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.