Wednesday, May 24, 2006

The Long Week: Day 3

Currently Reading: Ghost in the Shell 2: After the Long Goodbye by Masaki Yamada

Yes, I know, there are no postings for days 1 and 2 of the long week. The reason for that? I was too busy to post anything.

Right now I'm on day 3 of a 6 day week. This comes after just one day off from LAST week so it stands to reason that right about now I'm starting to get a little tired of that drive to the salon. Don't get me wrong, I like the job and I like the people there but DAMN I've been spending a lot of time there lately.

Day 1 wasn't all that exciting from a work standpoint. It was more of a gossip-oriented day. We didn't have that much to do so for the first hour or so Rogers, Amanda and I were talking about what's been going on in the store. We got a new General Manager recently and she's brought over one of her assistants from her previous store. And we also managed to squeeze in some stories about former employees. Just pretty much the usual BS session that happens on slow days in any office.

After a while the shifts changed, people went home, dogs got picked up and it was time for the daily cleaning. Pretty boring stuff which is why I'm not going to go into detail here. I mean, do you REALLY want to know about the size of the hairballs I pulled from the sink? :-)

Day 2 was a little more interesting. Rogers and Amanda both had the day off. It's their one day off this week. They were both a little grumpy that they have to work 7 days without a day off (actually Amanda didn't mind, she wants as many hours as we can give her). Me, I only work 6 days in a row but unlike those two, I only get the one day off. So where they've gotten 2 days off then work 7, I worked 3, got one day off, then work 6. But I digress :-)

Day 2 was the day for the substitute groomer. Someone had to cover for Rogers. The girl we originally had scheduled to fill in couldn't make it for some reason so we had to find someone else. Rogers, who was in charge of all this, got the deaf groomer from the Cordova store. Yes, you read that right, the woman is stone deaf. We made quite a pair yesterday.

It wasn't as bad as I thought. She's REALLY good at reading lips and clearly she lost her hearing after learning how to speak because she talks quite clearly. No problems communicating, which is good, and she was very nice, which is even better.

The only real problem with day 2 was that the rest of the store knew it was just us back there. Why is that a problem? Because some people seem to think that if you're deaf, or hard of hearing, you're automatically STUPID. Prime example, they were answering all our calls for us. Why? I have NO idea. I can hear the pages just fine and there's no problem talking on the phone. But tell some people you can't hear very well and they decide you need their expert assistance. After a while that sort of thing gets annoying. Finally the assistant manager on duty that day reminded everyone that I'm hard of hearing, not a complete moron. I answer the phones all the time.

It was also a pretty busy day for us back there. We've got the long weekend coming up for Memorial Day so you've got a LOT of people going out of town on trips or having parties of some sort. That usually means they want the dogs cleaned up RIGHT NOW! Honestly, I had to turn away SO many people who wanted to come in because they were leaving town on Wednesday and for some reason didn't think they needed to call in advance. Imagine it, 3 pm on Tuesday they're calling wanting to get their dog shaved down so they can go on vacation Wednesday morning. Some people just don't think things through.

Not sure how many dogs I washed yesterday but I do know that my commission total was around 80 bucks. That means, roughly, 160 bucks worth of sales so that's quite a bit of washing. Don't think I'll actually GET my commission this week though. I'm scheduled for 43 hours this week so unless I keep having days like that, my hourly will be higher.

So now we're at day 3. I'm not going in until later. It's my short day so I've got a few hours to kill. Spent one of them sleeping, which felt pretty good :-)

.

No comments: