(1 Jan., 2012)
I was late to work again today (I officially give up ever trying to traverse Long Island in less time than it took for Ferdinand Magellan to circumnavigate the globe) so my punishment was to reorganize the denim walls. Just huge tall walls stocked with jeans and you have to put them all in size and colour order according to a little roadmap of cards saying what goes where. This is always time-consuming and a huge pain in the ass to do and requires you to basically tear the entire wall apart and start from scratch, especially since nobody puts sizes back where they find them. (Fair enough, though--some of them require a ladder to reach.) Most of the time we don't bother just as long as everything is at least folded but sometimes there's someone who deserves a bit of retail-equivalent hard labour and today it fell on me.
It was, as I expected, a pain in the ass. Though I don't know that it says so anywhere in my files, I am mortally terrified of heights to the point where a kitchen step-stool can make me freak out. For the most part I can deal with this just enough that it doesn't impede my day-to-day life but I am never anywhere near comfortable on ladders. I've told the managers this and politely asked for assistance from other co-workers when I DO need something that requires a ladder. If it's legitimately too much hassle to get someone else, I'll do it myself but I shake noticeably the whole time until I get my feet back on the floor. So I'm fairly sure they're all at least tangentially aware that I don't like heights and the ladder is an unsafe place to put me, but that was probably all part of the penance paid and up the ladder I had to go. And stay for quite some time because, like I said, the whole thing is a time-consuming business.
Actually, in the end I didn't really mind it. It was something to DO so I wasn't going to get in trouble for idling and isn't one of those menial tasks that requires JUUUST enough attention to make daydreaming impossible. So it wasn't that bad. Even the ladder didn't bother me too much but I expect that was more because my mind had begun to wander sufficiently far so as to make me completely oblivious to the fact that I was standing eight feet off the ground.
Weird of the day: When I went to dinner after my shift there were two young (young-ish, probably between five and eight) boys at a table near me being pretty obnoxious. It was the two boys and (I assume) their sister at one table and the parents and their friends at another, leaving the girl, who couldn't have been much more than about fourteen, to mind the boys. Who were just unbelievably annoying and didn't listen to her pleas to behave, sit down, be quiet, stop fighting. It was the worst kind of annoying, too--the kind of annoying that you can't really get openly angry about. Nothing they did was aggressively bad in a way that justifies a total stranger yelling at them, but it was a case of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts--if they had ONLY been loud, OR fighting, OR playing with their food, it wouldn't have been so bad. But they were doing all that and more and it created a singular entity of annoyingness greater than all of it combined.
The parents were the most infuriating of all, though. They completely ignored the boys and their behaviour until it got to the point where people were staring, and then they made a few token scolding remarks--but not at the boys, at the girl. Not scolding the boys for misbehaving, scolding HER for not controlling them better! She isn't their mother!
Eventually they did do something that merited saying something. The kids started swearing. I usually have no problem with swearing in adults and teenagers provided it isn't excessive, but I am of the belief that you should at least have a compelling reason to swear. Emphasis in an anecdote, shock, or and exclamation are all good reasons to swear. Simply swearing because you feel like verbally cycling through all the dirty words you know? Not so much.
Bonus weird: This is completely racist of me to say, but I found it cruelly amusing. As they went through their list of dirty words, they actually spelled them all out loud. Like it was some Profanity Bee. Without even intending to think this, I thought, 'Well, it makes sense--they ARE Asian...'
I am a very, very bad person.
I was all set to go off at the boys for being extremely rude and inappropriate but someone else beat me to it and told the parents that they needed to be more proactive or they were never going to learn to be gentlemen.
On the plus side, though, they DID spell all the words right so they might be one of those rare vandals whose graffiti has proper spelling, punctuation, and grammar.
Be still my heart!
It was, as I expected, a pain in the ass. Though I don't know that it says so anywhere in my files, I am mortally terrified of heights to the point where a kitchen step-stool can make me freak out. For the most part I can deal with this just enough that it doesn't impede my day-to-day life but I am never anywhere near comfortable on ladders. I've told the managers this and politely asked for assistance from other co-workers when I DO need something that requires a ladder. If it's legitimately too much hassle to get someone else, I'll do it myself but I shake noticeably the whole time until I get my feet back on the floor. So I'm fairly sure they're all at least tangentially aware that I don't like heights and the ladder is an unsafe place to put me, but that was probably all part of the penance paid and up the ladder I had to go. And stay for quite some time because, like I said, the whole thing is a time-consuming business.
Actually, in the end I didn't really mind it. It was something to DO so I wasn't going to get in trouble for idling and isn't one of those menial tasks that requires JUUUST enough attention to make daydreaming impossible. So it wasn't that bad. Even the ladder didn't bother me too much but I expect that was more because my mind had begun to wander sufficiently far so as to make me completely oblivious to the fact that I was standing eight feet off the ground.
Weird of the day: When I went to dinner after my shift there were two young (young-ish, probably between five and eight) boys at a table near me being pretty obnoxious. It was the two boys and (I assume) their sister at one table and the parents and their friends at another, leaving the girl, who couldn't have been much more than about fourteen, to mind the boys. Who were just unbelievably annoying and didn't listen to her pleas to behave, sit down, be quiet, stop fighting. It was the worst kind of annoying, too--the kind of annoying that you can't really get openly angry about. Nothing they did was aggressively bad in a way that justifies a total stranger yelling at them, but it was a case of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts--if they had ONLY been loud, OR fighting, OR playing with their food, it wouldn't have been so bad. But they were doing all that and more and it created a singular entity of annoyingness greater than all of it combined.
The parents were the most infuriating of all, though. They completely ignored the boys and their behaviour until it got to the point where people were staring, and then they made a few token scolding remarks--but not at the boys, at the girl. Not scolding the boys for misbehaving, scolding HER for not controlling them better! She isn't their mother!
Eventually they did do something that merited saying something. The kids started swearing. I usually have no problem with swearing in adults and teenagers provided it isn't excessive, but I am of the belief that you should at least have a compelling reason to swear. Emphasis in an anecdote, shock, or and exclamation are all good reasons to swear. Simply swearing because you feel like verbally cycling through all the dirty words you know? Not so much.
Bonus weird: This is completely racist of me to say, but I found it cruelly amusing. As they went through their list of dirty words, they actually spelled them all out loud. Like it was some Profanity Bee. Without even intending to think this, I thought, 'Well, it makes sense--they ARE Asian...'
I am a very, very bad person.
I was all set to go off at the boys for being extremely rude and inappropriate but someone else beat me to it and told the parents that they needed to be more proactive or they were never going to learn to be gentlemen.
On the plus side, though, they DID spell all the words right so they might be one of those rare vandals whose graffiti has proper spelling, punctuation, and grammar.
Be still my heart!
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