So, yeah, as of right now I am working on 48 hours without having slept and I'm really not liking it at all. Holy fuck. I can honestly say I have never felt this physically miserable without there actually being a legitimate medical cause for it--like I just had some kind of surgery, or I'm having a horrific period, or I have the flu, or I'm passing a kidney stone. Possibly all of the above. I was so sluggish at work and so obviously unwell that even the horrible 'hemorrhagic-fever-is-not-a-good-enough-excuse-to-call-out-of-your-shift' top manager asked if I felt okay. (But didn't offer to let me take a break or get a drink or go home.) Yeah, no more doing this to myself. I need a regular bedtime. Operating on no sleep at all is not, it turns out, something I am at all able to cope with physically or mentally. Even that ever-present narrator in my head is talking pretty fucking slowly right now, which never happens. Wow.
Additional bodily development: I am officially dropping an alarming amount of weight at an even more alarming speed. I've had to tighten my watch band twice in the last month. (After wearing it for six months without having to tighten it at all.) I can't wear my ring anymore because it's so loose it sometimes just slips right off. My ribs are standing out more than they normally do and you can see my knee and ankle bones for the first time since I was in high school. My hands have gotten smaller. I mean visibly, noticeably smaller. I'm not a nutritionist or anything but something tells me that if you're losing body fat in a place that doesn't even have a lot of body fat to begin with, something might possibly be going on that is potentially less than completely hunky-dory.
Unrelated: there isn't a single self-service gas station in the town where I work (which is about half an hour from my apartment). Seriously, not one. Everybody I work with thinks this is totally normal but I freaking hate it. I don't want someone doing that for me, I can do it my goddamn self! Having someone else pump your gas is like having someone else tie your shoes--the only acceptable reason is if you happen to be incapacitated or something, and if you don't know how to do it yourself then you're actually kind of pathetic since you lack the ability to do a very basic and very necessary everyday skill. Most of the people at work don't know how to pump their own gas. Seriously. How the hell can you say something like that without the abject humiliation you should be feeling at such a staggering lack of competence?
Really unrelated: let's face it, evolution totally played a lot of really mean pranks on us. I mean just think about it--evolution left us with the appendix, an organ with absolutely no other function except to fuck us over. It either does nothing at all, or it fails painfully and can kill you. Evolution is also in charge of nipples on men, which makes so much in the way of complete nonsense that it's best not to think about it at all because it's only going to give you a headache trying to come up with a reasonable excuse for why men might have once lactated. That's all bad enough, but evolution wasn't going to stop there. No, evolution decided it would be fucking hilarious if all humans made identical noises for intense and unbearable pain and really good sex. The next time you stub your toe, do yourself a favour and tape record the sounds you make. It'll sound like a sex scene soundtrack, I guarantee it.
So unrelated that it kind of looks like I'm degenerating into psychosis: a woman came in to the store today to get a coupon applied retroactively to a purchase. We can do this, but it requires tricking the computer into thinking the customer has returned and re-purchased everything on the receipt and to do that involves laboriously typing in the long barcode numbers by hand, one at a time, and then doing it again to trick the system into thinking new purchases have been made. (This is the only way to do it without requiring they bring all of their purchases back to the store.) Now, this is obnoxious and time-consuming but we still do it. Except that the lady who came in today was fucking insane. She had so much fucking stuff that it required three separate transactions to complete because the system only allows transactions of up to 65 items. Yeah, and it took three of those. I wasn't handling the return myself, and thank goodness for that because if I'd had to I would have gone completely crazy. Instead it was on the manager. I bagged for her because it helped save time, since not only did this woman want every single one of her previous 195 items returned and re-purchased for the purpose of saving a total of about $50 all together (I understand times are hard and you need whatever you can get, but nobody was inclined to feel sympathy), but she also bought another thirty or so. Then I remembered who she was, because I'd had to deal with her before and she's one of the most annoying customers I have ever dealt with. She's the kind of person who refuses to pay the given price for anything, even when the given price is enormously reduced--she's also scathingly cheap and refuses to take any item over $3 and will argue about pennies. The last time I had to deal with her she kept whining about a coupon she swore she had but couldn't produce. But there weren't any out at the time and I had no idea what she was talking about. So she called her sister and demanded that I talk to her, because her sister supposedly had the coupon in her possession and I guess seh figured I could apply it through the phone by magic or something like that and... ugh. Even though she was getting basically like a 95% discount on all the shit she bought, she still bitched because our system will only allow one coupon to be applied retroactively to a purchase. She even wanted to go through the entire process again--which took more than an hour--so she could use both and save maybe a few more cents. At that point she was paying so little that even a huge percentage reduction was only going to add up to a few dollars for the entire four-transaction-purchase.
PROTIP: You are shopping in the 'clearance' section and purchasing items for, on average, less than a tenth their original price and getting a 50% discount on THOSE along with the coupon you had and wanted applied retroactively. You are no longer allowed to try and squeeze savings out of us. The level of your fussy disruptiveness and general demanding behaviour makes the pitiful amount of money you ultimately spend in our store not worth the time, effort, patience, and constant tooth-grinding required to get through the hour-long process of ringing you up without degenerating into a violent psychotic outburst for which the only remedy is rhino tranquilizers.
In all she had over 200 items total, with all her previous purchases added to the armfuls of new ones. (And bitched mightily because the already-dirt-cheap kid's clearance section didn't qualify for the half-price sale.) She paid a total of $90 and the manager outright lied and said she couldn't adjust the same purchase more than once just so the woman would fucking leave. She had so much shit with her that we had to get someone to help her carry her eight bags to her car--we made the two available male employees decide between them, which naturally meant rock-paper-scissors. While they were arguing, the obnoxious customer had left.
If I see her again, I'm going to conveniently come down with anthrax or something so I have an excuse to hide in the bathroom or conveniently faint. Or maybe have a heart attack. Or something. Anything. If necessary I will come down with the fucking Black Death if it means I won't have to deal with her ever again.
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