My head is spinning

I guess I should take you all to last weekend.  My schedule was such that again I was working the fulltime gig from 10pm until 6am Sunday followed by the part time gig from 10:30am Sunday until 6:30pm.  That leaves 4 1/2 hours between jobs, even less if I decide to go home and Sunday buses are less frequent on weekends than their weekday counterparts.  There is a bus that sort of runs between both jobs however, so I opted for that one instead of going home.  I used part of the 4.5 hours doing some grocery shopping as well, picking up some snacks for work.

The second gig was uneventful enough, much like the overnight gig before it, and so I got home, made some dinner and before you know it I was out like a light.  Quite a bit actually.  I slept all the way through Monday, until my alarm went off to go in Monday night.  Another uneventful 10pm-6am later and I am back home trying to sleep again.  With a little bit of food and some YouTube for entertainment I nodded off somewhere around noon.

Then the Tuesday night alarm goes off around 7pm.  I continue to sleep until about 8pm, which I am sure annoyed my neighbors (an alarm going off for an hour from 7pm-8pm, please) and when I got up I was dizzy.  It wasn’t a dizziness I could shake off either, I needed the wall to keep me erect (enter flaccid boner jokes here).  But for whatever reason I couldn’t stand up without help.   I thought maybe I slept wrong or something and opted to try napping it off.  So I thought I reset my alarm for another half hour but apparently I didn’t because it never went off again.  Instead I woke up around 2am, still wobbly and way late for work even if I could have made it in.

So I took a hard pass on work Tuesday night, hoping that I would feel better by Wednesday morning, as I had the first of my two COVID shots scheduled.  I went back to sleep until about 7am, then 8am and finally got up at 8:30, threw some clothes on and hurried out the door as my shot was scheduled for 9:15.  Thankfully I didn’t have to wait long for the bus,it was there within minutes of my arrival at the bus stop, which was good as I was walking I was leaning to my right a lot, I fell  off the sidewalk like 3 times.

Part of me was wondering if this was a COVID symptom, but I figured if that was the case I would find out soon enough, like right before my shot.  But nothing in my pre shot testing (if you consider having your temperature taken testing) presented as pro COVID, so I got shot #1 (of 2), was told to wait 15 minutes and then go about my day.  Since I had no side effects I waited like 5 minutes, then walked to Getgo on the South Side and got me a cherry coffee.

I then walked over to Aldi, bought a few things and went home where I made lunch and went back to bed.  I woke up and my dizziness was pretty much gone so not really sure what it was, a COVID thing, a high blood pressure thing, a working too many hours thing, or even a thing which defies description, it just was a thing,.

With a rubber hose

 So, Saturday morning I again opted to take myself to breakfast simply because work is closer to my favorite breakfast places than my apartment and if I don’t work Saturday night, then I am off until Sunday morning at 10:30 or so.  Besides, the bus that goes from work closest to my apartment doesn’t start running until 8am or so and I get off at 6am so if I go straight home I am going to probably have to take two buses and transfer in either Downtown  or Squirrel Hill, whereas there is a bus that runs from the Strip District (where I go for breakfast) to Oakland (where my apartment is).

So I opt for Kelly O’s in the morning (they have been on that Guy Fieri show on the food network) and I opt for the Pittsburgh benedict.  It is an eggs Benedict but under the eggs and Hollandaise sauce is onion, kielbasa and a pierogi.  Of course there was a wait for a seat, being they open at 6am (which is when I get off of work) and being under COVID protocols, restaurants are at 75% seating capacity these days, but it wasn’t along wait and soon enough I was noshing on some really good breakfast food.

I finish my breakfast and head off to the bus stop when I see one of my buses go by (54C for those familiar with Port Authority vernacular) but it runs like every half hour or so and I have a book to read and my phone so 30 minutes isn’t all that bad.  So I get to the bus stop and like less than 5 minutes later a plethora of police cars come zooming by with lights flashing.  They seem to be stopping a few blocks away, mind you my bus stop is at 21st street and I know the bus I am waiting on comes off of 16th street.  So if the police are stopped at 16th street my bus is probably going to be detoured, so I grab ye olde trusty phone to see if there is a detour and if so, where it is.  Of course none of the tv news stations have anything on their traffic maps or their web pages about what is happening, I check the Port Authority website about bus detours which is equally useless.  I figure my next way to find anything out is to listen to the police scanner, so I hop on the Broadcastify website, and am getting some updates mixed in with first responder speak, which I do not know.  Turns out it is a traffic accident, there are 3 victims, to in stable condition, one in critical.  Those are details to round out the story but there is no mention of where the accident is in relation to 16th street.  I am seeing cars headed into town being detoured it can’t tell from where I am if they are being detoured onto 17th or 16th streets.

So I wait around for a while, probably well past the half hour I should have waited and once all of the ambulances cleared out and the only thing left was police cars directing traffic away from the scene,I decide I might as well walk towards town and take a look.  Sure enough the accident was at the intersection with 16th street, god only knows when traffic (including my bus) will resume there and given the web was not offering information about where to catch my bus, I am probably best off walking into town and catching a bus there.

It is around 9am and I start heading in a downtown direction.  I leave the headphones on, tuned to the police scanner, more as background noise than to learn anything about my bus’s arrival, which I have given up on.

And I start hearing what is going on in my metropolis, there is a car accident and the end of a bridge (a different accident mind you), there is a domestic disturbance where no weapons are involved, a COVID positive male is having trouble breathing and then lastly, a man has a Lego stuck in his nose.  Far be it from me to ascertain when someone has a problem, but when you wake up in the morning and need your Lego fix to deal with the day, you might have a problem.  But rather than spend the day contemplating someone’s Lego addiction, I opted to go home and sleep instead.

Raise the roof?

 So rumor has it we are getting a raise at work.  I would like to think I earned it, but truth be told it is more like an incentive to get people to apply.  Not that we need a boatload of people, but there are 4 of us, plus a manager we share with another store to operate a business that is open 24/7/365.  As it is, I am the only one trained to work overnights, which means for me to get a night off, someone has to come in from another store location.  As a result I have been doing 6 overnights a week since late December.

The raise is somewhat significant, $1.50 an hour and while I am not one to spend time spreading gossip, news of the raise came from the shared manager and I can’t think of a reason he would lie to me.

Digging out of my COVID debt, the extra money is coming at a pretty good time for yours truly.  I had a ‘“Robbing Peter to pay Paul” thing going on for a while, so it is nice to be able to pay both Peter and Paul these days.  It is not enough for me to give up the second job, besides it helps to have something to fall back on should things go all shitty at the full time gig.

On another plus, some money I thought was last may not be lost after all.  I had booked my vacation last year prior to my last store closing due to the property being sold.  Given vacation was a trip back to Vancouver I figured my airfare was lost money due to COVID.  But I read the other day that the government of Canada was forcing AirCanada to refund all monies spent on cancelled flights due to COVID.  From what I have read, the Canadian government owns a percentage of Air Canada, so I went to check my booking the other day, but turns out I was booked on WestJet, who were kind enough to extend my airline credit another 365 days.  Now if we can just get the border open.

The President of Mexico

 So, like I said a couple of blogs ago, I have been at the new/old job now since early to mid/December.  The thing is, during that time I have already had three managers

, one when I first started was a relative new hire and was going through training while I was get reacclimated to the task(s) at hand, then he quit and we shared a manager with another location.  I am sure life sucked for him, trying to run two stores and the headaches involved with each, and finally our third manager who was promoted from assistant manager.  She stoped returning calls and texts on Sunday and up and quit.

Don’t get me wrong, it is a position I don’t want, I am content being responsible for myself without the added responsibilities of running a store and trying to get all of its employees on the same page.  Maybe if the store hired illegal immigrants I would be interested, but it only hires Americans and all of the headaches that goes with American workers.

Yeah, I said it, illegal immigrants are harder workers than their American counterparts.  Just sit down at your dinner table and think about who picked the crop(s) you are about to eat.  Americans believe that Manuel Labor is the president of Mexico and that some jobs are beneath them.  When you need money, there should never be a job beneath you.  Certainly one can aspire to better and more well paying jobs and positions, but the idea one is too good for a job is ludicrous.

Normaler than normal

So, Saturday I did something that I haven’t done since the pandemic days began, I did a Saturday morning breakfast in the Strip District.  Since I got off work at 6am, breakfast at 7 seemed like a good idea.  I had tried a Strip District breakfast a week or so earlier, but I chose a weekday and places weren’t opening until 8am.  I don’t mind meandering around to kill off less than an hour of down time, but once I clear the hour barrier, my desire to do something wanes considerably.

That attempt led to a breakfast at Eat N Park, which, while the food is serviceable, that early in the morning it is like being in death’s waiting room.  I say that realizing almost how true it is in my own life.  Eat N Park is a local chain with multiple locations round these parts, and as it happens, it was the last place I went out to eat with my mom.  What a sad experience that was, my mom just getting out of the hospital following a heart attack and on the trip home he decides to stop there.  She was so addled, whether it be the meds she was on or brain damaged suffered from her heart attack, couldn’t even read the menu.  It was a saddening experience, when you are witnessing a parents’ cognitive abilities just slipping away.

The last couple of trips to Eat N Park, including a week or so ago, albeit different locations than the one I was at with my mom and her husband, were equally sad simply because at 51 years of age, I was the youngest person there.  As I was eating I thought to myself, “is this it?” “Do I now go hang out with old people, as the last moments of my life just tick away?”  “Should I ask if they have a seniors discount, and do I qualify if they do?”

This past Saturday I opted for the Strip District instead.  It was an added sense of normalcy, people my age (and younger), eating in public (with some social distance spacing between tables, but public nonetheless).  The only difference was that I did feel a little rushed, what with a line of people waiting to sit as I was eating.

Still, it was nice to do something almost post-pandemic-y.  There are lots of things I have cut out of my life, weekend breakfast forays being one of them (as well as working regularly, which has changed since December, going out and having a few drinks which I still haven’t done, and random shopping trips to the mall, which I am only doing if I need something).  Not that I am afraid of COVID or anything, not really concerned one way or the other if I die or not, I’ve had a good run after all, but don’t want to get sick and get someone else sick in the process. 

Where I like the taste of ass

 So, back in my Smithfield  News days, I was in charge of the ordering.  As well as dealing with beverage vendors, I was responsible for ordering groceries.  We had plenty of shelf space and we also had a few coolers where some grab and go, and heat and eat items could be kept.  There was a line of microwaveable sandwiches called Big Az.  I never though much of them save for their packaging, which I guess the company was in the process of changing as on them was the phrase “New look, same Big Az taste”.

 Not sure who they hired for marketing, but  saying your food has ass taste doesn’t strike me as good for business.  But what do I know, I am here and they are getting thousands of dollars to promote ass taste.

So, here I am today again working in a convenience store (albeit as an employee as opposed to manager) and one of the complaints about working overnights is there is no place to go to dinner when I get off of work.  This fascination with places serving breakfast all day ignores that some of us work nights.  I don’t want more coffee in the am or pancakes or waffles.  How about some meatloaf, or a burger and fries?  Spaghetti and meatballs?  Fact is when I get off work, I want dinner, not breakfast and nobody is stepping in to fill the void with all day dinner.

So I took to poking around the paltry offerings we have at work to determine my dinner.  A number of times it ended up being ramen noodles or cup o noodles or hard boiled eggs (which I make egg salad sandwiches with).  Not ideal, but when has my diet ever been ideal?  So I am poking around work the other day, looking for post work nourishment, and I found Big Az burgers, both cheeseburger and jalapeño burger.  Plus it is in the new packaging so the Az taste promotion has been removed.  So I took one home the other day, microwaved it for just one minute (it was refrigerated, not frozen), added some condiments and lo and behold, I can officially say I like ass taste.

The winds of change

 Many, many moons ago in a land far, far away, I started blogging on a rather inconsistent basis.  Sometimes it would be a daily thing, other times months would go by with nary a peep from me.

But back in the blog’s formative days, I wondered what I could do to set the page apart, what would be different amongst my scribblings versus everybody else’s out there.  That type of thinking begat the change meter.  Since it is not uncommon for me to just pick things up off of the ground during my daily meanderings, I figured it would be neat if I kept track of it.  Find a penny on the ground, add it to the change meter, get an extra quarter from the change slot of a vending machine, add it to the change meter.  Back then I figured I would probably find maybe $50 a year.  You know, wishful thinking.

But then the rules started to change,  I found a monthly bus pass outside of work one day.  And the day I found it was the first of the month, so the pass was good for the next 30 days or so.  And being a bus rider myself, I could ascertain what the pass was worth, that being $80 at the time, so while not money itself, the pass has an established value and I paid nothing for it, so I added its value to the change meter.

The next change to the rules (though I would simply call it an enforcement of existing rules) came when I started my part time job at Uncle Sam’s Subs.  Seems we get tipped there, though it doesn’t fall under weekly wages or figure into my paycheck in any manner.  So while I didn’t find this money per se, it wasn’t mine at any time save for the end of the shift therefore it to gets added to the change meter.  

Which brings us to today, where when last reported on here the change meter total was $5785.77.  But we are going to add to that, to the tune of $1195.13, giving us a brand new change meter total of $6980.90.

What is old is new again and new is old again

It has been a while since I have meandered about this place.  So I guess I should update the folks at home and the ships at sea what it is I am up to these days.  

First off, I am still doing the two job thing, and with the same two employers as last January, though through a circuitous route.  I am not sure how much of this I covered previously (and I am too lazy to look) but last Jan. I was working for a place called Tri-State Petroleum.  They operate a handful of gas station/convenience stores in PA, WV and MD.  All was good there, at least as good as that type of work can be, when completely unannounced, the property was sold.  We found out a day before we closed from a vendor, no one in management bothered to inform the employees.  Our job, such as it was, after the sale, was to sit in the building to make sure nobody broke in and took any merchandise until management/ownership could be bothered to get off of their asses and get everything out of the store.  So I continued to make some money for a couple weeks after the closure but I figured my future isn’t long with these people if they can just up and close a place without warning.  So I took what I figured to be a common sense approach and started filling out applications, pending my soon to be demise from my current employment status.  Once I had a couple of interviews lined up, I quit.  I gave them the same notice they gave me about the pending store closure.

As luck would have it, one of the interviews would pan out, I was hired as an overnight shift supervisor at CVS.  Pay rate was a little better than Tri-State (where I was designated as a Crew Lead), hours were the same (overnights) so it wouldn’t change my life all that much.  The only good thing about my last few weeks at Tri-State was I was able to make enough bank to book most of my summer vacation to Vancouver.

So I start at CVS, they originally put me on daylight so the managers could “train” me.  Then COVID happened, CVS was no longer open 24 hours so my potential overnight shift no longer existed.  I went from a potential shift supervisor to a glorified cashier, amidst a plethora of other cashiers.  That brought forth another change in employment, this time I was hired as a Crew Lead at Getgo, which is a chain of convenience stores owned by the same people that own Giant Eagle grocery stores in and around the area.

Again, I am hired for overnights (if I can sleep I can make money) and because amongst their offerings to customers they also sell alcohol, so part of your training is a battery of tests to make sure you are qualified to sell what they sell.  My second day they have me log in to their computer system to begin these tests, except my log in doesn’t work.  I grab the manager on duty, we walk through everything and he determines my hire information must not be in the system yet.  I am cool with it, figuring they would get back to me about taking the tests again.  There were even a couple more attempts at it, but my log in info still didn’t work, so the only thing I could do was run register and go fetch someone if it was an item I couldn’t sell.

Finally a schedule came out where I would be working overnights, except they never fixed my log in info nor had me take any of the tests needed.  At least I still had the part time job.....

That, of course, would be at Uncle Sam’s Subs.  Not glorious work by any stretch, but at least throughout most of this I was working, and with tips had a little pocket change on an almost daily basis.  Enter COVID again, where indoor dining was eliminated, so the boss cut the crew size from 4 to 3 people.  So we had the same number of mouths to feed, but with fewer hours to do it.  Plus with my schedule going on again, off again with second jobs, I am just happy to still be employed there.  But there for a while during the pandemic it was literally my only source of income.

But I did have vacation paid for, so at least there would be a respite, right?  Not when your country of origin is led by a fucking moron, whom amongst his genius solutions to the pandemic were; it will just go away, the sun and heat will rid us of it, we could try injecting disinfectant.  I have never felt so embarrassed for my fellow countrymen who thought this was any form of leadership.  Let alone disbanding the Pandemic Response Team.  Nice work twatwaffle, as well as doing nothing you sentenced 400,000 of the people you were supposed to lead to their deaths instead.   Needless to say, with leadership like that Americans were not welcomed the world over, the majority of nations closed their doors to us, Canada included.

So the vacation money became the pandemic survival money.  At least some of it did, AirJet gave me an airline credit usable for up to a year and I got refunded my credit on my hotels.com gift card, which I bought with my job spotter earnings back in the day.  

Summer and fall became the summer and fall of my discontent.  Time spent looking for a second job, while at the same time knowing most everyone wasn’t even open, let alone hiring.  There were a couple of places though, Amazon and Fed Ex, which I applied to with varying degrees of success.  Amazon, I went for the drug test, only to find that they fucked up the drug test and I would have to retake it.  So I did, and passed to no one’s surprise, and I kept getting emailed by Amazon about picking a shift so I could start, but when I went to their online jobs board, there were exactly zero openings for the location I was hired for.  For like a month and a half.  There was a second Amazon location, further away from the city but with a shuttle bus that ran to the location, so I placed some calls about the schedule of this bus and they are all like “What bus?”, “We don’t know anything about a bus?” Finally I was like the bus on your fucking website that goes to your fucking location.  That bus.  Then I get some stupid email saying there was a problem with my application and the Department of Honeland Security.  Don’t entirely know what that was about, but finally after almost two months of this I had had enough.  I said to stop with the emails for available shifts because there never are any for the location I was hired for.  Not even sure why you put out the ad to begin with.  About a week later they sent me another of those shift selection emails and lo and behold, there were slots where I was to work.  I replied to their suggestion with a hearty “Fuck you”, if they think wasting two months of my time before making an actual job offer they had another thing coming because I would never work for such a poorly run outfit.

Next in the rotation was Fed Ex, who also were looking for package handlers around the holiday season.  Unlike Amazon, there was never an issue with my drug test, nor with the Department of Homeland Security nor any other entity.  Just the boring check into my background where they would find everybody leads a more exciting life than moi, and I got the invite to orientation.  The issue, and admittedly this is solely a me issue was the travel time to and from work, as there is only one city bus to the location and I am strictly a bus rider, living in the city it makes more sense to me than a car payment and insurance payments on top of my existing expenses.  While the pay rate was fair ($15/hr), shifts were only 4-5 hours long and in my head traveling like 2 hours to and 2 hours from work to only work 4-5 hours seemed foolish.  I am actually spending 8 hours together paid for 4 or 5.  Plus, because the shifts were so short, they expected you to work 6 days a week.  Not saying if it is a good or bad deal, I imagine that schedule works well for some people, just not me and my circumstances.  When I am spending almost as much time getting to work as opposed to actually working, then I ask myself if I couldn’t be making money during that traveling time.

That being said, the days in the year and my finances were evaporating rather quickly, but my bills were still showing up monthly right on time, like clockwork.  The part time gig had me down to one day a week after dancing around my ever changing schedule for the past year.

Then I ran into one of my old coworkers from my Tri State Petroleum days.  She had said they hired her back (she left when the old store closed as well) and the current location she is at is hiring.  This was a mixed blessing in my book, on one hand I knew how to do the job, I had done it for 2 1/2 years, but they were the outfit that started my shitty year off with a bang by selling the old location and never notifying the employees that worked there.   As a funny aside, the building at the old location is still there, seems the developer is having issues when it comes to building the apartment complex they wanted.  Problems with the local planning commission as well as city zoning have left the property as vacant as my bank account.  Still, work is work and I was getting tired of blowing dust bunnies out of my wallet, so I went ahead and applied.  The interview felt more like a formality, as it turns out I knew a few of the people that were working there, former coworkers from the old location.  And the interview was in fact a formality, as about a week later I was working.  Mind you, less than what I used to make working for them, but the new location is much slower than the old store.  And worrying about hours?  Puh-leez, since I started working here in mid December every check I have gotten has overtime on it.  So I am slowly getting caught up on where the pandemic put me behind.  After all, I even got a blog entry done and how often does that happen?