October 20, 2007

I can always tell when I get toward the last day of the week. Today was my sixth day at work and although I am off the next two days I will have to go in for about three hours tomorrow. Unfortunately my boss is off this weekend (not that I begrudge him that, particularly after last weekend) and we can’t overlap. I will get up at 7 and get my staffing and then roll in and cook with one of my managers from 10 till 1 or so and then head home. At least I hope it works out as planned. I have a small scale mutiny on my hands at my problem store and very shortly I won’t have too many employees left. It is taking all I have just to get the ones I have to stick around.

All of our management works in productive positions on the floor. That’s how we make money by saving it. The managers are supposed to cook every day, I cook a minimum of 35 hours a week and even my boss who has ten stores normally will work a couple of days a week. My manager however, thinks that she gets paid to sit on her rear in the office all day long with the door shut making the waitresses cook their own orders. Of course whenever I show up she’s cooking. I am going to have to start coming in the back way so that I can sneak up on her and catch her sitting in the office when it’s busy one day I guess. I have already had one girl walk out because of it but I put her right back to work.

Weekends are our busiest time. Normally even in slow stores like this one I have a cook and the manager working. For the last four weeks she has left my cook to operate by himself except for maybe an hour, and then she sticks him with the cleanup. The guy is my relief manager, so he works for me, not her. I basically told him a couple of weeks ago that what he needed to do was to get his half of the cleanup done and then just walk the out the door at 2PM. Unfortunately this woman has copped an attitude with almost all of the associates that have been working there for any amount of time and is hiring these pieces of crap to take their places without even checking references or anything. I’ve put a stop to a few but I can’t be there 24/7. Anyway, my guy did exactly as I suggested and finished his stuff and went to leave so this woman gets in his face and started talking shit about writing him up. He told her that we all get paid to do a job and to do whatever it was that she needed to.

He called me pretty upset about it and I reassured him that it wouldn’t go in his permanent file or anything and that he needs to refuse to sign the warning. If it were just this one guy I would chalk it up to a communication problem between the two of them but apparently it is her and EVERYONE in the store. I had a bunch of other stuff here when I originally posted this at one of my other sites but I took most of the profanity and other nasty stuff out since I like my job. Actually I like my paycheck but it’s the same thing.

Although it’s not yet Halloween the major store in my area already has started putting out Christmas decorations. It’s funny. There are a couple of aisles in the center of the store with all of their Halloween stuff and then almost the entire garden center is already set up with Christmas decorations. I love Christmas decorations. Even though Christmas is a hard time of year for me at work because my hours almost double overnight, I still enjoy the holiday. Normally I will take the kids out several times to look at all of the Christmas lights and when I have the time, my house has more lights up than anyone on my street.

One of the things I have noticed this year is that the LED Christmas lights are starting to get a bit cheaper than previously. That’s cool because I prefer the lights. They are much brighter and sharper and really show up nicely, even when it’s not quite dark out. They are also much safer than regular incandescent lights as well because they don’t burn quite as hot. According to a 2003 report from the EPA they estimate that we (the United States) use enough electricity each year with miniature Christmas lights to run 200 homes for an entire year. They also figured that a 20% market switch to LED holiday lights would reduce annual electricity consumption in the U.S. by 400,000 KWh. Since they don’t burn as hot and use less electricity they also reduce MY power bill and that’s a darn good thing when I pay less money.