Something was... off today.
I started the day by getting in the shower with my glasses still on. I joked with myself that it was a sign of how the day was going to go. If my day wasn't jinxed to begin with, that probably did it.
Getting lunch at McDonald's, I got the cashier who seemed about to have an anxiety attack. He repeated my order back to me four times. All I had was a cheeseburger and fries, nothing complicated, but he seemed both confused and terrified. He still screwed it up, I had to wait for them to fix it and I was late for my class.
I had a photo assignment to turn in today. I knew it required three final prints. But apparently I didn't make that connection in the lab yesterday and only made two prints. Will lose points over this. I told one of my classmates that I felt like banging my head on the table.
Which is probably why I smacked my forehead against the sun visor when I was getting into my car. Hard. It's still sore. I may actually have a bruise.
I went to my grandma's to help make dessert for tomorrow. We needed melted white chocolate. Apparently, if you get water in it or get it too hot it turns hard. Spent way too much time on a lost cause. Decided to make a thin icing with powdered sugar instead.
Then went to work for the "why bother" shift: three hours, basically just closing. Found out we had to mop the whole floor because the cleaning ladies apparently get the night before Thanksgiving off. These are the same cleaners who just recently left one night without doing anything, and then insisted the next day that they had cleaned everything.
Almost forgot my jacket when leaving work.
In the store parking lot we found a pile of clothes.
One of my neighbors is moving. In the middle of the night.
And another neighbor's dog is going insane.
I think this counts as one of my weirder days.
11.25.2009
11.18.2009
So...good news: I got an extra hour of work tonight, which means just a little bit more on my next paycheck; always a good thing. The bad news is that I got that extra hour because the cleaning ladies just walked out without vacuuming or mopping the floors. And nobody knows why. They just left, so I stayed late to finish the close while our cafe lead mopped the floor. So I'm happy about the extra money, but annoyed at the cleaning ladies for leaving us in a mess. It's not the first time they've bailed on us either, but usually they have some excuse (seems like everyone in their family, including them, has been ill sometime in the past five months). At this point, their jobs are looking a little shaky. And I don't get how anyone could think it was a good idea to jeopardize their job when the unemployment rate in this country has passed 10 percent.
They also couldn't have picked a worse night to do this. We were busier than we have been because holiday shopping has picked up, but our schedules are still reflecting the slow months we had this fall, so we're still running on skeleton crews. We were also training our new guy, who does fine on drinks and register but has never closed before, so we were trying to get everything done while explaining to him what we were doing and why. And the icing on the cake is that the FCOM (field cafe operations manager) is coming for a "visit" tomorrow. Meaning he is going to show up at 9 a.m. to tell us everything we're doing wrong, so we were also trying to get the last cleaning tasks done tonight.
Yeah...wonderful night for the cleaners to bail. I'm just a little annoyed.
They also couldn't have picked a worse night to do this. We were busier than we have been because holiday shopping has picked up, but our schedules are still reflecting the slow months we had this fall, so we're still running on skeleton crews. We were also training our new guy, who does fine on drinks and register but has never closed before, so we were trying to get everything done while explaining to him what we were doing and why. And the icing on the cake is that the FCOM (field cafe operations manager) is coming for a "visit" tomorrow. Meaning he is going to show up at 9 a.m. to tell us everything we're doing wrong, so we were also trying to get the last cleaning tasks done tonight.
Yeah...wonderful night for the cleaners to bail. I'm just a little annoyed.
10.31.2009
Love Halloween
The sprinklers on the front lawn are set to go off at 8:30pm. Tonight is Halloween. So at 8:30 the sprinklers went off and soaked the trick-or-treaters cutting across my lawn. The screams cut in with what seemed like perfect timing during the climax of Nightmare Before Christmas. Will be amused by this for days. :)
5.01.2009
Current happy song
Two more weeks! Two more weeks!
Then with all my classes done
I can finally get some sleep!
Two more weeks!
La-La-La!
:)
Then with all my classes done
I can finally get some sleep!
Two more weeks!
La-La-La!
:)
4.24.2009
Why I need choclolate
I hate work.
No, wait, that's not really accurate. My job's not horrible; in fact, it's probably one of the better food service jobs out there for people lacking the gold star of formal training. For anyone who doesn't know, I work in a Barnes & Noble Cafe. I spend my shifts steaming milk, blending frappuccinos (and I can spell it without checking), and talking people into dessert. There are a lot worse things I could be doing, and for less money too. B&N is a relatively decent employer (for a corporation) and I actually like my coworkers most of the time.
So it's not horrible.
Still, it's not the best job on the planet, and it's certainly not what I want to be doing the rest of my life. If I play out the scenario in my head of this as my "career" it always ends with me completely bonkers. But for now, while I'm in school, this is a reasonable job to have, if only because it requires little to no thought and they don't whine about changing my availability every semester.
But every now and then something happens that just makes me want to walk out and never come back. Like the three-month stretch of nothing but opening shifts my first year. Like the retired professor they hired that despised anyone under the age of forty. Like the fact that washing so many dishes is murder on my hands.
Most recently it's the cut in hours. I'm lucky, I've been there the longest, so I get priority and have only lost about three hours a week. Before the economy took a nosedive, we always had at least two people in cafe at all times, but with things as slow as they are now we don't always need two people and it's the slowest on weekday mornings. Guess when all of my shifts are. Uh-huh... So now I get to spend every morning working by myself until noon at the earliest. And in a job that I can now do on autopilot, having no one to talk to means I start to fall into that trance they always warn you about in driver's ed. By the end of my shift I'm feeling just a bit nuts and dreading having to do it again the next day.
But even that is not why I hate my job today.
No, today I hate my job, because I was told that I am going to have to work on a day in June that I requested off two months ago. Why are they ignoring a request that was approved by the assistant store manager? Because we now have an author signing on that day, which means we need extra people to work that afternoon, which means I have to come in that morning to set everything up so that my manager and the lead can work the event and close. I just happen to have the rotten, messed up luck to have to have this stupid event fall on MY birthday! That's right, on my birthday I get to get up and go open that cafe and attempt to not lose my sanity. It's not even that I'm working on my birthday that annoys me, it's that I requested it off with more than enough notice, had it approved, and now they tell me "oops, sorry, our bad, no deal."
Unfortunately, I can't really do anything about this so I just get to growl and be frustrated. And fantasize about the day I can hand in my notice. I just need a lot of chocolate in the meantime.
No, wait, that's not really accurate. My job's not horrible; in fact, it's probably one of the better food service jobs out there for people lacking the gold star of formal training. For anyone who doesn't know, I work in a Barnes & Noble Cafe. I spend my shifts steaming milk, blending frappuccinos (and I can spell it without checking), and talking people into dessert. There are a lot worse things I could be doing, and for less money too. B&N is a relatively decent employer (for a corporation) and I actually like my coworkers most of the time.
So it's not horrible.
Still, it's not the best job on the planet, and it's certainly not what I want to be doing the rest of my life. If I play out the scenario in my head of this as my "career" it always ends with me completely bonkers. But for now, while I'm in school, this is a reasonable job to have, if only because it requires little to no thought and they don't whine about changing my availability every semester.
But every now and then something happens that just makes me want to walk out and never come back. Like the three-month stretch of nothing but opening shifts my first year. Like the retired professor they hired that despised anyone under the age of forty. Like the fact that washing so many dishes is murder on my hands.
Most recently it's the cut in hours. I'm lucky, I've been there the longest, so I get priority and have only lost about three hours a week. Before the economy took a nosedive, we always had at least two people in cafe at all times, but with things as slow as they are now we don't always need two people and it's the slowest on weekday mornings. Guess when all of my shifts are. Uh-huh... So now I get to spend every morning working by myself until noon at the earliest. And in a job that I can now do on autopilot, having no one to talk to means I start to fall into that trance they always warn you about in driver's ed. By the end of my shift I'm feeling just a bit nuts and dreading having to do it again the next day.
But even that is not why I hate my job today.
No, today I hate my job, because I was told that I am going to have to work on a day in June that I requested off two months ago. Why are they ignoring a request that was approved by the assistant store manager? Because we now have an author signing on that day, which means we need extra people to work that afternoon, which means I have to come in that morning to set everything up so that my manager and the lead can work the event and close. I just happen to have the rotten, messed up luck to have to have this stupid event fall on MY birthday! That's right, on my birthday I get to get up and go open that cafe and attempt to not lose my sanity. It's not even that I'm working on my birthday that annoys me, it's that I requested it off with more than enough notice, had it approved, and now they tell me "oops, sorry, our bad, no deal."
Unfortunately, I can't really do anything about this so I just get to growl and be frustrated. And fantasize about the day I can hand in my notice. I just need a lot of chocolate in the meantime.
3.20.2009
So...
...yeah.
You know, despite my myriad complaints about every english class I've ever taken, I actually do like to write. I even like to think I'm pretty good at it...most of the time. The problem is that what I enjoy writing falls under the category of "creative writing" and the closest a required english class gets to that is the "personal narrative." Which was always followed by the "comparison/constrast", "literature analysis" and "persuasive" essays. I'm telling you, the reason high school always seemed to drag on was because they made us take nearly identical english classes every semester. They pounded the outline for a five-paragraph essay into my brain for four years and managed to knock most of the creativity right out.
So...what was the point of that mild rant on the inanity of the education system and why is it my first post in this blog? Well...
I like to write. I just haven't written anything for fun in so long that I seem to have forgotten how. The idea is that even if I'm writing short posts with little to no meaning, at least I'm writing something. Really, don't expect anything profound here. You're not likely to get more than random comments at one am on the lack of common sense displayed by the general populace. Words on the screen, that's the goal here.
So...
You know, despite my myriad complaints about every english class I've ever taken, I actually do like to write. I even like to think I'm pretty good at it...most of the time. The problem is that what I enjoy writing falls under the category of "creative writing" and the closest a required english class gets to that is the "personal narrative." Which was always followed by the "comparison/constrast", "literature analysis" and "persuasive" essays. I'm telling you, the reason high school always seemed to drag on was because they made us take nearly identical english classes every semester. They pounded the outline for a five-paragraph essay into my brain for four years and managed to knock most of the creativity right out.
So...what was the point of that mild rant on the inanity of the education system and why is it my first post in this blog? Well...
I like to write. I just haven't written anything for fun in so long that I seem to have forgotten how. The idea is that even if I'm writing short posts with little to no meaning, at least I'm writing something. Really, don't expect anything profound here. You're not likely to get more than random comments at one am on the lack of common sense displayed by the general populace. Words on the screen, that's the goal here.
So...
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
