look! a new post!

we all know i'm a really bad blogger. what you might not know is that quite often i have ideas for blog posts, but then i don't have time to blog when i think of them, and then i forget and they never happen. example, i never got around to telling all of you about being reunited with my mother's family back in august. i'm not going to get into it now, because it was a while ago, but if you're curious you can ask me about it in person and i can tell you about what my youngest cousin has in common with her mother and how big an ass my other cousin's ex-husband is.

so, what's new with me? with any luck i'll be starting my christmas shopping tomorrow. yes, i said starting, not finishing. you see, i've been working a lot. a whole hell of a lot. about two months ago one of the women who also does my job, the only one of us that is full time, had to take some time off to have surgery. that left a lot of hours to be covered. on top of my share of that, it turns out there's a little problem with the girl our manager decided to train to do the job while we were shorthanded. she seems to have a problems with showing up for work. out of the last 6 or 7 weeks, there has been one week that i didn't have to come in on one of my days off and work because she called in. it's not just me though. she's also part of our ad set team, or at least she was, but after she called in on that 4 weeks in a row, the manager decided to stop sheduling her for it, and gave those hours to the guy who kept having to work them anyway.

now that the head of our front end is back (as of monday), i should go back to actually having two days off a week and not having to worry about can i finish my shift on saturday without running over on hours. well, unless she kills the new girl on saturday night. there's this new hire at work who has not only managed to annoy the crap out of me and all the female managers (we are a cranky bunch of bitches), she's also seriously peeved off the other front end supervisor, who is widely know to be sweet as pie and get along with everybody. the beef i have with her is that i keep getting stuck with her by management because they don't want her on the floor. this should be great because when we're crazy busy like we are coming up to christmas, i need a cashier to keep up front so i can get off register long enough to straighten my front end. the problem is, while she has no problem staying up front, i can't seem to get her to stay on register. every chance she gets she's dusting something or sweeping the floor i'm going to have to sweep again anyway or something. and if no one is standing at a register when they come up to check out, where do customers go? to my register. so i have to stop what i'm doing (something that has to get done before we can leave) and wait on them, while she continues to do things that don't need to be done or that i will have to do again in an hour anyway. the problem that everyone else has with her is another matter entirely, and something i actually haven't had to deal with since her second day: backtalk. i gotta tell you, it's really stupid, but it proves the girl's got balls, big brass balls. you don't sass management anyway, but if you know my managers these are not women you want to sass even if you don't work for them. i've stood right there and heard her say some shit to the floral manager and the assistant store manager, and i've heard about some of what she's said to the craft manager and the other fes. enough of this has gotten back to the store manager that she's already getting shorted on hours and it's not even christmas yet. in fact the only day she works this week in saturday night, the only night that the head fes is closing. this could get damned interesting, because that woman doesn't take well to sass, and she seems a little frayed from being thrown into christmas in retail cold after two months off anyway.

in other work news, we got new music. the old music was this mind-numbing instrumental crap that i know we had three cds of despite the fact that it all sounded like the same song over and over and over again. now we have real music, real songs that you would recognize, with words and everything. the only down side is that there's this one christmas song that kind of annoys me anyway, the kind that sticks in your head even though you don't even like it, and i swear it played three time during my 7.5 hours shift tonight. other than that it's been pretty awesome. i even caught one of the managers singing along twice the other night, once when i was, too.