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?

 

Covid casualty

Well I guess I should begin at what feels like the beginning.  Prior to my last vacation, which is now going on two years ago (Christmas 2018), the change meter was sitting at a total of 2655.79, since then the total has more than doubled, with me collecting another 3129.98 since then, so if we add the numbers together, which I hear you need to do in order to get a total sum, the change meter now sits at 5785.77.  While it has been more than a minute since I have been on this page, I am back to at least report on a Covid casualty of sorts.

Since my last entry, many moons ago, a pandemic broke out.  Perhaps you heard about it, lots of people wearing masks or throwing temper tantrums for being asked to wear a mask.  Schools closed, businesses closed, there was a big write up on it in the news.  As for me, I have been biding my time through it, furloughed from my part time gig, picked up a couple of temporary full time gigs, brought back to the part time gig, they were all time wasters until my summer vacation, which of course would be a return trip to Vancouver.  Thankfully I had everything paid for prior to pandemic 2020.  Or so I thought.

I went looking at my bookings, both flight and hotel as I wanted to be in Vancouver for the Honda Celebration of Light, it is along the lines of a week long festival and on three of the nights there are fireworks displays out in English Bay.  The competitors come from three different nations and are judged with one nation being the overall winner, based on presentation, synchronization with the music etc., etc.

Anyway I double checked my flight with the festival dates, all good, then i checked my hotel booking and it was a couple of days later than day one of the festival.  Apparently i got the wrong date stuck in my head when it came to booking that piece of the puzzle, so i went and booked a second hotel room for the missing dates.  This was partially solved through the jobspotter app (now deceased) where I racked up enough Amazon gift card cash where I could purchase a hotels.com gift card to alleviate the cost of a second hotel.

That was until the hotel I originally booked was sold.  I wish I were making this stuff up but it is true.  The cool thing was the company that owned them owned a second hotel in downtown Vancouver and they were letting people rebook at the second location, which I took advantage of, so crisis averted there.

Then along comes the pandemic, at first it closed the US-Canada border until March 21st.  Little did I realize that living in a country being run by a full blown retard, 6 months later that closure would still be in place with nary an iota of leadership coming out of Washington DC.  State governors have been left to fend for themselves with varying degrees of success, in part because some places wanted to do nothing and others wanted to hurry up and return to the status quo of prepandemic days.  Meanwhile I am watching days disappear from the calendar, and things get worse here, not better.  It is now at the point where the rest of the world is telling Americans to basically “Fuck off!”.

Where that was readily apparent for me was in the flight booking.  Flights to and from starting changing on an almost weekly basis, departure times would change, then destinations would change.  My return flight was to be Vancouver to Toronto (at night, so I could get some shut eye on the plane), then Toronto to New York City and from there New York to Pittsburgh.  Then the changes started rolling in, I would go from Toronto to Atlanta to New York to Pittsburgh, then it was Vancouver to Seattle to Atlanta to New York to Pittsburgh to when the border closure was extended on Tuesday I would be on the ground in Seattle three hours after I was to board a plane in Atlanta.  Heck while I was in the air from Seattle to Atlanta I was also supposed to on a plane from New York to Pittsburgh.  Needless to say, that was still a work in progress.

I checked how things were going in my destination, they were racking up about 100 Covid cases a day, or what would pass as a typical day in Pennsylvania.  But as I was looking I saw the Honda Festival of Lights was one of the things that was cancelled.  Social distancing and all that jazz I am sure, but I still had the plane ticket (sort of)and hotel, I think I could amuse myself for a week if need be.

Then Tuesday rolled around.  I finished a book I started reading (it is on top of goodreads to the right) and I was just heading into a eye appointment ( which took about a month to get, thanks again Covid).  I sit down in the waiting room and crack open the phone to see what is going on in the world and that is when I see the border closure has been extended to Aug 21, well after my bookings.  Not that I blame Canada, if I could keep my people safe by denying entry from a nation of fucktards, I would do it too.  Every day it seems there is another video from someone who is throwing a tantrum like a 5 year old over being asked to wear a mask.  Literally like grow the fuck up or do us all a favor and get sick and die already.   I am cool with culling the gene pool of these obvious living defects.

Anyway before I get more ranty, I spent this morning cancelling my hotel reservation and my flight, so yeah, I guess I am still a little pissy about it all.  The hotel was easy because I had paid for the rebooking yet, they were to take their money two days prior to my booking (they have my card info) and the airline, while not refunding cash, did issue me a credit for the cost of the flight that I have two years to use.  Hoping to try again next summer, but relying on my fellow Americans to take responsibility in getting a handle on this pandemic is probably foolish so good thing the credit is good for two years.

Lies and more lies

     So, I had an interesting meeting on Friday.  Seems that my last full time job, where they gave us a whole one day notice they were closing before they closed (see last blog for more about that), had an issue with me for filing for unemployment because I left two days before they locked the doors permanently (I spent two weeks just sitting in the store every night babysitting their property because they were too lazy or stupid to make arrangements to have it picked up in a timely manner) and I was offered a transfer to a store that I told them I couldn't get too, a downside to be reliant on public transportation but not sure I would have wanted it even if I had a means to get there anyway.  I am not one who lets people fuck them over twice, you get one shot then you are dead to me. 

     So I started scheduling interviews figuring I might as well get the ball rolling on getting on with my life.  While I was busy doing applications and scheduling inerviews and waiting on callbacks, I went ahead and filled out an unemployment claim, figuring worst case scenario I would have something to fall back on at least temporarily.  All is good, got some paperwork from the unemployment people including signing up for the state's jos search website (PA Career links), had a handful of interviews and figure if one of them pans out I should be good to go.  Untl a couple of weeks ago, when I get a letter from the state saying my former employer is contesting my initial claim.

     You might think this is a bad thing, but I would argue it is not (at least if you can get by for a couple of weeks with a diminished income).  Because then you get to go to an appeal hearing to make your case regarding your claim.  You go and sign in and they hand you a folder to review.  In that folder is everything your former employer wrote about you, which is awesome becaus then you get to see everything they lied about.  Which I am guessing they knew because while both parties were notified about the hearing, they didn't even show up.  So I got to explain to the mediator that no one besides my store manager ever mentioned a potential transfer to me, and I explained then that I would not have a means to get to said location.  The mediator asked if I could take a cab or Uber and I said the charge on that on a nightly basis would have been probably half what I made that shift, and working for like 6.50 an hour isn't even minimum wage, so the offer was not practical.  He asked if I spoke to anyone else, I said the management team never gave me a time to sit down with them and discuss other options (which is true), I was asked if the other notes in there were accurate and I said no, the lone offer of a transfer I was given would have also resulted in a cut in my hours so not only would I be spendng have of my shift money getting to and fro, there would be fewer shifts for me as well and my pay rate may be the same, I could be cut as much as 20 hours a week (and still be called full time), so it was a pay cut all the same.

     The arbitrator seemed to agree with me, as he told me I could refile my claim at the next available opportunity, which hopefully will not be needed as I am waiting on a background check to come in on a potential job opportunity (the offer has been extended, pending my background check) which will be more money than I was making at the last job as a starting wage (not after 2+ years) so I have my fingers crossed (though there is nothing on my record so I don't know what the issue would be).

      Like I said though, the appeal was a good thing if only because it taught me what people who I thought were at least decent to me at one point, really thought of me overall and were more than content to stab me in the back at first opportunity.  To them a hearty "Fuck you!".  I figure the reason they did not show up for the appeal would be they would have to defend their lies in what passes for a legal proceeding, and they didn't have the balls to do that.

It’s dark

It’s dark.  That is about all I can say as we head into a new year.  Just sitting at work, listening to Pandora (so you may get Pandora updates in here) and trying to blog.  Not that I like blogging from my phone, or that I like having time enough to attempt this at work, but what can I do about that?

Our saga begins on my Sunday night/Monday morning shift.  Since I am almost strictly overnight, I never know which day to call a shift.  On the schedule it is a Sunday shift, even though the majority of it takes place on Monday (11pm-7am).   Anyway enough about that, usually on overnights I have a list of things I do besides the normal waiting on customer stuff, including making sure the coffee station is refilled and ready to go by 5am, sweep and mop the store, count all of our cigarettes and restock missing ones, run the daily reports from the previous day and check in and scan in any incoming orders.  This particular Sunday/Monday however, i was more productive, I managed to change the garbage cans in the parking lot as well as get half of the walk-in cooler restocked as well.  It sounds simple, but in both instances I have to leave the floor, which I am not allowed to do if someone comes in (I work alone and am not allowed to leave the store unattended).  I knew I still had an order coming, so I retrieved the scanning gun from the office for the occasion.  Everything was going swimmingly, or so I thought.  

My boss, Beth, shows up around 6am, we do the normal hi, hellos, how was your weekend thing, she is followed by the Frito Lay vendor.  Nothing unusual there, he always comes late (at least late for me as it is in the middle of morning rush) but he doesn’t have anything with him.  Nonetheless I grab the scanning gun, prepared to scan in whatever it is we ate getting.  He says he isn’t bringing in anything because we are closing, to which I say that is news to me.  I explain to Beth what I have been told, so she calls the district manager who informs us that at 10am on Tuesday we are closed permanently.  Mind you this is 6:30am Monday.

So what am I doing here Tuesday night you may ask?  Apparently they want someone on site at all times until all of the crap is removed.  Which should be a fun task since the employees were not the only ones who were left in the dark.  Tuesday morning I had to refuse deliveries from Coke, 7Up and McKee foods as nobody told them that we were going out of business either.  Right now I am here to prevent potential looting and when I step out for a cigarette it is eerily dark, with no lights, no glow from the pumps and the signage all turned off.

Not even sure what the future brings at this point.  There comes a point in life where you get tired of starting over and I feel I am dangerously close to it.  I have an interview set up for Thursday (thanks Doug) though I don’t know how long I get to hang out and prevent looting.  It could be one week, it could be one month.  There was talk of transferring employees to other locations, but not sure I want to work with people who treat employees in such a manner.  Plus if I take a transfer not sure how that effects my part time job.  I am tempted to just take unemployment for a while and sit on my ass.  Explore my possibilities, maybe just get the hell out of here altogether.  Who knows at this point.

This just made the list, Christmas list 2019 edition

Before Chris Jericho had his list gimmick in WWE, i have been posting my Christmas list on ye olde blog.  Since once again it is that time of year time to find out who or what made the list.  You will note some of the entries are repeats from previous lists, either because I have yet to receive said item or because I used the item and am going all “Thank you sir, may I have another”.  In any instance, time for the list.

Groceries

Money

Gift Cards

Jo Jo Rabbit on DVD

The new David Thorne book

A day off of work

Female companionship, or a sex doll

Plane ticket to London

Great Wall bus ticket to Chinatown

A maid

A home cooked meal

Pickled eggs

Grandma’s Ham Pot Pie

My mom’s chocolate chip cookies

Any season after season 1 of Homicide:Life on the Street

One of those Popeye’s chicken sandwiches that are all the rage these days

A port authority bus pass

Lottery tickets

A raise at work

Smart TV(as opposed to my stupid TV)i

Days of frustration

So today was to be the big day, the day where I book my flight out of Pittsburgh for vacation next summer.  This may come off as a little premature to some but I like to have things squared away in advance, plus I am booking around a specific event, so I expect a potential traffic increase on bookings closer to the event.  So a combination of time (I have worked 28 straight overnight shifts without a day off to this point) and available funds (my paycheck finally cleared the bank after they dat on it for like 4 days) meant today was going to be the day.  It was until it wasn’t.

I get home from work, get settled in with a bowl of shredded mini wheats and hop on ye olde laptop to get about the business of booking.  I opt to use Expedia, through the Swagbucks website, so I can do a little double dipping, get vacation and additional swagbucks for my account.  So i find what appears to be the appropriate link and go through filling out the necessary fields on to get a your booking has failed message, try again in a couple of minutes.  So I wait and while I am waiting I get logged out somehow, i hop back on and I have to refill out everything, hit the confirm button and again nothing.  I noticed that while filling out everything the defaults were Canada, which is where I am going, not where I am from.  So i look to the browser bar and swagbucks had connected me to Expedia.ca as opposed to .com.  Figure no harm no foul, none of the bookings were confirmed so I would just go back to the correct Expedia site and start again.

With the correct Expedia site in the address bar I again attempt my booking, which is cheaper now as it is in US dollars versus Canadian ones, fill out everything I saw and confirm.  Turns out I missed something, whether I want trip insurance which allows me to cancel with no penalty.  Don’t want that, drag my corpse there if you have to but I am going, so I click no and confirm.  Again I get the failed booking message, try again in two minutes.  So I wait, try again, same result.  Wash rinse repeat on the bullshit too many times to count until I get a message saying there is something wrong with my account.  Turns out they were charging my card each time I tried to book while not making an actual booking.  So now I call them to find out what is going on.  After dead ending through one of their bullshit automated menus, I call a second time and ask why my account is being charged for multiple bookings that never confirmed, as my account was now reading $-788.45.  I was told that those are pending charged, they will disappear in a couple of days.  That sent off my inner rage monster, I ask how that fucking helps me today, as I cant use my card for anything now.  I was told I could make the booking today with a different card.  My reply was why would I do that when you have already made one card useless for the foreseeable future.

Not trusting Expedia at this point, I contacted my bank, not expecting miracles after my deposit fiasco a year ago where the ATM erred on a deposit by $11 and it took better than three months of fighting to get my money back, but any port in a financial storm.  While the conversation was somewhat helpful, though again no immediate resolution to my problem, they tried to hock another service on me at the same time.  Sorry, I am still pissed that i can’t cash my paycheck without having the money to cover it, there is no way in hell I am giving you more money that you will deny me access to.  Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, fuck you or something like that.

Shazam, I'm back (and still stupid too)

   I realize I have ignored this place for months now.  I would offer an apology for that, but this page  on my schedule , not yours so no apology will be forthcoming.  In fact, what I am about to write about happened like a month or so ago, that is how current I am being with this entry.  Te hnically I still have about a third of a vacation entry still in draft status and considering vacation was in December this entry will be current by comparison.
So time to grab Peabody and Sherman and hit the Wayback Machine again.  Shortly after my promotion at work (I am technically titled Crew Lead at the gas station, but given I work overnights by myself, that would be a crew of one I am leading) I realized my new overnight schedule would leave me with Sundays off at both jobs.  Yes, now at least every week I will have one day off both places.  This particular weekend, weekstart was doubly nice though, I was going to be off both jobs on Monday as well.

   With that type of respite, I figured I might as well go do something cool Sunday afternoon/evening.  I had worked both jobs on Saturday, so by the time I had gotten off at 7am Sunday, I was ready for a nice long nap.  It turns out it was too long of a nap, but the weather was still kind of nice, so I shook off my daily malaise and decided to make something with what remained of Sunday.  I had a free movie pass for the Waterfront (yay, Coke caps come through again), so I walked up my street to Forbes Ave to catch the 61D, which goes right to the Waterfront.  It was like 8 o'clock or so, by the time I caught the next regularly scheduled bus and got to the theater it was maybe 9ish.  The game plan was to catch "Shazam", but by the time I got there just one showing was left, a 10pm showing in 3D.  As people who know me know, I hate 3D movies, it is like putting on dorky glasses to see something that looks like it is straight out of a Fischer Price Viewmaster.  So I quickly peruse the remaining movies and "Hotel Mumbai" had a showing at like 10:20, another movie that I wanted to see after seeing trailers online.  I wasn't all kinds of comic book geeked out for it as I was "Shazam", but hey, I'm here, it's here and best of all, it's free.  With an extra almost hour and a half to kill before the movie, taking in the wholesome goodness of a Primanti's sandwich seemed like a good plan.

    So I get my belly good and full (so I am not ordering overpriced theater snacks) and i get back to the theater around showtime.  I settle in and am pkeasantly surprised how good the movie turns out to be.  It would be one of the best I have seen this year, if I did and end of year recap of such things, but then Hollywood luminaries would be asking for statues and shit.  That would be followed by a bunch of winners having too long acceptance speeches and I don't want to be up till three am covering an awards ceremony for awards I created, so there will be no "best of 2019" list on this blog.  The run time of the movie was a bit long, I did not realize this going in, but it checked in around 2 hours and 20 minutes.  So when i get out of the theater I walk to the adjacent bus stop, where I wait for about 20 minutes and no bus.  I am thinking the movie ran longer than the bus schedule, so I walk across the Waterfront over to Giant Eagle so if there are any late buses left I can possibly catch one to at least Sq Hill.  I wait there maybe another 15 minutes or so before I decide nothing is going to come, but I have one last bus I can try to catch, I can walk up to 8th Avenue and try for a 61C, which I know runs late.  I get to that bus stop, and wait what feels like an appropriate amount of time before deciding that no bus is going to be forthcoming, I am better off just walking home.  Now I have made this walk in the past, during the day I have taken the trail along the river from Oakland to the Waterfront, and it is one of my favorite bike rides when I have the bicycle out of mothballs.  Just a hop down the hill, across the Hot Metal Bridge, and catch the trail at the South Side Works.   But this was late at night, and to my knowledge the trail isn't lit.  Not that I am afraid of the dark, but a dark wooded trail with my nighttime eyesight (nonexistent) and walking home that way would be problematic.  There was another option, I knew 8th Avenue eventually ran into East Carson Street in West Homestead (west siiiiiide, holla).  Of course i came to this realization after walking halfway back to the trail, so I split the difference and walked 7th Avenue instead.  It has to run parallel to 8th Avenue, right?  And so it does, until it doesn't as it runs into 8th Avenue in West Homestead (west siiiide, holla), at which point I decided I could just walk 8th Avenue the rest of the way.  And that plan worked until I got to the Glenwood Bridge interchange, then at some point I got all discombobulated, my lack of sense of
direction mixed with my non existent night vision put me on the wrong path.  Where I was walking was still flat, or at least felt flat, so I assume the river was just beyond the woods to my right.  I even saw signs say certain areas were Hays and Baldwin, i remember seeing similar signs walking along the trail as those boroughs are responsible for certain portions of the trail, so I keep walking.  And walking.  And walking.  I am not seeing any familiar landmarks on the horizon.  I see a big hill off to the right, I assume that is the other side of the river.  Maybe Greenfield or Hazelwoid or something.  Finall

Penguins @ Canucks 10/27/18

Pittsburgh 5  Vancouver 0

Evgeni Malkin - 2 G, A

Casey DeSmith registered his second career NHL shutout

Penguins @ Flames 10/25/18

Pittsburgh 9  Calgary 1

Derrick Brassard - 3 A

Evgeni Malkin with a 6 game point streak (2 G, 10 A)

Penguins @ Oilers 10/23/18

Pittsburgh 6  Edmonton 5  OT

Patric Hornqvist - 2 G, A

Pittsburgh has a point in 5 straight games

Laundry day

Sitting in ye olde laundromat just washing some work clothes before I kick off a relatively easy work week for myself (only one double), but whilst I was away some things did happen which require my attention, or some cleaning up as one doing laindry might say, which I just did.

I am bummed by the quick closing of "Hug Thai" here in Oakland.  I know, you don't know where or what it is, but it appeared to be a Thai restaurant around the corner from my apartment.  Now I am not one that has a hugely experimental palate, I am not as bad as my mom was in that department, but  I can honestly say I have never had Thai food, so a place so close to my apartment tempted me to try it soon.  I figure i could get something to go, if it sucked too bad I could always make something at home, but this would at least be between me going from points A and B, rather than going out of my way to try something I didn't like.  Except they were open for like two weeks, so by the time I was able to stop by after work onenight there was a closed for renovations sign on the door.  Perhaps this saved me, if they could only make it two weeks, i am thinking even if Thai food was good, this was a poor representation of said food.

So, Leveon Bell decided not to sign his franchise tender offer with the Steelers and chances are good he will never play in the black and gold again.  I don't get the mindless peeps that immediately went to critical mode of him.  Yes, I get he could have made $14 million this year and it is more than anyone reading this blog will make in their lifetime, but NFL contracts are just paper.  Everything is about guaranteed money, not just this season but going forward.  Otherwise a team can cut you, and regardless of what your contract says financially, NFL players are basically "at will" employees, they can be cut or fired at any time for almost any reason.  So I get Bell wanting some form of security in the form of guaranteed money.  The fact James Connor has played well in Bell's stead, makes it all the easier to FU Bell from the fanbase's perspective.  But what happens whoen Connor's rookie contract comes up, and he is seeking and exponentially larger increase in salary than Bell sought, given Connor is pkaying on a third round rookie contract right now.  James Connor better be watching what is taking place right now, because unless the Steelers lock him up under a long term extension before his contract comes up, the same people loving him right now will be offering up the Bell treatment to him soon enough.

Lastly, I should probably pontificate on the elephant in the room, that being the shooting that took place at the Tree of Life synagogue a couple of weeks ago.  First off, I am not surprised in the least.  As I have often said, nothing is going to change because dead bodies are just the cost of doing business in America.  Sooner rather than later we will be able to teach our kids geography by the number of people killed in a certain location.  What was off putting to me, besides the carnage, was the Stronger Than Hate thing that popped up immediately afterward, as if somebody saw this occur and thought to themself, this is a prime branding opportunity.  Because clearly it is incorrect.  Mr. Bowers was exposed in the same concoction of geography, so certainly the region itself is not stronger than hate.  I'll admit, I am not stronger than hate, I keep all emotions, including hate, available in my emotional toolbox, as one does not know when a specific emotion may be called for. I am aure that comes from a childhood where the first memory of my father was of him trying to choke the life out of my mother.  I guess the trend now is to offer thoughts and prayers, but how has that worked out for Sandy Hook, or Orlando, or Parkland.  It is the emptiest of gestures to do.

Penguins @ Maple Leafs 10/18/18

Pittsburgh 3  Toronto 0

Evgeni Malkin - 2 G, A

Sidney Crosby tied Gary Sittler for 60th place on the NHL all time scoring list with an assist.

Canucks @ Penguins 10/16/18

Vancouver 3  Pittsburgh 2  OT

Jake Guentzel, Carl Hagelin - G each

Pittsburgh has lost three straight to Vancouver