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.