June 2007

I spent the day in my most experienced manager’s store today and will be there tomorrow. The big problem that I have there is that I have been hung just about every shift that I have been in that store for the last six weeks. I trained the guy two years ago, but unfortunately a lot of the bad habits from his previous boss have rubbed off on him and he seems scared to get rid of the pieces of crap that are currently working for him. Unfortunately part of our money is paid from retention of associates and even though quite a few of these people are hurting his sales and profits, he would rather keep his little $120 bonus and be staffed.

Fuck that shit. Two of his five waitresses didn’t bother to show up or call this morning although he apparently knew at least one of them wouldn’t be there and did nothing to fix it. I have replaced their asses tomorrow and hired two more for his store. I dislike taking control of the schedules, if someone did it to me as a manager I would be extremely pissed off, but I am so over this crap at his store. I spend 80% of my time there trying to get covered when I should be cleaning or training people.

One of his evening shift waitresses called in and then about an hour ago his night shift cook called in. I’ve replaced his ass for the rest of the week (three more days). I hope he enjoys his vacation.

It was a bit of a longer day than I expected. I am just now starting to relax. I don’t normally drink on a work night but I arrived home wanting a drink today for some reason. I have that bottle of Maker’s Mark, but I wasn’t in the mood for bourbon or whiskey today. What I need is a Tequila Sunrise, or something close since all I have here is Sunny D. Working on my second one and developing a nice little buzz already. It’s a good thing that all of my managers are on deck today. Don’t have to be back in until tomorrow.

I have seriously hosed my system. I upgraded it but because of my default templates and most of the garbage that’s been her for a few years it’s pretty messy. I have it where it will reindex the main page now and at least a couple of the entries are up, I don’t know if the comments are working or not. They may work from the individual pages or may not. I will check it out. It may be a few days before I get things right here again because of work hours, be patient

It's kind of interesting that I found this today. I don't particularly know why I am paranoid about it, but
when I go back to the doctor on Tuesday to discuss the results of my cholesterol test I have to schedule a PSA.
That's something I've never had done. The PSA is the Prostate-Specific Antigen test. My insurance company
gives us a break if I get one every year, and from what I understand the FDA approved the use of the PSA test to help
detect prostate cancer in men over 50. No, I'm not 50 yet but it's an insurance thing. Apparently they also
use the PSA test to monitor patients with a history of prostate cancer to see if it has come back.

I did a bit of reading on prostate cancer earlier this evening in between dueling phone calls from one of my stores
and a waitress that walked out and it is pretty nasty (the cancer, the phone calls are an entirely different story.

Apparently it's normal to have low levels of PSA in your blood, but cancer and some benign conditions can
increase PSA levels, thus the test. I also did some reading on treatments as well. One prostate cancer treatment in particular that I found kind of interesting is
called HIFU. Apparently they are currently in phase three of clinical trials for HIFU treatment right now. HIFU is
High Intensity Focused Ultrasound. It uses ultrasound to destroy deep-seated tissue with extremely good accuracy
without any kind of invasive surgery. That's way too cool. I don't even pretend to understand the technical
details, I just leave that part to my wife and try not to nod off during the explanation.