Sweet Catastrophe

What is it about wearing headphones that makes people want to drone on incessantly?

With our new store hours and adjusted schedule I only get a 30 minute lunch so I pack something and chill with my iPod to escape for a little bit. But every day there’s been someone who just has to talk to me! Why?

Lalalalala I can’t hear yoooou! lol

I’m trying my damnedest to sign up for the dental and vision insurance offered at Lowe’s, but of course our site isn’t functioning. It’s nothing new, accessing the website from home is always touch and go! Unfortunately, open enrollment only lasts another day. I’ve been trying to research thoroughly and wanted to check one more thing before signing up—I wanted to see the list of providers, ya know? I don’t want to be limited to like, two choices in Valdosta or something. But I can’t do that….

I’m tempted to head to Lowe’s to sign in and sign up, but even there, I won’t be able to access the outside stuff to check providers. I’ll just keep trying….otherwise, I’ll go in early tomorrow, sign up and hope for the best!

Me: Alright your change is $30 and here’s your receipt. If you’ll just pull your vehicle up these gentlemen will be more than happy to load this up for you.

Customer: *puts away receipt and change* Oh here you go, I have a coupon for $10 off.

Me: I’m sorry but I can’t redeem a coupon after the sale has been completed.

Customer: Why not? I’ve got the coupon right here, just take the $10 off….

Me: Ma’am, I’ve already finished your sale; you’ve paid for it, and I’ve given you your receipt. I have no way to go back and change that for you; it’s finished. If you’d like, you can stop by the Returns desk and they can take care of the coupon for you, but there’s absolutely nothing I can do here.

Customer: *As she’s walking away* What kind of damn store is this that you can’t take a fucking coupon?! I’ve never!!

Me: The kind that lacks a time machine….

If you’re gonna skip out of work after your break, how about you refrain from getting on Myspace and posting bulletins and crap, making it obvious that you were lying about why you couldn’t come back…

They’ve added to the workload down in Lumber–it’s not actually my job, but I end up doing a lot of it because it’s really too much for the guys to get done in the time frame they have so I help out with the stuff I’m capable of. Gone are the evenings of me zoning out until it’s time to go.

I wish all the extra work and sweating meant I’d be seeing some weight loss, but it just means my back aches more.

There’s a guy in Lumber with a crazy little temper. He just lets stuff get to him a little too much and all of a sudden he lashes out at the wrong people–his superiors. Of course, he’s got a right to be annoyed, and he’s not saying anything that isn’t true, but he vents it in the wrong way and it just makes him look bad. He knows it too. I think we need to bring Jack Nicholson into the store and they can sing “I Feel Pretty” together and things will be alright.

So Open Enrollment for part-time insurance benefits at work is about to begin. I’d already decided to enroll for the dental at the very least so I’m now trying to decipher what it all means. It can be really confusing to someone who’s never really dealt with insurance before, ya know?

I’m wondering though, if this might be that step that insures I’ll quit. You know how that goes, you wanna do something and keep giving yourself reasons not to and then when you’ve finally got a solid reason, you end up doing it anyway now that it really makes no sense!

I dunno. Things have been changing a little though. My new manager is pretty awesome. She’s a really logical person and doesn’t seem to have a lot of tolerance for things that just don’t make sense…she’s really understanding when it comes to how we deal with a lot of things.

We’ve gotten some new equipment too, but it’s been stuff like used cisco routers for their offices and new registers–same kind, just new–not the stuff we need like new credit machines and new deactivators. Actually, I guess they did replace a few of the credit machines, but they didn’t replace two of the ones that absolutely needed it and well, they’re not good machines to begin with; we really needed to be able to move to a different kind or something. These are horrible at reading cards and they don’t even tell you that it didn’t read your card until after you’ve put in your pin, chosen cash back and approved the sale, so of course, people tend to worry they’ll be charged twice–they’re not. In two years I’ve never known anyone to be, but it’s annoying to deal with on top of the other general things that put customers on edge with you.

I’m starting to realize it’s just not Lowe’s that bothers me anymore. As far as jobs go, it’s fine now. There was a lot of stupid stuff going on for a long time and well, there are still some stupid things, but for what I actually deal with, it’s not horrible. I think I’m just really sick of retail in general. I want a desk job so badly, but I just don’t know how to have one while I’m still working on school. I think the closest I could get would be working at a hotel, but really, that’s not much of a step away from retail when you think of what I’d be dealing with there.

I’ll get my insurance–that means I have to stay on for at least another 6 months or so–it’ll be that long before some of the dental benefits I need will kick in. Maybe by then I’ll have my retail second wind and I’ll be able to keep on. Or maybe by then Publisher’s Clearing House will have given me ten million or $5,000 a week for life…..::dreams::

^^^That’s what I plan on doing all day tomorrow. Of course I have to be at work at 6am………I’ll skip the rant. Hopefully that’ll be an issue of the past pretty soon.

I’ve done all I need to do today and already had dinner as well, so I think I’m gonna take a sleeping pill at 8 and hope for the best.

I just hope that works out better than the last time I tried this. Last time I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t get back to sleep. I’ve been waking up in the middle of the night feeling way too hot and wrestling with my pillows for the past few weeks. Maybe I can finally get over that. I should probably just go ahead and turn on the fan as a preventative measure. I can always sleep when I’m cold, but never when I’m hot.

What do you use when you need to get to sleep unusually early? I use a generic otc sleep aid, but I’ve been known to just use Nyquil or a strong Benadryl. (Disclaimer: That’s not to say I use sleep aids often; probably once every three months if that.)

So every year, the top scoring stores in our Customer Focused program have a drawing for a brand new car. Today they were there for our drawing and apparently, it was between me and L.A. and obviously I’m not writing an entry entitled, “Lamer =(” detailing my epic win…

I wish they hadn’t told me that I had made it into the final two. I didn’t even really care about it until I realized how close I was to it actually happening. No, I don’t need a new car, nor do I desire to own a brand new car–there tend to be too many kinks to work out in a new car, but it would’ve been really nice. I’ve been pushing grills, and lumber, and indoor lighting for two years now and it just would’ve been cool to have something nice to say about my job, finally! haha

L.A. doesn’t need a new car, and she’s one of those who creates her own schedule at work pretty much….I just wish I had lost to someone else. Coming so close, I realize it would’ve been the best timing with Ryan’s car dying. We could’ve sold the car and gotten him something more suited to him, something lightly used, and still had money left over to put on school loans.

I really do wish they hadn’t told me about it.

So I don’t know what’s going on with my locker at work. It appears that someone wants my vest?

I use tsa locks, they have a little green indicator on them, and if your lock has been opened any other way than using the combination, it shows a red indicator. I use one similar to this one for my locker at Lowe’s.

I hadn’t been paying much attention to it until one day I noticed my indicator was red. So I looked the lock over and it certainly looked like it had been pried apart. Now, you can reset the indicator, but instead, I bought another lock in a different color hoping to deter whoever had been in it.

With the new one, it wasn’t long before I saw that it was red when I came into work one day. Now, I’m not ruling out the possibility of me doing something when I lock up that jarred it into thinking it had been busted open, but I’ve played with my old one and not been able to make the indicator turn red at all, so I really think someone’s trying to bust into my locker, but I don’t know why! Any time they’ve tried has been when I’m not at work so the only thing in there is my vest and copies of my availability and time off requests–there’s nothing valuable in my vest at all!

We don’t have cameras in the break room, so I’m not really sure what I should do. I haven’t rest the indicator again since the last time, but I think I should and just monitor it really closely and probably not bring my purse in for a while…I hate doing that though. I guess I’ll get a little clear bag to bring in my inhaler and keys and stuff like that so I don’t have to leave my wallet or anything in my locker…

But I mean hey, if someone wants my vest that badly, they’re more than welcome to it!

6-3 in Lumber on April Fool’s day. Will I survive?

Peggy has ignored my request to not work until 8am. I can’t even function anymore today. I didn’t get home until 4 and I had too much to do to feel like I could take a nap. By the time I got most of it out of the way, it was really just too late for a nap. So now I’m just pushing through till a reasonable bedtime.

I can’t think straight though. I keep losing my train of thought and forgetting what I was about to do. Like an hour ago, I got up to leave for Wal Mart to pick up some bread, pet supplies, and my prescription. I got distracted when I heard the dishwasher finish its cycle; I walked into the kitchen to sort out the next set of dirty dishes and then came back to my chair. I spaced on the whole Wal Mart trip. I guess I’ll have to do that tomorrow.

Yeah…I just stopped to watch something on tv for like, 5 minutes and forgot what else I wanted to blog…