maybes and a rant

I have been completely neglectful to my poor dear diary. I really have no good reason to have been so. I think I am failing all my classes this semester, so it isn't because of all the homework I have been doing. I am only being scheduled about 20 hours a week at work, so it isn't that I have been working too much. I guess I just don't feel like writing. Possibly because I am not the strongest at it, maybe I am just so burnt out that anything that takes any effort is too much for me.

I have all these little lists of things that I need to write about here, but when it comes down to it, the list is just like a note card for a speech, and I would need to fill in all the blanks, once I sit down at the computer all the words that I need to tell the stories have disappeared from my vocabulary. Maybe someday in the near future I will get them all organized and type in word before I even connect to the Internet. Maybe I can't make myself add the entries because I would be opening up even if there are not many people that I know who actually read this. Maybe I figure they aren't really worth writing about and if I leave them all as lists they will just disappear and I can forget about it all.

Since I am here and the words appear to functioning in the manner that they are supposed to be I will work on the big subject that shows up on most of the little lists.

Work has been pretty much hell since I came back from Wyoming. When I first started working in the deli at Target I loved it, there were plenty of hours to be had and I got along with the people that I was working with. Then Patrick changed his availability and Kristen got her old job back at Subway so she only works on weekends now. And I was having to spend a lot more of my time with people that I wasn't as comfortable with.

I was dealing, keeping a smile on my face and at times doing more than my share of the work. If I was in the deli, I did everything I possibly could and then some, if I was scheduled in Starbucks, I would take care of all of my stuff over there and then pick up some of the slack in the deli.

A while back, the team lead in the deli totally went off on me about how I had let the Starbucks attitude rub off on me and I had become a stuck up snot. That really bothered me because I am like the friendliest easygoing person in my family. I want to have a fun time doing my job and if at all possible I want to help my co-workers do the same. It bothered me but I wasn't going to let it ruin my life, I knew she was wrong.

It had been in the back of my mind, and I had almost forgot about it until the other night when I was sitting at the computer trying to put words together to form sentences in a manner worthy of a diary entry and the cats knocked my bedroom door half way closed and I looked at my nose in the mirror on the door. In that one short glance I realized that my nose is a bit turned up at the end. All my life, my nose has been my favorite part of my face followed by my eyes. Nearly 23 years into my life, someone makes a totally off base comment about me being stuck up, and I see my nose in a totally different manner.

Not many of us ever liked our team lead. I have been calling her Samma Bin Laden since the day she cut her finger on the slicer and stopped doing her job. The whole deli crew has been running around like her little lackeys since that day picking up after her and putting out fires she started with poor guest service.

It gets old, especially when we are told that they are trying to get rid of her, they just have to cover all the bases because she was one of 3 African-American employees in the store.

The Sunday that Spring Break started for us here, I was scheduled to work a three hour shift from noon to 3 pm. At 8 am the phone rings, I sat up looked at the caller-id and decided that I would answer it just because I was only scheduled for 8 hours that week. It was Target they needed me to come in as soon as possible. I clocked in shortly after 9 am, was told that Samm was sick and she needed to go home as soon as she finished doing our order.

She roamed around the deli doing nothing for about 45 minutes, then disappeared to place the order. When she came back into the department so wandered around for another 30 minutes then came over and told me that she couldn't make herself go home because she didn't think that we (June and I) were going to be able to get all of the production done before the store opened at noon.

Now not only am I stuck up, but I am incapable of making a few sandwiches and cooking chicken and mashed potatoes. I am pretty sure that I have more experience making sandwiches, than she has. I worked at Subway half of my sophomore and all of my junior year of high school. I worked at Taco Bell for 7 months, and I worked in a University cafeteria, maybe not as the head cook or anything, but I helped out in the kitchen.

That wasn't even the part of the situation that upset me the most. What totally pissed me off was the fact that when level 3s go home sick and they have worked at least 4 hours of their scheduled shift they get paid for the full shift and don't have to make up the missed hours. She dicked around in the deli until she had been on the clock just about four hours, and then she finally listened when she was told to go home. She left the department and went and printed invoices and the department email just to make sure she had enough time on the clock to get paid for her full shift.

The deli is already short on hours and those of us that take our job seriously can't get the hours that we would like to have and Samm was pulling crap like this at least twice a month.

That day I cried at work. I went and talked to head of the grocery side of the store and told him I thought it was bullshit. I was woke up on a Sunday morning, showed up for work 3 hours early and was told that I didn't know how to do my job, by an individual they have been trying to fire since the day they hired her, because she didn't do her job. They were pulling her into the office at least twice a week to tell her she either needs to step up and do her job properly or step down so they could find someone else to do it right.

I knew she was wrong and that I shouldn't have let it bother me, but things shouldn't have gotten to the point that she was worried that others were doing a better job than she was and she felt threatened by us so much that she thought she needed to break us down and try to get us to quit.

Almost another week went by after that before she was finally fired. She worked there for almost a year, and they had been trying to get rid of her just as long. But they had to have enough reasons to get rid of her because our store can't afford another lawsuit. I would have thought that not doing your job would have been enough, then add the shoplifting, ignoring supervisors, writing bad checks and everything else it would have taken less than 10 months to get things taken care of.

Any way she is finally gone, and everyone is in a much better mood. I no longer fear going to work in the Deli when she is there, because she won't be plotting a way to cause complete mental breakdowns. Which probably wouldn't have taken much more for me with the way I have been feeling the last few months.

So it is now 6:05 am and I have been at this for more than an hour, I think I am going to spell check and click the cute little done! button before damn Juno decides to disconnect me again.