Reflections On A Week of Days

Wow, that week went by pretty quickly.

I am off until Tuesday morning at 6:30 a.m. This is the first long weekend I've had off in a year and a half; Labour Day will be the first holiday I'm not scheduled for since I started here. And I asked to work Monday (actually Sunday night). It's the money: at time and a half I still make less than I made...wow, a little more than two years ago now. Time is elastic.

Witness my mornings. They go by in a blur: cull and face my department, reduce product, see what I need to stock, check off what came in and get it on carts to come out or shelves in the cooler if I don't need it, and fill the shelves. You put it in one sentence like that, it doesn't look like a lot of work.

It can be. Today the order filled the cooler such that I couldn't even move in there. My fresh meat was two pallets, each taller than I am. My full-time deli girl, who has been tasked with training her boss, was actually impressed with me today. She said she wouldn't have got the order processed as quickly as I did. (I think she's lying -- she's good -- but it felt really good to hear, anyway).

It's a far cry from how I'm sure she felt on Monday.

Reducing product: the reduced stickers are perforated in three places. Between stickers (obviously); horizontally between the reduced price and the bar code; and INEXPLICABLY vertically in the exact middle of that bar code. I made a complete ass of myself trying to peel those stickers on Monday. They'd rip and tear and at least half the time the barcode would rip down the center, forcing me to place that code in two pieces very carefully. All of this at half the speed of smell.
Each day I got a little better. I still have the odd bar code rip, but now at least I've mastered peeling the damned stickers.

The simplest physical tasks can prove daunting to me if I've never done them. I'm not one of those people who can look at anything and determine how it fits together, or what I'm supposed to do with it. But...practice practice practice.

Yeah, my mornings fly. I look up and it's break time; I look up again and it's lunch time. My lunch is supposed to be 11-noon, or something like that, and I love that, because my afternoons are so short.

They miss me on nights. I share a freezer with grocery and...yikes.

Part of me misses nights too, to be honest. A small part. I saw more of Eva when I worked nights (through the week, at least): she gets home from work not long before I go to bed, and I'm gone by the time she wakes up in the morning. There's also the quietness of the store (though it's nice to interact with customers again, I've missed that).

The strangest things come to mind as for differences. Riding TO work isn't much different at 6:00 a.m. than at 10:00 p.m., at least this time of year. Riding home, however, there is a TON more traffic...and it's MUCH windier. Every day. It takes effort to pedal. You don't have that problem at night.

Winter may be interesting. The busses don't run quite early enough to get me to work on time. It's a 45 minute walk on bare and dry pavement.  I can just picture the night of a heavy snowfall...I'll be up at something like 3:00 a.m. to get the driveway shovelled. Best not think of that. The price you pay when you don't drive.

The job itself is...I'm enjoying it. I want to know a LOT more than I do. I want to fix a myriad of problems, and I know that I have to curtail that part of me because (a) I only have so much time in the day and (b) fixing problems there is a slow, unbelievably ponderous process. One thing at a time, one day at a time. A little bit better every day. That's my goal.

But that's for Tuesday. Right now it's the weekend. And I'm going to have one.