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?
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