|
2004-05-31 - 1:50 a.m.
can't shine off $6.55
The Nine Greatest Songs of All Time (Right Now)
1. Paula Campbell f/ Comp
"Take You Home" (remix)2. Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam with Full Force
"I Wonder If I Take You Home" 3. Big & Rich
"Save A Horse (Ride A Cowboy)" 4. AC/DC
"The Jack" 5. Jay-Z
"Public Service Announcement" (Just Blaze remix) 6. Juvenile f/ Soulja Slim
"Slow Motion" 7. Pulp
"Acrylic Afternoons" 8. The New Deal
"Receiver" 9. Trans Am
"Surrender To The Night" |
I was going to take a summer class this summer, but decided to change the concentration of my major so I don’t need the class and dropped it. So I’ve got 3 months of no school to look forward to, but I’m still keeping up with both of my jobs for the summer. And even though I’m working more or less the same number of hours a week minus all the time spent in class, so far for the past two weeks, I haven’t really felt like I have any more free time than I did before. So I’m taking an extended Memorial Day weekend and going down to Delaware to see the moms and spend some time at the beach. This past semester, I worked 3 morning shifts a week at my Towson University events department job, and I struggled most of those days to get there within an hour of when I was supposed to be there at 9am. So when they told me that my summer hours would start at 8am 5 days a week, I was kind of dreading it. But it’s cool that I get out of there by noon most days, and amazingly so far I’ve been pretty good about getting there on time, or at least no more than 10 minutes late, which is really good for me. The other day they asked me to come in at 6:30 to help out with an early job, and I said I’d try, and I really did, I set the alarm and everything, but I must’ve done something wrong because it never went off and I woke up well after 8. But I didn’t feel that guilty about it because I had a shift at my other job til 10pm that night, so I wasn’t dying to get up extra early. The thing that kind of sucks though is that most nights I don’t get to bed at a reasonable hour, so a lot of mornings I barely drag myself out of bed in time to take a shower before work, so I spend all morning at work feeling all grungy and gross, and then come home and end up taking a nap and by the time I’m awake and refreshed again, it’s too late to really doing anything with the day, if I don’t have a night shift at my other job. But I just started this schedule a couple weeks ago, hopefully I’ll find a groove and it won’t keep wearing me down so much. I really hope the workload slows down, though. About a month before the end of the semester, the amount of events we had to set up started to pick up, and it hasn’t really let up since then. There are usually nice long lulls where most days there’s only a couple small setups, and then the rest of the morning I can just chill in the office and get paid to do nothing. But lately there’s been at least one or two big setups daily, and it’s really been wearing me down. There’s just a lot of heavy lifting and my hands are killing me. Also, the guys I work with kind of drive me nuts sometimes. I’m one of the only student workers who’s still around for the summer, so I’m mainly working with the two older contract workers, Bruce and Batty. Bruce is 40ish and he’s fairly laid back, but Batty has worked for TU for 42 years, and is really set in his ways and sometimes it’s really hard to understand him. Usually I’m pretty patient with Batty, but lately I’ve been copping an attitude with him, which I should probably hold back on, but sometimes I just get sick of it. Actually, lately I feel like I’m a much more bitter and nasty person than I was not that long ago. I think that juggling two jobs for the past year has started to take its toll on my demeanor, especially at work. I used to be a lot more patient with people. The sub shop job in particular has worn down my good nature. I think customer service just does that to you. Sometimes customers are just stupid bitches. And I can deal with that, I can be nice when I choose to be, but sometimes I gotta keep it real. What really annoys me is when a customer acts surprised by the price and whines or gets nasty about it, like if they make enough of a stink I’m going to risk my job security to cut them a deal. It’s like, fuck you, you think I make the decisions around here? If you don’t like it, don’t come back, but don’t give the middleman a bad attitude about it. Sometimes I have to regulate on co-workers, too, though. Carol, usually works day shifts, so I don’t work with her that often, for which I am glad, because she’s a crabby, lazy old bitch, worked a night shift with me the other day. And when a customer asked me for a rag to wipe up a mess at their table, I handed it to him, and Carol snapped at me and told me to go clean it up for him myself. She always has to address people that way, just yelling at them to do it this way or that way, and I wasn’t having it. She can pull that shit with the daytime people, but not with me. But I decided to leave well enough alone and not force the issue. But a few minutes later she brought it up again, and I told her outright that she needs to either use a civil tone when addressing me, or I’m not going to listen to her. It felt good to stand up to her, and I’m sure it pissed her off, but I hope something got through her thick skull and she learns some manners. In the space of a week at the sub shop recently, one of my favorite co-workers gave her notice that she was quitting, and another one got in a minor car accident and has been out of work. So it’s just been a depressing place lately. Plus, there’s always dealing with the night manager Mike, who I work long closing shifts with at least once a week where he talks my fucking ear off. This guy has the most inadequate social skills ever, once you get him started he just talks and talks and even if you try to contribute to the conversation, he just steamrolls right over it and goes back to whatever he wants to talk about, and stutters and repeats himself, and my dad is pretty longwinded so I grew up learning how to tolerate people like that, but this guy is driving me nuts. The other night he showed me a short story he wrote, since I’m an English major, and asked me to critique it and such. And it was basically just this weird fantasy about dating a stripper and it got all creepy and sexual and ugh. I used to feel like there was some kind of nobility or spiritual enrichment in working hard in these low paying jobs, but now I’m just starting to get tired of feeding myself that myth. There’s no dignity, no enlightment, and sure as hell ain’t no money. I will not look back on my wasted youth in the food service industry with fondness. -al
previous - next
|
