A Mighty Fine Life

Done with work forever!! Well, done with this work forever, unless I can't get another job, in which case they'll totally rehire me. How do I know? Because jessiethejester has now been promoted and will be the new cafe manager, and she said so; also because, she said, despite never ever saying anything nice to me (or anything other than writing me up, in fact) the store management loved me. The hell? Stupid Borders.

Anyway, done with that now.

Last night was fabulous, even if I don't remember it. It's not that I blacked out or anything, it's just all pretty blurry and I don't think I was paying much attention. As it turns out, I really like gin and tonics. Who knew? Karaoke RULEZ! Oh, and the boy came out with us; having my boyfriend meet all of my older sister's friends for drinks made me feel wierdly adult. The hell? Again.

I've had a headache and been kinda ill all day. Gosh, I had my first hangover.

Big plans for the next few days. Fun times. Oh yeah. Ana tomorrow; Jess, Jen and Margot after that; Seth's thingybob on Tuesday. And somewhere in there, applying to jobs. Good times!

So work completely and totally fucked me over yesterday. I nearly walked out never to return; but then I calmed down, muttered angrily to myself, and didn't. I did, however, call in sick today. I mean, I am a little bit sick, but mostly I just don't want to deal with that fucking place right now. I'm off tomorrow, so we'll see how I feel Thursday. Ught. Fuckers.

second_batgirl also had a really, really shitty day yesterday (probably worse than mine, when you consider) and so she came over to crash and now we're hanging out. She's "sick" too. Jobs suck. I hate beig a grown up.

The end.

I quit my job today! I've been debating doing this for awhile now, and seirously debating it for a week; thigns kind of came to a head today. It wasn't all super dramatic or anything, but I did get to bitch out the general and assistant general managers for quite awhile. And that felt good.

Absolutely nothing will change there, and I'm glad to have an end date. Two weeks from today, I'm back to full time job hunting and playing with the kitty all day. The kitty, at least, will be pleased.

We now have both a cat and a laser pointer. In other words, we now have endless hours of amusement. (I didn't mean to get her all riled up; I'm going to bed. I thought she was asleep and picked up the laser to fiddle with it, because I was bored, and a moment later she sprang off the couch and started chasing it.)

Work still sucks, but the managers have finally recognized that about half of the staff wants to quit over fucking Borders Rewards, so they've begun bribing us. Whoever gets the highest percentage in each hour gets a free snack from the cafe. And my favorite manager (coincidentally, the one who has the store's credit card) decided that, though he didn't see our numbers for the day, we probably made quota (40%wtfbordershqforreals?!) and so he took everyone who closed the store out for desert.

Which means my dinner was chocolate cake.

It was lovely, but too little too late, and whatnot. I still want to quit.

I had a generally shitty day at work. I mean, I was about five minutes away from throwing my apron on the floor and stomping off to never return. (The Boy encouraged this, by the way; he also wants to quit. His reasoning was that we should have quit at 7 tonight and stomped right off to a sports bar to celebrate by watching the game, but, uh, considering how the game went, maybe it's just as well we didn't.) It was just a shitty day of shitty things happening, and just... gah.

However, then the boy took me out for a drink, and was generally a sweetheart. I could shmoop about him at great lengths, but will spare y'all... for now.

Then I returned home to find a kitty in the appartment. This is not a total shock (details can be found over at harriet_vane) but was still quite pleasant.

So, nine hours of total suck; three hours of goodness.

And tomorrow... YANKEES.

I only got six hours of sleep last night, and have been completely dead all day. Funny, because in college I routinely got less than five hours, and was fine. Clearly... I'm a hundred years old.

Work today sucked. The new girl in the cafe called out at the last minute, so I had to close... an hour early, so no customers were ready to leave, and the whole thing was a pain in the goddamn ass, and grr. Also, I burnt myself really, really badly today; there's a red streak down my hand from below my first knuckle past my wrist. It throbbed for hours, despite the fact that I immediately iced it and covered it in aloe. Jesus.

And for these and many other reasons involving it sucking, I'm seriously debating quitting my job. The only reason I haven't yet is because I hate looking for jobs, and I don't really want to be unemployed again.

Countdown: T minus four days until I see the Yankees and Sox at Yankee Stadium with the boy. I just realized I haven't mentioned that yet... Yeah, he's taking me to the game on Wednesday. Because he rules. Though if they play like they did tonight... JACKASSES.


So. Tired.

( The bad (work) )

( The good )

Apparently, I don't have a Moxy Fruvous icon. That seems a little wrong.

So we have a new guy working the cafe, and he looks, swear to god, like Murray Foster's younger, nerdier cousin. In other words, I spent the whole day gazing at him. Or possibly I was hypnotized by his so-ugly-it-was-insanely-awesome, polyester, geometrically patterned brown shirt.

Mmm. Eye candy abounds in my store. It's true.

More good news: since Sunshine is leaving us (sniff, sniff) and we have a new guy, the schedule had to be redone anyway, so starting a week from Sunday, I'll have Sundays off! I lose my two-days-off-in-a-row style weekend, but will, in fact, be able to see other humans once a week. Yay!

Today was insanely long, but hey, it started by getting brunch with irontears, so my day was cooler than yours by default. (Mondie, by the way, is adorable and awesome, and I use my only real Mush icon in her honor. *bows*)

Work, on the other hand... Jesus Christ. So we ran out of, uh, everything. It's really quite hard to make a latte with no milk, for example. And we had no soup, no iced tea, no chai, no muffins, no bagels, no scones, and only about half of our sandwhiches. And I was all alone for the lunch rush. Ohhhhh was it ever awesome.

My new theory is that for every (or close to every) really shitty customer, there's another in line who also thinks that person was a dickweed who should shut the hell up. Those are the customers I like. (I'd give you the whole story, but... blah blah blah, customer was a dick, other customer said shut the hell up, etc; it's basically every I-work-in-retail-story ever.)

I'm totally wiped, arg. After work tonight was dinner and kareoke with Dan; after work tomorrow is meeting with Sarah and the Borders/theater people to discuss the possible foundation of a Borders theater group. Which would be nice. (Me, craving a replacement for BK? Nah.)

So. Tired. Arrrg.

So work decided to pull me out of the cafe and put me on register for the main store for two hours tonight. I knew basically how the register worked, but not how to de-alarm things, nor how to take the safety casing off of CDs or DVDs. And for a good hour, everyone was too busy to tell me.

Man, and I thought people were rude when they wanted their coffee. Turns out, they're about a billion times worse oon their way out of the store!

I need a real work sucks icon. Hrmmm.

(ETA: Apparently, Lou Reed was in our store tonight. I didn't get to see him or anything, but that's cool as a concept, right?)

Today was my eighth day in a row of work. Thank GOD I have the next two days off. So. Freaking. Exhausted. I'm mostly enjoying work, though; with a couple of exceptions, my coworkers rock. I particularly enjoy working with Sunshine, he's so... well... sunny and upbeat.

We had the most psycho customer I've ever seen tonight, though. Around 8:30 (the cafe closes at 9:30, the rest of the store at 10:00) a customer stomped over to me, while Sunshine was in the back wrapping up opened food. She demanded to know if we have a second public bathroom, which we don't, and then if there's a usable stall in the men's room, which I really didn't know if there was. Her complaint, apparently, was that the bathroom was being cleaned.

Now, I'm someone who tends to be leery of public bathrooms in general, as they have a tendency to be... well, gross. Particularly in the city. So generally, I'd think the bathroom being cleaned was a good thing, especially because it wasn't closed, it just had the slippery floor sign up while it was being mopped.

The lady ranted, more or less verbatim, "Well, I've been gone from New York for TWO YEARS and I HATE the city and just got BACK and it's exactly the same! I hate New Yorkers! She's in there, CLEANING the BATHROOM with her MOP and she's waving it AROUND and when I asked if I could still go in she said YES but WHAT IF SHE HITS ME IN THE EYE WITH HER MOP?!!!! THAT BITCH! I mean I never swear, ever, but FUCK THAT!"

You can see how I was slightly confused. I wasn't sure what she was asking me, and stuttered that we clean the bathrooms every night, and Sunshine walked up and said basically the same thing. She stomped away, and I explained what she'd said to me. (His reaction was very nice; "Oh, honey, if a customer ever swears at you like that again, you just call me. She's done for, I will get her out of the store like that. *finger snap*" Thank you, my new adoptive big brother.) She stomped back over to this, demanded to know if we were talking about her (which I denied, of course), then stomped off again.

Two minutes later, we heard screaming: "YOU PIECE OF SHIT!! YOU FUCKING..." And so on. And on and on and on. Sunshine snuck over to listen to the fight she was having with Tina, our awesome drag queen manager. The gist was that the lady was very, very angry at us for cleaning the bathroom, and wanted to make sure we knew it. She declared that we'd lost a customer, to which Tina, who does not enjoy being sworn at, declared, "Great! Do you want directions to the nearest Barnes and Noble?" (I love Tina.)

Luckily, we all decided it was hilarious. But god bless days off.

So. Tired.

It looks like my schedule is going to be afternoons/evenings, Thurs-Mon. Which means I'm only free mornings and in the middle of the week. Which means I'm never going to see any of my friends again.

At least for a couple weeks.

Sleep now.

So today was my first full eight hour day; getting myself back into a real sleep schedule is going to take some time and effort, as is getting back my caffiene tolerance, but I'm not as jittery tonight, heh. There's one guy who works at the cafe who's a total dick; everyone else rules.

A, it turns out, is a hardcore slasher. Who loooooves the Road to El Dorado. We had a long discussion about feminism in fandom, and by discussion, I mostly mean I ranted and she nodded. (Again, I lost my caffiene tolerance; I might have been a little hyper.) And, oh lord, I need a nickname for the guy I work with, and though I dislike QaF, the only thing that springs to mind is Sunshine. Sunshine is from Rochester, and his boyfriend has never understood his obsession with Wegmans; upon finding out I was from Ithaca, he made his boy stop by so I could explain. Because kids from upstate love Wegmans.

And those are just the people I worked with in the cafe. During lunch, I ended up in a long conversation about the sudden shift in Rory Gilmore's character, the appeal of Supernatural (the appeal is Jensen), and how awesome Veronica Mars season one was; and then another random guy asked if anyone would be willing to argue about feminism in language with him for awhile, and we had a fifteen minute, rather boisterous discussion. And then I was asked if I ever read comic books.

And after lunch, A, Sunshine and I got to turn on the radio, and without even thinking about it, we all started singing along with Journey. I realize two days is way too early to judge a job, and things are never as good as they appear, but any job where I get free coffee and can sing Journey and discuss slash and no one bats an eyelash, and I get a discount on books and DVDs, is a pretty sweet deal, so far as I'm concerned.

So I'm a pretty happy camper. And now Rachel is watching American Idol, of which I'm not a fan, but apparently I just don't understand her lurve for Bucky Covington and his unconventional hair.

So my first day of work was today. And... it was surprisingly awesome. The paperwork/policy section of the day took about two hours and would have been no fun, but the training manager was super nice and kick ass. During lunch, I got to sit at the cool kids' table (it was the only table) but didn't feel at all excluded by the random strangers; everyone seemed to be getting along well and were happy to hang out on their break.

After lunch, jessiethejester (AKA Sarah) began training me to make drinks. I learned many many things, and, well, remember how I went off Coke and coffee for awhile, and have been having very few of them since? Yeah, my caffiene tolerence was shot. And I had to sample every single drink I made. And since I was learning to make a lot of drinks, that was a lot of caffeine. And wow, did I start tweaking. It took two hours for me to stop shaking and being hyper, and I'm still kind of jittery. Jeeeeesus.

After work, Sarah and I hung out for a couple hours. Which was fairly awesome. I'm staring full time starting today, so yay!

And... now Supernatural is on. And man, I don't like Sam at all. He's such a pissy little prick. And I don't do incest, but good lord, Dean is gay for Sam (why? he's not pretty, and he's a pissy little prick!). And the dialogue on this show is so bad. (And for those interested in more commentary, you should check harriet_vane's journal for our "Questions Left Unanswered By Supernatural" series. And oh look, Rachel can quote along with this as it airs the same way I can do with Disney channel movies!)

My life has been rather busy and pretty awesome lately, but I'm far too lazy to recount all of that here. Suffice to say it's good to get out of the house, I've never lost a game of pool, and it's nice to see old friends. There's been a certain amount of self-discovery, but, well, no one cares about that but me, and I don't care about it that much.

So, a meme!

Ganked from harmonyangel, though I don't have a million bajillion icons like she does:

Go to my icons and choose the following...

1. One that makes you automatically think of me.
2. One that you think I should TOTALLY use more often.
3. One that you don't get/needs more explanation/you have no idea why the hell I have it.
4. An icon I don't have that you totally think I should- a particular character, emotion, fandom, or whatever.

Come on, you know you want to. I think it's interesting.

ETA: Someone anonymous and awesome just bought me extra icons! Dude! Now I do have a million bajillion... or potentially will, if I can even find that many. Heh. Whoever you are, you rule.

Hey! I have a job! I got hired at the Park Ave Borders (the one where jessiethejester works) and I'll be working in the cafe, full or close to full time. Training begins Tuesday. Yay, income!

I also finally got a new cord for Deej! (the iPod, for those not keeping track at home), because mine disappeared. I haven't been able to charge him since Tulio broke, but now (after he briefly flipped out) I can again. Woo!

And hopefully, this weekend there will be playing with Noelle and Sarah, or Jess and Margot (and stalking Kevin Smith), or both.

Woo and also hoo!

I totally void-stamped my nametag. I am such a geek. But lo, I am finished with Regal Cinema (despite what C threatens, forever. Unless I have to work at a Regal in NY). Figures, I finally won a combo contest (highest percentage last Saturday) and am done. Everyone at work signed a card for me, and E, who I absolutely adore, got me a day planner for 2006 with absolutely beautiful flower photographs every few pages. I got all choked up.

Then I remembered that I'M DONE!!!! and felt happy again.

I just finished re-reading Last Days of Summer and it made me sniffle.

Margot left this morning. I'm off today, tomorrow, and Thursday. Friday is my last ever shift at the kiosk; I work Saturday, Sunday, and Monday at Regal and then I'm done. Forever.

Speaking of work, a few days ago I woke up to a text message from my awesome friend Sarah (jessiethejester, who never updates), who did the run-away-from-home-live-in-NYC-have-no-money-ever thing four months ago: her manager will probably be willing to hire me in the Borders cafe where she works; she can train me. Borders pays better than Regal, and gives better benefits. So it's nothing definite, and I have Regal to fall back on if it doesn't work out, but awesome.

Speaking of which, my tooth is acting up again. Yes, Dad, this time I actually will call the dentist.

I visited Mr. Githler, my evil eighth grade history teacher. He was mean to me, but if he hadn't been, I'd have suspected he had a terminal disease. Being in my HS was very, very, very weird.

Margot and I watched Newsies last night:
queenitsy: Why does Dutchy choke when the bell rings?
second_batgirl: Pavlovian response? Oh, look, he swallowed.
queenitsy: He must be very well trained, then.
...I forgot how much I loved this movie.

Rachel visited and then Margot visited and it was awesome. Now I have no friends again, at least in the area, and this is sad.
(Mr. Githler: So you've been living in your parents house and working two crappy jobs. What friends do you have in the area to make you feel better?
Me: ..."Friends"?
Mr. Githler: Why aren't you on heroin by now? I would be.)

I'm glad to be nearly done with work. I've never been as angry at a customer as I was a few days ago; it's not a real horror story, but I swear to god there is a correlation between people who buy icees and people who are fucking morons, and clumsy ones at that. Then I discovered that I had a double shift with both jobs, after I was ten minutes late for Borders. So that was a 14 hour day. I made Mom and Margot come rescue me with food and a sweater so no one would see my Regal uniform.

Margot and I watched all of Hana Youri Dango, and it was awesome crack. I deeply, deeply wish that Hanazawa Rui was my boyfriend. Or older brother.

I'm moving very soon. This is terrifying the hell out of me. But also very exciting. Um, eek?

I'm not dead or anything, just insanely, insanely busy.

But.

I quit my jobs! Both of them! *glee*

And Margot is here, and Rachel was here, and things are generally awesome. Because I quit my jobs!

(PS: If you are zengarden, myownimprov, or poisonivory, you are late with your secret slash fic. Shame! Shaaaaame on you! *wags finger disapprovingly*)