dragonlady7

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so the schedule was a bit wonky, so i was in buffalo for 2 weeks in a row– in the summers it winds up always being every other week, which is the worst possible way this could work and yet that’s just how it is– and anyway i thought it would be nice because that way i get a weekend instead of spending it driving, and it turned out i didn’t. because my supervisor at work went on vacation, cleverly taking five days over a weekend so he could be away for longer. but that meant i had to go in saturday; he usually does about ten minutes of work on a saturday just to meet amazon’s deadlines, but he can 1) do them remotely and 2) is salaried. if I got the remote shit configured to do it at home, that’d be me working unpaid, so no. My commute is short, so I went in, intending to do so for half an hour but then it was too much work to do in half an hour so I stretched it carefully to an hour. (I haven’t felt the same about this place since I realized they round your hours down to the nearest half when paying you. of course they round down. Ugh.)

anyway. i also wound up having to work several 9-hour days in a row. so thursday morning i sat and tallied up all my hours, and then did the math they do before they pay me– round down to the nearest half-hour, subtract half an hour per eight hours worked for the unpaid lunch break i don’t ever take, etc.– and was left with the number of hours I could work over the next two days to avoid going over 80 for the pay period. I had been counting on this since that resentful Saturday, anticipating that I’d Just Have To take a half day or something on Friday to make up for it, which would be Just Such A Shame. (I was looking forward to it immensely.)

I got fifteen as my result, which didn’t include the two unpaid half hours. So… eight hours each day. Oh.

Well, as it happened, rushed off my feet all day Friday, I redid the math on my lunch break and realized I’d fucked up and in fact should have only worked five hours Friday after all. But it was too late, and in fact I wound up working a bit over eight because I had too much shit to get done. And probably all along I had too much shit to get done to take the time off.

But I didn’t have permission for overtime, and– well, we’ll see. I might get yelled at. Possibly they’ll just find an “innocent” way to forget to pay me for it. We’ll see.

But I’m real tired and I just want to lie here for a little while. Phooey. (Your picture was not posted)

I went into work today. The office job.
Some of it is just that I was so lazy last week and couldn't in good conscience leave all that work sitting there. Some of it is greed for hours; of course I'm going to clock in, and now I can get paid for the work I ought to have been doing when I was fucking around on the clock on Thursday and Friday, and if I take off a little early this coming Friday I won't miss out on pay. (I did not come in at all last pay period, so when I went to pick up my check, it wasn't there, which ought not to have been a surprise but somehow was. Listen, I'm not broke, but I was halfway expecting some money and was sad not to get any. I don't deserve any, but still.)
Some of it is worry; we're taking the cat to the vet Monday morning, and I wouldn't have chosen that; Monday mornings it's important to get shipping data uploaded to Amazon's server, or they take it as an excuse not to pay us. (That's really every other Monday; they hold all money for two weeks and then deposit it all at one go, and it only includes stuff you've shipped, so we race like mad to get everything sent out on Crunch Monday, as we call it. I honestly don't know if it's actually a crunch this week, but I am worried I'll be behind tomorrow morning.) But if Dude's willing to make appointments, I know I never actually would do it, so I will do whatever he says to do, if it means I don't have to make the appointments.

I'm still at work right now, waiting for my phone to finish charging and waiting to download one more time to see what orders we really have. I shipped everything going out of here, anyway, so that's done. Caught up on the few things I ought to have done Friday and couldn't.

The main thing, though, is that when my supervisor's out of town, he wants me to check the work email on the weekends, and I refuse, I refuse, to work off the clock from home. If I can't work remotely, I can't work remotely, and if you want me to do that, fine, but you've got to pay me to come in and do it.
Now that I live close, I don't mind. I'm just never around.
But I knew, he's in NYC this weekend, he wasn't going to check the email, and if there was anything from Amazon, it would go late.
(As a seller you have 24 hours to respond to a message without penalty; beyond that, it counts against you, regardless of whether it's a weekend or a holiday or there's a power outage or your place of business is closed by a blizzard or some other act of God. There's no appeal, and while it's only a percentage point here and there, beyond a certain percentage they don't give you the coveted Buy Box anymore, so it does count.)
(My supervisor is salaried, so arguably, it's not unpaid work if he sits on his couch on a Sunday morning and looks at the emails a bit. But I'm hourly, so fuck no.)

I also took advantage of the weather being beautiful to walk to work, figuring if it was a mistake and hurt my foot or my hip I'd be less sorry than if I did that during an 8-hour workday during which Dude could not come retrieve me. I chose footwear poorly, but-- we were cleaning out closets, and I've been trying on the shoes we found, and these sneakers were in a set that looked possibly not worn-out, and so far of the three one turned out fine, one turned out unwearable, and this pair, well-- they look fine but they are also unwearable. But now I have to walk home in them. Bummer. I may be rather sore tomorrow... Oh well.

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One of those weeks where everything’s just sort of plodding along. After literally twelve years of being on the verge of getting a new cash register/inventory system at work (yes it has been broken to the point of near-unusability for the entire time I’ve worked there), we are slowly rolling it out across the five, er, now four locations of the chain (oh yes, the store where I worked for ten years is shut down now, bye, I didn’t go say goodbye, I’m not going to be sentimental about that horrible building and its styrofoam columns to nowhere). Our online department started using it last Friday, and we’re the only cog in the wheel fully transferred over. Fortunately, it’s easy to use, and I have learned my new workflow easily.

It’s the end of a particular kind of ADHD hell– I’ve written before about how my job is incredibly specifically poorly-suited to someone with my combination of poor attention span, terrible memory, and literal numbers dyslexia. The old system had a lag time of 45-70 seconds from basically any button you pressed, and you’d have to type in entire UPC codes without flubbing a number, and then wait 45-70 seconds to see if it came out right, and then press a button and wait 45-70 seconds for it to bring up a dialog box. And you couldn’t copy-paste, that wasn’t allowed in the program, so you had to type out the UPCs by hand. And so on and so forth.

The new system’s very easy to use, but since it’s not fully onboarded by the other bits of the chain we have to manually zero out all the negative inventory for the stuff we’ve sold, and so on– lots of redundant shit.

Also I went out to dinner on both Monday and Tuesday nights, and that’s lovely sure, but both times it was like, three hour dinners, and that’s fine but it meant I had to go home and go straight to bed afterward, no time to decompress or like, be alone, or whatever. It’s fine, but it means I’ve also made no progress on any personal projects this entire time. 

I’ve also been writing, steadily, and it’s great that I’m doing it but I’m also aware that I’m being really inefficient. I’ve started from the beginning and I have like 30,000 words and it’s… all one scene, more or less. I will probably, in my next draft, reduce most of this to a summary. But I wrote it out, all of it, and I discovered things I would not have if I’d just summarized it to begin with. (For example, my protagonist has a seizure disorder. I have to research seizure disorders, now. I have not yet begun to do that, that’s also going to be a third-draft kind of deal, but if that happens to be something any of y’all have great insights into, I may be looking to pick someone’s brains! No, it’s not going to have to be perfectly medically accurate, this is SF and he’s partially a cyborg, and no I haven’t decided how serious it is, but I feel like that would be not just a useful plot thing but it would be a kind of neat character note to have, and I honestly haven’t read any (?) books featuring a main character with a seizure disorder, that I can think of, and anyway it seems like something I should work in there.)

Also I was having a discussion on Twitter with galadhir by another name, and they mentioned how tiring it is that novels always have gender inequality in their worldbuilding, and so I explained that one of the components of this one I’m working on is reverse gender inequality and it’s been sort of tricky to build that out! But anyway, I thought I’d share my summary of the B plot of the story here:

My current WIP features the dying Queen’s son struggling to be taken seriously enough to inherit even though he’s a man, & a father no less; sure boys get baby-crazy but he’s been working with her advisors for years, can’t we be liberated about this?

So there’s that; I often forget to come up with an elevator pitch. (The guy in that Tweet is the protagonist’s half-brother, though, because there’s of course an A plot too and I’m not sure which is actually the central plot or where this is going, exactly. Shit there might be a C plot. How do people describe this stuff?)

I haven’t gotten up to the Big Muscle Girl female protagonist in the rewrite yet, so I dunno how she’s getting revised. I think she was the most successful part of the partial first draft, though, so she might not change much.

Had to call the corporate headquarters in Philly just now.
Dialed the number. We don't have speed dial, I had to key it in manually, and I'm bad at numbers so I'm prone to mis-dialing.
Phone rings a whole bunch of times and a guy picks up. "Hello?" he says.
Shit, I think. "Uh..." I said. "This is [myname] from [storename] in Buffalo. Is this [corporate storename]?"
"Uh," the guy says, sounding genuinely confused.
"I must have the wrong number," I said. "Sorry."
"No," he says, "no no, this is-- uhhh, yeah, this is [corporate storename]."
"Okay," I said. "Well, can I talk to [boss]?"
"Sure, sure, hold on, who is it?" he says.
I pause a moment, then replay the earlier autopilot. "It's [myname] from [storename]. In Buffalo?"
"Oh, oh yeah," the guy says, and I think I recognize his voice, he's a guy who's worked there about twenty years, during which I've been calling for about twelve years, about once or twice a day. "Ah, hold on."

For real bro, for real. Twenty years in retail and you answer the phone "hello".

No, it's not the first time this has happened, but I never fail to assume I've dialed wrong.

So at work we have an Etsy shop among many other ventures, and that's where we've listed our film transfer services, and that's fine and it works astonishingly well. I'm always stunned by how poor people's reading comprehension is, and yet--
the other day I got a phone call, yes a phone call, from someone who had done all the necessary sleuthing work to connect our physical phone number to our Etsy shop via our online store, and this woman's question amounted to admitting that she had not read our listing and so did not understand how to place her order, so over the phone I read her our listing, which answered all our questions but begs, in turn, the question of, how did you find our phone number if you can't read, but. We can but throw up our hands, is what that amounts to, it's unknowable.

Anyway. A very elderly man placed an order through our Etsy shop and sent in his film, and how do I know he was elderly? well his handwriting, see. Palmer-style, and really shaky.
He sent several notecards along with his order, including his email address on them. I didn't worry about this, as he'd checked out through Etsy and there's a messaging system there, so I wrote to him to say his stuff had arrived, and then when we finished it I wrote to him to let him know it was done, and uploaded the tracking to their automated system knowing it would also send him an email.

Well he wrote today, to our website's main contact address. And he wrote the entire email into the subject line, and sent it with a blank body (except for the signature, "Sent from my iPad", which explains a lot there). I sent my film to you with UPS Tracking # thusandsuch, did it arrive."
The crowning beauty of this experience is that he concluded "I made the purchase thru Zesty".

It took me a moment. Zesty.

Yes. He did. He placed his order through Zesty. We are going to call it that, going forth. Gonna put that on my nonexistent business cards.

(It is a well-known facet of my customer service profile, for my coworkers, that I have a soft spot for genuinely harmless elderly men. I have no time for middle-aged men's shit and if they're mean regardless of age I'm not there for it one tiny bit, and for some reason old ladies hate me, but the really elderly guys with bad jokes and good intentions? oh my gosh. Why am I so tolerant of them? I don't know. The location where I worked the sales floor had a regular who'd been a tail gunner for B-24s in WWII and I was like putty in his hands. Whatever Angelo wanted, he got. even though generally I was shirty with dudes, it doesn't count if they're over 90. So when I tell you, I am not mocking the Zesty guy, I mean, I really am charmed and am not mocking him with this.)