabber when they see one and they've been acting accordingly, buying up AK and AR rifles, high-capacity short-barrel pump shotguns and handguns of all types.
So when Jennifer promised last week to special order a Sig Sauer P229 for me, I wasn't disturbed or even surprised that it was Monday before she found time to place the order. The usual waiting time for any order from Sig Sauer, AR-type rifles or handguns, is usually weeks and since I was ordering a P229 from the Sig Custom Shop, I didn't expect it anytime soon.
But to our amazement at the shop, my new Sig P229 SAS Gen2 .357 Sig pistol arrived today!
Happiness is indeed a small blue pistol box from Sig with my name on it. It's got everything, Sig Anti-Snag SAS Generation 2 carry-melt treatment with all the sharp corners and edges smoothed out, Short Reset Trigger System and the Short Trigger, SigLite Tritium Night Sights, Two-Tone Stainless Steel Slide and black polymer frame.
And best of all, the Sig Sauer factory crew in Exeter, NH, bent the rules and made this model for me in the Sig Custom Shop in .357 Sig, while the SAS Gen2 is supposed to be offered only in .40S&W and 9mm. I suspect Jennifer did a lot of sweet-talking to the Sig factory rep.
And that factory rep also promised Jennifer he'd send me a set of those really nice Rosewood grips that were offered on the SAS Gen1, which is now discontinued.
The pistol arrived with black polymer grips, so I'll just have to wait on those Rosewood grips. But I don't have to wait to shoot it. Range trip tomorrow!
Gotta sort it out so I can carry it to work on Monday. I'll be giving it a workout with Speer Cleanfire Frangible, Georgia Arms Canned Heat FMJs and an assortment of hollow points. I'm sure it will do fine, but never carry a pistol until you know it's gonna work when you need it. Sig's have well earned their motto: "To hell and back reliability," but as Ronald Reagan said, trust but verify. I shall verify tomorrow at the range.
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