[[Still A Girly Girl]]

Jul 30, 2005

My job is a soul-sucking vortex. The locals here have created colorful names for many of the businesses. The Cottage Cafe is "The Rottage"; The Sunset Cafe is "The Scumset". You get the picture. Tonight someone told me that Safeway's nickname is "Slaveway". That sounds about right.

Usually my manager is really good about making sure to not overwork us, and she always, always gives us two days off in a row, but she had surgery a couple weeks ago and someone else is in charge of our schedule for the time being. Well, kind of. The fuel station manager made the schedules up ahead of time, but the woman who compiles all the different departmental schedules into one big conglomeration of scheduling goodness has been really taking her own liberties and shuffling things around. Next week will be the second in a row that I have had Monday and Thursday off, and this week I got called in to close on my Thursday off. Just to spite her for asking for the day off she gave half of my usual 8-hour Sunday shift to a co-worker whose last day is Monday. Would it have killed her to at least give her my whole shift?

Anyway. The scheduling was inconvenient to begin with, but some unexpected problems have changed the last couple days from six hours in uniform to fifteen hours in uniform. When I got called in yesterday I was a little less upset about it than I would have been had I not been told that our union contract dictated time and a half on more than five days in a pay period (we get paid weekly), or more than eight hours in a shift. Today I found out that the union contract was recently changed and now we only make overtime on anything over 40 hours a week. My job is also classified as "Helper Clerk" so I don't qualify for any of the health benefits. I'm glad that my $33-a-month dues are working so hard for me.

Today was supposed to be an easy shift. I was supposed to start at 2:00 P.M. and clock out at 8:00 P.M. All was going according to plan until about 3:00 when the computer system went down and the gas pumps started being finicky about whose cards they would accept. Around 4:30 they stopped accepting credit and debit payments altogether. About a quarter of our customers normally pay at the window, but today, for seven hours, every single customer had to actually interact with a human being. Since the computers were excruciatingly slow in processing sales, our turnover time was between 90 and 120 seconds per customer. Usually it takes 10 seconds or less from "Hello" to "Thank you, have a good day". We went from 100+ customers through the station in an hour to around 50, with a constant line-up of 8 or 10 at a time. About a quarter of them were patient. I got to stay until we closed.

After I clocked off at 11:06 I purchased ingredients for a salad, and two pints of Ben & Jerry's (My rule is that I only buy Ben & Jerry's if it's on sale. It went on sale last week. It's on sale through August 2. I'm certainly not getting any skinnier before Tuesday.) I just ate as much imitation crab, $3 avacado, and hearts of romaine as my happy little tummy could handle, and I'm on my way to bed soon. I have to be up in less than 6 hours to go back to work.

Boy, will I be glad when my boss's 10-12 weeks of recovery time are through. Just 8-10 weeks to go...

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Posted by erynthenerd @ 12:17 AM

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