Bus stops

Good morning.   8am here and already I am waiting for my second bus on what promises to be a fairly long day.  I have made one trip into work already, in part because I left my iPad on my desk yesterday and wanted to pick it up sooner rather than later.  See the thing is, I have grown somewhat accustomed to blogging on the iPad, usually is just put a note together for myself, then when I get home I email myself the note and copy and paste from the email to the blog.  I know there is a copy function on here, but it is such a pain to use that it is just easier the other way.  So the iPad allows me to blog while I am standing here waiting on bus #2 rather than just stand here looking all absent minded.


Since I had to make a trip in to work anyway I grabbed two books of lottery tickets for the instant machines at Gus Millers and took care of the lottery machine at Smithfield News, where we had sold out of one ticket, plus I emptied the money out of it and counted it.  Turns out we sold almost $1100 in scratch of tickets in one day.  That is a pretty good number for Smithfield, it would be an average number at Gus Millers, where our lottery sales are significantly higher.

My next bus just arrived.  Woohoo!  The thing with buses is that I only learn a bus schedule if I need to, since there are a number of buses that run between downtown and Oakland, I can usually catch a bus within 10 - 15 minutes of arriving at the bus stop.  But I am not going to either place right now, instead I am running off to breakfast at IHOP, so my bus selection went from 7 or so down to just 2.  The plan now is to go have breakfast, then venture to Gus Miller for the lottery stuff, then back to Smithfield for my normal Saturday routine.  Part of that routine will be changing the prices on snuff, Santa is not the only thing that happens every December, those of us in retail also know that tobacco price increases come in December, once one company does it the others pretty much follow suit.

This is a complete change of subject, but the conversation taking place behind me on the bus is disturbing from a male perspective.  A woman is on her cell phone, carrying on a discussion that would probably be left for other venues besides public transportation.  In the conversation I have already overheard that she needs to stay at home with her mom for a week because her apartment is disgusting, that she is feeling bloated, her period is out of whack and she is wondering if it could be menopause.  There are things one does not need to hear this early in the morning on their way to breakfast, and the menstrual cycles of people on public transportation would fall somewhere on that list.  Thankfully she has gotten off the bus, perhaps now I can get back to matters at hand.

The reason I am off to breakfast this early Saturday morning is one of the reasons that I do lots of things I do, because it is free.  One of the pluses to signing up with IHOP online is that you get a free breakfast for your birthday.  That one I knew about, apparently you also get a free breakfast on the anniversary of your sign up date, which was in December from what I can now tell.  I have about a week to use my free breakfast, so I decided to head out today before I buried myself in work.  That was when I thought about my Karaoke Friday entry yesterday and how I said I wanted to be more dedicated to this whole blogging thing again.  I figured I would blog while at breakfast, so I checked my bag for my iPad, found out I left it at work, and well, that is how this whole adventure began.

I have been meaning to write, the last week or so has been just a whirlwind of things that I have wanted to put down on the page but haven't had the opportunity.  The best place to start would be where I had my first inkling of blogging, that being last Saturday, which in Pittsburgh means it is also the Celebrate the Season parade downtown, taking place the first Saturday after Thanksgiving.  It is one of the city's longer parades of the year and just makes a mess of trying to get around downtown with all of the street closures.  The parade usually features a B list celebrity or two and a musical act that hasn't been relevant in a couple of decades, but to paraphrase Mark Twain, "When the end of the world comes I want to be in Pittsburgh, because things happen twenty years later there."  I had thought about taking the camera out and snapping some pictures and putting them on here or Facebook (or both), but the parade also marks the one year mark of when I met Ruth, she arrived on the Friday after Thanksgiving and the parade was one of the first things we did, and it wasn't something that I felt like celebrating all that much this year, so I stayed home and slept in until I was sure the mess downtown would be cleared up, then made a late sojourn into work.

Work has been both good and bad recently, the biggest good being that we got our Christmas bonuses this past week.  But it has also been good because I am starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel regarding some things.  Our new register system is in the process of being installed.  Right now we have one terminal on the floor installed as well as the back office.  The plan, devised at least in part by me, is to keep both our old and new systems running at the same time, using the new terminal to train people and work out any bugs that may arise, while using the old system to do the daily sales in the meantime.  It is a process that should admittedly be happening faster than it is, but I am at that point where I am at the whims of the register people when it comes to training me on the things I need to know.  Once I have that knowledge and the other three terminals are installed, they can go kick rocks for all I care.  I just hate being on their timetable right now.   Another thing that is slowly coming into focus is the actual operations of Gus Millers.   The person who manages that store, Bobby, is really good at it, so my problems have not been on that end of things, rather my problems have been on the financial end of things.  Plain and simple, too much money was coming up missing far too often.   Originally I didn't know what to make of it.  I questioned what I was doing, was I reading the reports wrong, was I missing sales numbers to account for what seemed to be happening.  I talked to Dee, had her read over my reports, double check my math just so see if I was screwing something up on that end.  I questioned Ed, asking him if this had been an ongoing problem prior to my promotion.  If not was it a lack of oversight, or are people just trying to take advantage of me being the new kid as it were.  Whatever the case, it would not be a stretch, in fact it would probably be and understatement to say that between July when I took over and the end of October, the shortages that were coming up in the registers and the lottery were over $1000.

It was an ongoing problem that needed to be addressed.  It was also a problem that Ed seemed unwilling to address, dragging his feet on the issue every time it came up.  Ed is harder on his son Brian, who owns the business, than he is on the employees, some of whom have taken Ed's generosity and treated it as their own personal entitlement.  I am not going to suggest what Ed should do with his money, that falls entirely on him, but when I am staring daily at problems that keep repeating themselves then something has to be done.  So, over the course of the last few months we have made some moves, how those moves will play out over the long haul is anyone's guess, but it is nice to know that the store has not been short a significant amount of money in almost a month now.

Bus #3 now, I have finished my breakfast and am headed to Gus Miller to do their lottery machines.  Breakfast was pretty good, two pancakes with blueberry compote, two eggs, two strips of bacon, two sausage links, toast and coffee and it cost all of $4.05.  The toast and coffee were extra, everything else was free.  Wish I could eat like that for free every day. Now I just feel fat, like I could curl up in a ball and take a nap, which is suppose I could do but then I would not get anything done today and I have plenty I would still like to do.  Besides work, which will be busy enough, I also want to get my next bus pass and pop into Macy's later, not because I am a fan of theirs, I am not, but I have a coupon for 25% off on anything I buy and I still have my birthday present from Ed to use yet, a $50 gift card for the store.  So I am hoping to get a little Christmas shopping done after work, then maybe do some more online with Amazon, where I have over $100 piled up in gift cards.  I need to get the Amazon stuff done sooner rather than later because I will have to deal with shipping times and god forbid, possibly even the post office.

I made the mistake of going to the post office the other day.  I had used my Coke points to order something for my mom for Christmas.  I can tell you that I got her a food steamer, because chances are she will never read my blog and even if she were to stumble upon it, I think we have reached a point where one would really have to be interested in what I have to say to make it this far.  Anyway, so I have saved enough points (1000) to get the steamer and silly me I thought that when it arrived it would just be sitting on the front porch under the mailboxes.  Instead there was a card in my mailbox, I had to go to the post office and show them the card because they were holding the package.  Now normally trips to the post office are problematic just because you enter a place where the employees work at a rate that I would call postal speed.   It is best described as the inverse of urgency.  That process is made worse when you live where I do, adjacent to a major college campus, because now everyone is sending things to all parts of creation and wanting the scientific formula for all of the different postal rates that are available.   Meanwhile in both the mail loading area in the back and behind the managers office door, there is all kinds of laughing and carrying on taking place.  If the post office were a hair style it would be a mullet, business in the front, party in the back.

Bus #4, the day just got longer, from the time I was at Gus Millers last night until this morning we sold out of 5 more books of lottery tickets including 3 books of $20 games, so back to Smithfield I go to get more tickets, then back to Gus, then back to Smithfield again.  Worse is this bus has no shock absorbers whatsoever, so trying to type on here is like trying to teach a blind person how to write with a pen.  Lots of fun in that.

Back to my post office story, I get there and of course there is a line, one person actually waiting on people, probably a dozen or so others to whom manual labor would be the President of Mexico.  After ten minutes of this, a second person decides to come up and wait on people.  At least that was what appeared to happen, until instead he decided to try out his George Carlin material on the one person who was actually doing their job.  So a trip to pick up one small box ends up taking over 30 minutes to get from opening the post office door to leaving.

Bus #5, this is starting to sound like Kasey Kasem's top 40 countdown, up next #5 in our countdown.  This bus is from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and in its first week on the chart it is 71B Highland Park.   I already know I have been awake too long when I am making American Top 40 references.

I have my five books of tickets that need to be loaded, I grabbed them after verifying the  lottery machine total and then sorting the two stores lottery monies so that we could buy back and extra 5s and 1s we may need for change this weekend.  We probably will not need it, we usually get enough change from the bank on Thursday or Friday to get through the weekend, but I would rather have it then not.  One of the things I do that did not get done before my promotion.

Speaking of the bank,  the bank the store uses had a couple of changes in personnel this week, they lost Kia who was our contact at the bank should any issues arise, she is being transferred to a different branch of the same bank, and they hired a new teller, Gillian, who is very cute and if I were twenty years younger I would take great pleasure in being rejected by her.  Since Kia's last day was Friday morning, when Sammy and I dropped off the stores' deposits on Thursday, we also brought Kia in some flowers as well.  Gillian was there and she asked where her flowers were, which is just like issuing me a challenge, so Friday when I had to run to the bank I brought her flowers as well.  Not sure if I upset any of the other women who work there, but they never asked.

And now we get to our long distance dedication, "Dear Kasey,  I can't recall the first time I ever rode one, but for the last 26 years I have found myself riding an assortment of buses provided by Port Authority transit.  Some times it will just be a single bus ride in a day, some times like today, I will be on my 7th bus by noon.  Could you please send me the 61B North Braddock inbound?  Thanks, Stranded in what feels like Siberia.  Dear Stranded, here is your not so long distance dedication."   Yes I am on the bus again, surprise.  If all goes according to plan I will only have to do this one more time today.

While I have a minute, I guess I should congratulate myself (since no one will do it for me) for clinching a spot in the fantasy football playoffs.  With one week left in the regular season I am still in first place with a record of 9-4 and can fall no further than 4th.  Since the top four teams make the post season, this is a weekend of non worries on the fantasy front.  Sure it would be nice to finish the regular season in first, but let's be honest, only champions are remembered, not guys who do well in the regular season.

Okay, that was a longer hiatus than anticipated, I managed to get the grocery orders done as well as change the snuff pricing in both the old and new register systems.  This is one of the reasons I do want to get the new system up and running, having two systems means I am basically doubling my workload.  The sooner we get the new system installed, the sooner I do not have to do that.

For the record I am on bus #8 now, another 71B Highland Park.  I had planned on being downtown a while longer, but when I went digging in my wallet for my Macy's gift card it wasn't there.  Most likely it is on the night stand beside my bed, right where the iTunes gift card Ruth gave me also sits.  Just because I have this iPad does not mean I am into downloading a bunch of different apps or music for this thing, I use it for blogging, I keep some quick reference notes for work on here and I will sometimes take it out when I am taking pictures and don't want to use my digital camera.  So the gift card that she gave me back in June sits on my table unused.

Even though I forgot the Macy's card, I still have one more errand to run, I have to go get my bus pass for next week, at least I do if I want to get back and forth to work.  Then the next stop is home, I may cook tonight, or I may order in, haven't decided yet, but in either case I better put a wrap on this, I have yammered far too long as it is and I am almost at my last bus stop.

So this is what it is like to blog?  Who'da thunk that?