…by god. Considering that I have been up now for six hours it might as well be five pm here. Thus the tasty drink I am having trying to relax…
Day From Hell…
Damn, it’s only 9:50 and this has been one shitty day. I’m sitting back at home right now, at least for the next hour.
The car acted like it didn’t want to start this morning, but it caught and turned over so I went ahead on into one of my stores. I still have a manager on vacation and another one is off today. For the most part everyone showed up at those two stores today but at my third one nobody but the manager showed up. It took me awhile but I finally got him covered. We are having that multi-unit manager meeting/cookout today so I was planning on visiting each store for about 30-40 minutes then head home to get some shorts on. When I went to crank my car at the first one it wouldn’t start. I am damn sure not a mechanic so I assumed it was the battery. I borrowed a waitress’s car, went to the Wal-Mart and got myself a new battery. It sounded funny but cranked right up. I made it to the bank and when I came out it wouldn’t start again. It smells funny, like a burning belt smell. I don’t know but I am assuming my alternator has gone out.
I called for a tow ($50 damn dollars) to the shop that does all of my automotive work, and the wife came to pick me up and bring me home. I have one of the other district’s coming to pick me up for the cookout. Glenn, the guy that does all of my work said that he was pretty slammed so it may be a couple of days before he even looks at the car. I’m damn sure not going to drive the gas-guzzling van. I will just go in a bit late tomorrow, and I think that the girls are going to Panama City Thursday, so I will have the blue car for a couple of days.
My entire week has been like this. Nothing seriously major, but just entirely too stressful. Most of it is because I have one of my managers on vacation so several days I am trying to run two stores at once. It is expensive because instead of me cooking and running a store as I normally do when a manager is off, since I have to take care of two I am paying two cooks. I can’t let myself be productive on the floor in case there is a problem at one of the other ones.
Just wanted to put a quick post up. I’m going to shower and change into some shorts for this thing.
Tramp Stamp Tuesday
The Children of Hurin…
Now that I have finished my brother’s book I am going to start reading the other one he brought me, The Children of Húrin. There is a reason he brought it with him though. He said it is boring as hell. I love Tolkien. He was one of the first fantasy authors I ever read as a child, but when Christopher Tolkien released the Silmarillion after his father’s death, I never did make it through the book. It is boring, dry and reads like a boring, dry history text written to put people to sleep.
I will attempt to make it through this one. My tastes have matured since then, but if my brother didn’t like it I don’t hold out much hope for the book.
Sporting Wood…
We had a pretty good time at the Braves game tonight. They were playing the Nationals and overall is was a pretty boring game, at least during the first few innings. One thing I noticed is that attendance is way down over the last time I was at a game a couple of years ago. We were supposed to go have Mexican before the game but my boss decided that we didn’t have enough time so he brought pizza and snacks to one of my stores and we hung out in the back and ate until it was time to go. Don’t get me wrong, I like pizza but this was the third night in a row. I’m done with Pizza for a few days.
The three district managers all rode together and a couple of store manager rode with us. I guess we are all the old folks that like to get sleep and show up for work on time, so we left my boss and the other younger guys there at the top of the 8th. The score was 4-1 Braves when we left. I haven’t checked to see what the final score was but it turned out to be a pretty good game after all.
It was Bat night, so I brought home an Andruw Jones bat for Pete. She loves it. What was really funny is that they check you for weapons and shit right at the gate, you go in 20 feet and they hand you baseball bats. What the fuck is up with that? I told the other districts that we would use them to beat the shit out of the homeless guy that was asking for money when we left. They just got this shocked look when I said it. Had to be there I suppose…
In the nosebleeds…
Overslept
I should have been up 45 minutes ago. That’s one of the reasons I get up so early. It gives me a bit of cushion should I need to sleep in a bit. I tossed and turned and had a pretty hard time sleeping last night. I suppose I shouldn’t have had that darned nap yesterday afternoon.
I never have understood how people can regularly show up late for work. As a manager I generally cured that of 99% of my employees. The ones that can’t get to work on time just didn’t get the good hours and I eventually replace them. When people know upfront what you expect and you send them home once or twice for being late, either they find another job or show up on time.
It’s a bit more difficult since these folks have a set of managers between myself and them. I have sent several home already but it hasn’t fixed the problem so far, although a couple of them seem to have gotten the message. I will just keep on harping on them until they get it right. Being late is just one of those things that irritate the hell out of me. I’ve already had a couple of the folks that are consistently late come to me asking for raises and they were genuinely offended when I told them that I wouldn’t even consider going to bat for them when they can’t get to work on time. There are other issues involved as well, such as being lazy as hell, but showing up when they are supposed to is a bit part of it.
Furry Apparel
Something along the lines of this…
Random thoughts and whatnot
You Can Always Tell…
…when I am trying to just find some filler or it’s been a slow day in the old thought factory because I start posting news blurbs. Actually I have always done that but with the newsroom stuff like the immigration raid story I get a tiny but per read. Not much, but it pays like Google Adsense does. I just wish I could customize the display a little bit more, say to a black background. They fit in well at my tech site but not as much here.
Two of my three managers are back in today, and the other is on vacation so I am back to running just one store as well as the district. One store is pretty easy, but I need to find a way to make it a little less stressful on myself when I have two of them out, like this past Thursday and Friday. I scheduled both of my relief managers to work so that I wouldn’t be productive, which makes it a bit easier, but Thursday one of them was sick so I let her go home and cooked lunch myself.
Once or twice a year we have get-togethers or management “care and shares”. What a gay name. Monday will be pretty cool though, we are going out for Mexican and then going to the Braves game. The only problem I have with that is that I won’t get home until at least midnight and then have to turn around and work part of the morning. Tuesday we have another one, but this is only for the multi-unit managers. Sounds like a barbecue or something. I will definitely have to take beer to that one. Several hours with the multi-unit team on an island in the middle of a lake might just cause me to drink a bit heavily. I have to work the next day as well. I probably could have picked a better day off than Monday but such is luck.
It looks like the Boy will tentatively graduate on September 14th. Since I am going to be taking that weekend off that may put me off the prior weekend, which is supposed to be the blogmeet at Amicalola. I was really looking forward to that, but going to boot camp graduation is more important. Maybe I can make it to Eric’s in October. That will probably be the next most likely time for me. I just depends on the other district’s and when they have their vacations scheduled.
Dax has a particularly nasty meme up. DON’T visit if you are easily offended. Hell, don’t click if it’s not so easy to offend. You have been warned. Here’s the link. I am tempted to actually answer the meme. I actually have the post half written but don’t know if I want to post it or not.
Tuesday is the one year anniversary of Acidman’s death. Damn. It doesn’t seem like it’s been quite that long, and then again it seems longer. Things have changed very drastically for me since then as far as working. I’ve met some pretty cool people over the last year, as a direct result of going to his funeral. I’ve written a post, but won’t put it up until the 26th.
Elisson’s making ice cream. Damn, didja bring enough for the rest of the class.
I really need to get my blogroll fixed. I should have some time on Monday morning. Since I was able to export it to a Word document I can just pull the links from there and add them in to a text file. It’s just very tedious because even with cleaning it up there are quite a few links. Maybe I will go back to using blogrolling after all. That’s what I have my Techroll hosted on. Search isn’t working on my tech site apparently. I just tried to search for the entry over there to link to and got a 500 error. PITA. It’s here and I will update the links to it shortly. Will have to fix the search widget as well, but probably not today. Too much to do, too little time.
It’s way past time to start getting ready for work so I will leave you with all of the pointless stuff above. Something to do on a lovely Saturday whilst I work.
The Minimum Wage Increase…
…or How my government gave me an involuntary PAY CUT.
July 24th the new Federal Minimum Wage goes from 5.15 to 5.85 an hour. At the same time we, like most companies around the united states will be raising our prices to compensate for it. As far as my employees go it indirectly effects them. Nobody that works for us makes minimum wage except during the first week of training but since their (and my) cost of living is about to be jacked up everywhere, they are all effectively taking a pay cut. The folks that make, for instance, $7 an hour certainly aren’t getting a pay raise any time soon and now that I have explained how this shit works to most of them they are entirely unhappy with the new law. The truth hurts.
The tipped minimum wage isn’t changing at all. It is currently $2.13 an hour and most of the waitresses that work for me make about a dollar an hour more anyway, plus tips. I would say that most of them average between $7 and $15 an hour depending on what kind of job they do and how busy we are. Like any other sales position in the world what you make is related to what kind of job you do.