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"To be awkward or unkempt, to talk or move wrongly is to be a dangerous giant, a destroyer of worlds...any accurately improper move can poke through the thin sleeve of immediate reality." - Erving Goffman
God I love the smell of drunken employees in the morning.
See you all December 9th if I'm still alive!
Here is where it gets awkward and I don't know what to do. Last year, I got used bowls for christmas from them. Absolutely used, there were dings, scratches, and someone didn't wash them all the way, though they did have the box. This year, Brooke went to a bridal show and got a free gift bag full of facial care products that is destined to be my gift this year (We know this because brother called mom to ask what to get everyone and he said that).
The quandary comes in with the fact that I spend a great deal of time in picking out their gifts. They might be quirky sometimes (This year I'm getting my brother an OSU piggy bank and his fiancee her college's piggy bank, because my brother really likes to squirrel away money everywhere and college football is something they're both really into).
It's not about the gift.. it's more about the time spent thinking about it? Used bowls and freebies you don't want really doesn't say 'I'm happy to be part of your family!'
"To be awkward or unkempt, to talk or move wrongly is to be a dangerous giant, a destroyer of worlds...any accurately improper move can poke through the thin sleeve of immediate reality." - Erving Goffman
Nothing is going to get better. It's not.”
― Dr. Seuss, The Lorax
"To be awkward or unkempt, to talk or move wrongly is to be a dangerous giant, a destroyer of worlds...any accurately improper move can poke through the thin sleeve of immediate reality." - Erving Goffman
First and foremost, @Macavity: I really do extend all of my heartfelt empathy for you man. That sounds like a seriously crappy situation and I hope for your sanity it finds a favorable resolution soon.
I have a few rages to rage about. First, Best Buy.
The morning of Black Friday I was derping about and had my awesome slippers on. They are super comfy and since my wife is preggo and baking at about 350 degrees all the time, she has the thermostat set at 60 most of the time and still complains how hot it is. Psuedo-rage number one. Negated partially by slippers. Huzzah! However, because I had my slippers on I didn't realize I got my foot tangled in my laptop's power cord and when I turned to go derp somewhere else, my laptop fell on the floor. From a height of about 4 feet. Onto hardwood. Mini-rage one. My wife, however, had the right idea to check to see what kind of additional coverage we opted for when we bought the laptop. Usually I'm not one to get the accidental damage protection or anything like that, because I'm usually pretty careful with my stuff. With this laptop, however, we got it because there was super cheap and I was travelling all the dang time for business. It just made sense. Well, it was a freaking amazing thing that I did buy it, because in theory it should be covered and I can get my precious restored to almost-new condition. So, mini-rage one is partially negated by additional protection! Hooray!
I absolutely despise going out. I hate every aspect of shopping, I hate every aspect of eating at a restaurant, pretty much if it involves being anywhere other than my home or the home of someone that I know, I have an active dislike for it. There are very rare exceptions, in fact I can only think of one off the top of my head, but the bottom line is I hate it all. I don't like it when people sneak up on me, I don't like not being able to see the various points of entry for the location, and I don't like being unable to formulate some sort of response plan to a variety of emergency scenarios. So, now that we've covered that, you can understand why it is that I really didn't enjoy the idea of having to drop my laptop off at Best Buy on Black Friday, but hey, it had to be done so I'll put on my grumpy face and try to not rip anyone's face off. So my wife and I find our way into the store and get in line to go up to the Customer Service counter. We wait in line for maybe 20 minutes or so, not bad, we specifically chose 1100 to come in because we figured the shopping for deals would have slackened a bit as hungry shoppers dispersed to find sustenence. I perhaps overestimated the importance of food to people craving bargains, but all is fine and dandy, right? No. I get to the front of the line and I get asked what I'm picking up. I respond with 'Nothing, I need to drop my laptop off for repairs.' I get told that they're not doing that today because they need everyone they have to check out Black Friday shoppers. I see. So apparently the 2 years of accidental damage coverage is really 728 days of accidental damage coverage, because we need to nix the two Black Fridays in that timeframe since I can't get any service there. Enter major rage one. I absolutely get that for retailers there isn't a bigger day than Black Friday. Cool. Got it. Need to make the dough. I'm all over that. Let me stay home and everyone else can go nuts. What I'm NOT OK with is that the money I spent previously at the store is apparently no good for the services purchased because I'm not spending more money right now. Have to keep upping that bottom line, eh? Yeah. So my wife drags me to look at the DSLR cameras, since we don't have a decent camera and apparently people like to take pictures of babies. Whatever. I snap at the stupid sales associate that asked us "if we had any questions about digital DSLR cameras." No you stupid redundant unicorn, I don't have any questions other than why do you have to aggrivate me further. You've already lost my business on this camera, the best you can do is save face and hope that I forget about this six months from now when the world is telling me my six month old needs a cell phone or whatever and I'm in the market for some fancy electronics.
So, naturally I go ahead and write a sharply worded letter to the store's management. I would want to know if my employees were being stupid or we as a terminal were failing, so I figured I'd extend the same courtesy to these folks. I love how they immediately want to offer to make things right. Well, it's a pretty freaking easy concept, how about you let me drop off my laptop for repairs. I'd like for it to be a very quick, efficient process where I have an appointment, show up at the allotted time, don't have to wait in any sort of a line, fill out the paperwork and drop my computer off and am on my way until I get a nice phone call saying that it has been fixed. Trying to give me a gift card or something isn't going to "make up" for it. The time I have away from work is far too precious to place a price on it arbitrarily with store credit. How much is my time worth? Probably more than you're authorized to... authorize. Or whatever. The point being that you need to keep your silly little trinkets and electrons and lets get down to the really valuable stuff -- time. Now I have to spend some time writing a bluntly worded letter to get my point across. Psuedo-rage two, since I'm putting a bit of time and effort into writing this rage post, and I just spent the last 24 hours writing almost 25,000 words towards an awesome novel of Aetolian-ness chock full of characters from the game and other characters who have names that are suspiciously similar and are portrayed in a less than favorable light. The vast majority of them were simply grabbing names out of a hat. I will admit that a very select few were carefully selected so I could live out my Aetolian Fantasy in text. I know that sounds weird and mildly amusing, and I found it so, and if you take it personal then I will laugh at you because you shouldn't take anything in Aetolia personally. Except that one thing that I took personally and hold a personal grudge against the player they I don't even interact with and hope they fall into a wood chipper. The good news is, it probably isn't you. You forum peeps are pretty darn spiffy. Where the heck was I?
Alright, so lets talk about time. And work. Specifically time at work. Or work time. Time to work. Time spent at work. Some combination there of. I work at what I will call a medium-sized location. We have basically five categories of locations -- tiny, small, medium, large, and humongoid. Humongoid is like the largest location in the world of its type. It will take you two hours to drive across it. There are half a dozen managers or more on duty at any given time. They get a lot of resources because they are awesome, sort of. I do not work there, thankfully. See the second paragraph about going places where there are people. Then we have large locations. They're pretty sizeable operations, make up the bulk of the actual work the company performs. Typically they are grossly overstaffed, having the sam number of managers as the humongoid location(s) with far less work. 4 on, 3 off schedule anyone? Then you have our operation. We do pretty incredible work for our size, and since business is booming right now we're racing to keep pace. Below us are the small operations that I would say do between 25 and 80% of the work we do. They're usually staffed the same as us, for some reason. Then you have the tine locations. You are the one guy there, you hot shot you! Make your own hours, take responsibility for whatever mess ups there are, take all the credit when you're awesome. Cool, now that you have the background, we'll get to the substance of the rage.
I got my boss fired this summer. It was pretty epic, because then I got in trouble due to politics. I hate politics. But we were running the whole place with myself, another more seasoned manager, and a trainee. No offense to the trainee, but he might as well have not been here since he had no idea what he was doing and was gone all the time. It's alright, we all started somewhere. So we worked like that for more than a month and a half. Then we got our new boss in and we trained him and he's phenominal. Then the trainee actually started becoming useful, and we all thought this was great because it had been a long time since this location had more than three managers. Having four of us would dramatically improve our quality of life because we could actually get trained by the more experienced managers, we could develop professionally, we would be able to work 10-12 hour days instead of 13+ hour days, and we could actually abide by the 5 on/2 off schedule that the region is dictating with their iron fist that every location abide by. We were making a tremendous push to keep our trainee since he was already useful to us and he was here, the company wouldn't have to pay to move him, etc. etc. Things were looking like we might actually get to keep him, too! Then, we get told he's going north to the smaller operation north of us that screws us every which way to Saturday, all day every day at every conceivable opportunity. The senior manager there has an ego larger than Zaphod Beeblebrox's ego, and if he just kept it in check, wasn't a jerk and actually worked more than 35 hours a week, there would be absolutely no need for him to work his young managers to death and create the illusion that they need a fourth manager. Now they'll reap the benefits while doing a small fraction of the actual work/revenue generation that we do. To make matters worse, I know there will be at least 10 weeks out of the year that I will be working without days off because each of the two managers above me get 4 weeks of vacation and we all ahve at least 1 week of training at head quarters annually. So of the 49 weeks that I will be working here, 10 of them will be without days off. So because someone decided that we had too many managers as it is, I have no need apparently for 20% of my off days this next year.
To complicate things, one of the managers is refusing to work anything other than straight nights. He says he can't go back and forth between nights and days anymore because he's too old. So he and our boss will be on straight nights and days and I'm the swing guy. I have a medical condition that kind of requires a fixed, regular sleep schedule and I benefit tremendously from having a set routine. When there is vast change, bad things tend to happen. For example, instead of being able to focus on work I end up writing a 50,000 word novel and then a lengthy rant post. Whatever floats your boats home skillets. I really hate to bust out the ADA and request reasonable accomodations, but I honestly am having a hard time finding the alternative solution that doesn't end with me in the hospital. Been there, done that, not happening again if there is anything I can do about it. Then throw in the aforementioned bebeh that's fixing to escape from slaver's isle soon and I'll already be three or four steps behind for sleep and routine next year. Like I said, I really hate to play the ADA card but if I'm left no other option, thats what it is going to come down to. Furthermore, these jackalopes told us we'd get to keep our trainee until after I come back from my FMLA for bebeh bonding and momma caring time. I went ahead and dropped one train on them and told them I wasn't taking it until sometime in 2014. They interpreted it as 2 weeks in January of 2014. Specifically the first two weeks. OK, we can play that game. Then they decide that they can't actually keep our trainee at our location that long and he HAS to go to his new position on January 1st. So much for keeping him until I even start my FMLA, let alone after! Like I said though, I'm good at playing these stupid little games. The entire month of January is sounding awfully good for bonding. Might even dip into February, I'll be sure to come back only after I'm all good and bonded with this child.
So, tl;dr - Best Buy sucks, time is precious, my employer is dumb and apparently hates those of us working at my location because they have denied our obvious need for another manager so we are adequately staffed and even went so far as to tell us that we were overstaffed as it is.
Nothing is going to get better. It's not.”
― Dr. Seuss, The Lorax
My rage is I ordered a new TV from Amazon.
Said TV arrived with a multitude of dead pixels.
TV had been a great deal.
I process return, exchange/replacement not an option. (Out of stock)
Will not get $$ until they receive mine back.
Same size TV, different brand on Cyber Monday sale.
Don't have another $400 just lying around.
Screwed.
Been dying for a bigger/nicer TV for years, finally have some money saved up..and screwed. RAWWRR.
I'll survive, might be some Christmas-y sales that come about, I'll just have to keep an eye out.
Thank you for not continuing the circle of dickery, Saybre :-) I can't do it either, I feel so BAD about it.