Crew you, screw me

 

I guess that is what I get for filling in overnights to cover for someone's vacation. I had mentioned previously that at my news stand gig I have been put in charge of the stock people. We are kind of like the Oompla Loompas, but cooler. Anyway, my crew consisted of 5 people, me, Gray, Rob (s), Rob (t) and Curtis. A quick rundown on the 5, Gray started the day after I was moved from register duty to stock person, so he and I have worked together through the duration of his time there, Rob (s for short) was next in line, then Curtis and most recently Rob (t for tall). The s and t are for your clarification, they are not identical by any means, so I can tell them apart by just looking at them, something that you dear reader aren't able to do.

With me working overnights, the crew was pretty much on their own, but really, how much damage could be caused in a week, right? If only you knew......

The problems all started on Tuesday. Gray has what I would view as a most unenviable task, he has to work at all of the news stands we own, sometimes all in the same day. With me on overnights, the theory was that he was going to be spending most of his time in our store, but he would still be at the other downtown stores as well. The thing is, he was having issues with the mother of his son, she wanted to move to South Carolina and take their son with her, he was fighting to keep his kid here in PA. A court hearing was scheduled on the matter for Tuesday, and Gray had gotten permission from Ed to have the day off, but neither Gray nor Ed notified the other stores about their arrangement, so while our store knew Gray would be off, none of the other places did and they started bitching when he wasn't at work on Tuesday. Troublesome to be sure, but certainly nothing that couldn't have been worked out with a simple phone call or two but then two days later, on Thursday, Gray doesn't show up for work, nor does he bother to call anyone to say that he isn't coming in. Goodbye Gray, Ed fired him.

Next came Saturday night, when Rob (s) called in to say that he was calling off for Sunday. I didn't hear the exact conversation, but apparently he said that he hurt his head or something along those lines. I am almost positive that this is a fabrication on Rob's part, given the conversation that he and I had on Friday, Rob (s) mentioned about his upcoming birthday in a week or so and that since he was going to be camping out of town that weekend, he was going to be partying with friends in town on Saturday, and even suggested to me he didn't expect to be in all that great of shape come Sunday morning, when he was scheduled to work from 7am to 3pm. I find out about this call off when I get to work Saturday night, which I didn't find to be all that surprising, but since I do none of the employee scheduling, it wasn't my problem either, that type of thing falls higher up the food chain than my set of responsibilities. Still I get into work around 10:30pm last night (I usually arrive 30 minutes early when I am running the shop, just to balance the bank and lottery and do a cigarette count before my shift starts) and I no more than get there than Ed comes in. Seeing Ed on a Saturday is not a normal thing, usually the managers tend to not be there on weekends, if only we all could be so lucky, but there he was. After doing a quick walk through of the store to make sure everything was okey dokey, Ed comes up and starts asking about Rob (s) calling off. Alex, who was in charge of the shift before me explains the phone call, to which Ed says that since Rob (s) allegedly hurt his head, he isn't allowed to work again unless he has a doctor's excuse. Now I am of two minds on this, on one hand Rob (s) was probably one of my better workers (I would have put Gray first, but he had already fucked himself earlier in the week with the no call, no show nonsense) so simply calling off isn't that big a deal to me, even if I question the reason why, which I have kept to myself. That being said, Rob (s) is also an Art Institute student, which means we are already working around his schedule, and with him requesting time off next weekend as well, the limited time he is available he probably should be there. And if you are going to call off, by all means use an excuse that won't require a doctor's slip. The flu or something simple like and upset stomach works far better than a “I hurt my head excuse”, where one can ask for some sort of verification, especially when you know you will not be able to offer such proof. It is fundamental Lying 101 kids, offer as little on the factual side as need be, so as to make the subsequent cover up far easier to maintain. Instead most likely I have now lost 2 of my four crew members in the course of 6 days.

That being said, it looks like we might be hiring an attractive female that goes to school downtown and lives in the dorms across the street. Of course I don't need to remind myself that college girls are way to young for me, but eye candy at work if it doesn't turn into gawking with drool running down my chin I suppose could be a good thing. I will wait and see on that one.

I will say that my last night on overnights concluded a pretty productive week change meter wise. After pulling $4.16 on my first shift, I managed to pull another $3.92 on my other three overnight shifts, certainly not as good as day 1, but better than I do while working in the basement. That means the change meter moves again, now at $112.58. December seems so long ago, when I was hoping to break $40. Who would have think it would take off like that this year, after years of plodding along.

Sorry, took a nap there and now it is Monday morning. Probably be in my best interest to wrap this up here, rather than have another run on blog like the last one. 8 pages is about 8 too many in my book. Actually, sleep was definitely called for if I was to get my schedule reset to go back to mornings this week. That Thursday/Friday switch was hard to do, so I am glad to be back on a more consistent time basis. Our schedules at work start on Monday and go through Sunday, with the day your shift started being the day that the shift gets credited to the schedule, so while technically I had 5 overnights last week, only four of them count toward that week on the schedule. And one of my alleged days off really didn't feel like one because it was the day in which my schedule times switched. The schedule actually looked like this, Sunday I worked from 11pm until 7am Monday morning, but since that shift started on Sunday and our last day of the week is Sunday, my first overnight for scheduling purposes gets credited to the previous week. Monday I again started at 11pm and worked till Tuesday at 7am, but by then I had at least adjusted the biological clock to working overnights. Likewise Tuesday I worked from 11pm until 7am on Wednesday and on Wednesday the schedule was the same, 11pm until 7am Thursday. Technically Thursday was my day off, since I didn't have a shift start on Thursday, even though I was there for 7 of my 8 hours on Thursday. Friday was the day I flipped, working from 7am until 3 pm, but really having only 24 hours to readjust to go back to mornings was a little tough. I was forced to stay up as long as possible Thursday just so I didn't wake up Thursday afternoon or evening and then be up all night and try to work Friday morning. Saturday I was back to overnights, 11pm until 7am Sunday morning and after all of that schedule juggling, I am glad to be back on straight mornings, though Dan, who also works overnights is talking about taking a vacation in the near future. I just hope that if he does, we at least have replaced a few of the people we let go this past week. I don't mind the workload on overnights, it isn't easier or harder, just different, but I don't want to come back to days worth of work that didn't get done on my absence, like is going to be the case when I get to work on Tuesday.

The stocking of the coolers went okay, but our shelf stock never got out and as a result it messed up some of the ordering that took place. We ended up ordering too much stuff that in fact we had, it just needed to be put on the floor. It is an oversight that I usually don't do, because I have an understanding of what we have in the basement, and I really hate having too much junk in the basement that we just can't move.

I should note that I have taken to getting back into playing baseball on my PS2, after a long hiatus away from the game. I was missing two vital instruments in game play, a controller and a TV remote, that I needed to replace before I could play again. My controller broke when I put my computer chair on it by accident, I keep my PS2 under my desk and the controller wasn't pushed far enough back, and my TV remote also broke when I knocked it off of my bed while sleeping. With my TV, rather than setting the PS2 or DVD player to a specific channel, there is a game option on the screen that isn't a specific channel, it is just labeled as GAME, but you can only access it with a remote, so I had to go out and buy a universal remote, then learn how to program it so it would work with the TV (no small feat I might add) and then find the button on the new remote that corresponded with the GAME option on the TV. Anyway, I will not bore you with a Joe Random update, that can be saved for another time and give you, the reader, yet another reason to boycott the blog.

Sorry, had to duck away for a couple of seconds, had some Facebook updates that I had to attend to. Once again I am playing D&D while blogging, two steps in to a 13 part adventure and again I am getting my ass kicked. Things aren't looking good for my drow ranger, I only packed one healing potion and it has to last for another 11 events.

I promised a future story in the last blog a story about shorts and now seems as good a time as any to tell it. One of my favorite past times at work is to grab a cigarette and go girl watch out on the street. Usually the pickings aren't that bad, with the Art Institute and Point Park University both about a block away, and plenty of well dressed women that work downtown often strolling by the store, it is not to hard to find plenty of attractive women to ogle. That being said, there are some people that should look in the mirror before they leave the house. Listen, I know I don't have the most manly of physiques, which is why I don't opt for, say, wearing bicycle shorts to work. That being said, I am outside the other day, enjoying the polluting of my lungs, when across the street there was a girl with a large ass. Not that a large ass is, in and of itself, a bad thing, I am more about curves and how proportionate they are to the particular female frame, some chicks can pull off a large ass, this one couldn't. Worse, she was wearing these skin tight shorts that were a black and white checkerboard pattern. The optical illusion created by such a spectacle can't be overstated. The colors accompanied with the bouncing of such large ass cheeks created a pattern that was hypnotic in its horror, and I was left wondering that if I crossed my eyes and stared through the pattern whether or not I might see a sailboat in there, and if I did, would it be an illusion, or would there be an actual sailboat in her ass.

I am listening to the radio while I type this, just some idle sports talk banter in the background. Thankfully the Dan Patrick Show just ended. I can't imagine how this guy gets to host a talk show. Actually I can, he used to be an anchor on ESPN's Sportscenter, but his radio show, which is now on its third different syndicator, it just awful. It is all about Dan and little about actual sports. Far too often the show just devolves into him complaining about guests that opted not to be on the show, or some other part of shameless me talk that speaks volumes about his ego. He wasted a good portion of today's show talking about how ESPN is having a reunion show for some anniversary or another and that so far he hasn't been invited, and even if he were invited he isn't sure he would want to go, and I am thinking, who really gives a fuck, besides you? Please tell me there are more important things, even in the minutiae that is sports, than whether or not you are going to accept an invitation that to this point hasn't even been offered.

Okay, enough silliness from me, time to do a spell check, and hopefully a better proofreading job than I did last time I blogged. Here's hoping this week is better than last for all concerned.