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As the tagline for my blog used to say “sleep is just a cheap caffeine substitute”. I actually did get a bit of sleep last night. About normal for me anyway. I finally hit the sack about 10:30 and have been up for almost 30 minutes now. Working on my second cup of coffee. The nice thing is that with all of the managers in I won’t drag in until about a quarter till seven today. I have a few things I need to do and I will end up cooking at that same store for awhile this morning. That is my most challenging one as well. It’s the one where they had that guy arrested for having hidden cameras, so right off the bat I have a public perception problem that is still there several months after the fact. It’s in a pretty upscale neighborhood which makes it a little harder to get my business back as well.

Couple that with the fact that half that guy’s employees were either using or selling drugs on the premises and I pretty much have an uphill battle there. My sales are down something like 28% over this time last year.

The guy that IS there managing now is a pretty good manager. I trained him a couple of years ago and he has plenty of experience. His only problem is that he is scared of losing people. He will keep shit around that doesn’t help his business even when there are replacements available. That’s OK. I will be helping him with his schedule today and some of that shit is going to find itself with about two days on the schedule. Hopefully they will just quit.

I have been reluctant to run anyone off from that store because it is harder to staff it than the other two and also because with my vacation next week I just didn’t want to jeopardize any chances of being off for a week. As a manager your time off is pretty much guaranteed but once you go a bit higher if your stores aren’t staffed you are pretty much shit out of luck. That’s why my days off have pretty much been cut in half over the last two months. I am averaging 5 days off per month over the first two months since I got promoted and don’t see it getting easier until the summer is over. I have one other guy that hasn’t had a vacation yet that will be taking it at the end of July and then I have a couple months of breathing room after that.

Updated – ooops. Got the wrong embed from youtube the first time. If you watched it and wondered what was up, it’s been fixed.

I changed the encoder I was using so the video is pretty much crap, but I am lazy and don’t feel like redoing it.

Next time I will just use my camcorder and then transfer it to the computer. I seem to get the best results doing it this way. It makes it a bit harder to edit (not much) than using the web cam, but the picture is a darn site better.

That’s pretty much it for the night. I think I am going to take my happy ass to be and get some sleep. I may post a bit in the morning before I head off to the salt mines…

Technorati : Porncast, Shadowscope

Not like that! Damn. All three of my managers are in today for the first time in eleven days. Thank goodness. If I had to deal with two open stores for another day I was going to scream. It was a pretty short day overall. I didn’t get to sleep until around three this morning due to my nap yesterday, and then I slept until about six. That put me at work at ten after seven which was about forty minutes later than I normally go in. I farted around at two of the stores for a couple of hours, checking managers back into their money and food from vacations and off days and then headed over to the other store where I was to cook. It was pretty slow so I caught up a bunch of paperwork for him as well as my own. I might have cooked for a total of about thirty minutes.

After that I headed to the bank and then back to the other two stores where I cooked for awhile. I ended up having to bail out the manager and her THREE cooks at my busiest store. They were just having a hard time working together so I caught them up and headed home about 12:30 or so. Pretty darned early for me on a Saturday. Actually it was DAMNED early for me on ANY day. I am going to attempt to repeat the pattern again tomorrow. I don’t get any days off this week so I certainly don’t feel guilty about it.

Somehow all of my employees in all three stores managed to get to work tonight as well. I don’t know how they managed that one but I won’t look a gift horse in the mouth. I have a few more posts I want to get up tonight and then I’m headed for bed. Even with getting now sleep last night I decided NOT to nap today. I would like to get a full night’s sleep so that I don’t feel; like shit tomorrow.

I finally got to sleep somewhere around three this morning. I got up at four, started coffee, and lay back down until a few minutes ago but it damn sure isn’t enough. I am pretty much nodding off right now as I sit here. What’s bad is that I will try and get out of work a bit early this afternoon and come home to take another nap. As long as I don’t sleep too long it should be ok. Between having too much coffee yesterday afternoon and the wife not being here I had a pretty hard time sleeping.

All three of my managers should be back in this moring (keeping my fingers crossed) so today should be nice and easy. Actually with this week starting a holiday week we only get one day off so the only day between now and my vacation that any of them will be off is Tuesday. Originally I was taking Monday off but thought that being off Monday, working two days, then starting vacation was pretty stupid so I am working Monday and am just going to try and get out of the stores by noon the next two days.

All week I have been receiving cell phone pics from the wife and her friend. Here’s a couple.

None of them are great photos but hey, they’re from a cell phone…

Exactly what I wish I were doing right now…

Hanging out at the pool…

It’s like they are taunting me…

It never ceases to amaze me just how much like the Jerry Springer show my job is. I’ve got people on meth, constant gossip, he said she said crap, entire dysfunctional families all working together, fights in the store, people getting arrested WHILE at work, even people getting the occasional DNA test to see whose kid is whose. One day I’m going to grow up and get a real job and see what being around adults is like.

I’ve spent most of the evening importing entries into the database for the move to the MT 4 templates. Some of the archiving stuff isn’t working 100% yest so I am not able to rebuild everything dynamically. Not sure yet if it’s because of the beta status of MT or if there is something wrong with my database. Either way most of the stuff should be working properly.

Once I am able to start rebuilding everything dynamically things should speed up a bit.

…or maybe not.

I overslept big time today. I have a couple of minutes while I drink my coffee so I decided to get online for a minute or two. One of the other District’s sent me a text message as she is looking for some help today, otherwise I probably would have slept on through until my employees called me in an hour or so. That would have sucked.

The site seems to be running better than it was last night. Maybe I can finish that stuff I was working on when I get home this evening.

I don’t have a hell of a lot to post about. I’m still in that sleep fog. Maybe later.