Holiday Retail 2022

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, 

It's been a while since I wrote one of these. Here I'd like to explain to you what it's been like working the retail gig this holiday season. 

First, the work has been intense and nonstop. I've been working 42-48 hour weeks since November and the work isn't letting up even going into this week and Christmas week. The good news is that the pay is decent but it's tough making it through the slog every shift. I've been working five days per week with only two days off since the summer. 

Second, cold/flu and covid season is here again, and with that brings sicknesses, mostly of a respiratory nature. For the first time since covid began in 2020, I finally got a regular cold. It only lasted a day or two but it was setback from my usual day to day routine. I still went to work as I felt well enough, but I probably initially got sick from work, from customers and/or employees. 

Third, my job has become easier but its still grueling. I've sort of graduated from having to do regular checkout scanning large orders. Rather, my management has decided they want me to run self-checkout for my eight hour shifts, as its mostly machine button pressing menu, and the older cashier employees who aren't used to computers don't want to do it at all. So I sort of lucked out. Because the older employees don't want to do it, I end up doing it, and I get to avoid doing all the heavy lifting $400-$600 holiday orders and bagging a million bags. Not too shabby! 

Fourth, the type of employees that get hired and stay on the job has diminished immensely. Right now, they want anyone they can because they need cashiers. So they hire them and immediately promote them to cashier. The problem is that none of them stay. There are two other young people my age, two girls, who are very good cashiers but all of the other young people are baggers or other positions that work menial side jobs in other departments. A lot of them are special needs and the regular ones seem to have a lot of behavioral issues. I've had to learn how to talk to these kids in a certain type of way to get them on my side and help me out. Not ideal to getting the job done everyday! 

Fifth, management seems to be good this year at getting the job done. But they have done a horrible job in encouraging mask wearing so oftentimes the youth get sick easily and spread it around so that's concerning. My main problem with the management is that since day one in 2020 they weren't enforcing mask wearing either by customers or employees. That has been a problem since the early days of covid. The actual boss and co-director never wear masks and have had covid already several times. They probably spread it. One of the sales managers has had covid several times as well. I keep my mask on and keep my distance from all of them for my own safety. They all have failed horribly on this one simple task. 

Lastly, the job has become more machine-like. You really get a sense that you're a cog in the machine in there nowadays. The upper management lack empathy, but you also see it at the lower management level as well as from the customers, that that's expected from customers at this point in the game. You have to really dig deep to see empathy and compassion from others there nowadays, but it is still there in small doses here and there. It's not the worst place in the world, but you can sort of see that one day this entire operation, this job will eventually become obsolete if replaced by machines. The self-checkout tells me that everyday. 

All that being said, my personal life is quite magisterial. I learned how to play piano, sing better, and drums. I can speak Spanish pretty well now, as well as a little French, Italian, German, and even Portuguese. I'm still reading the western canon and loving every minute of it. C'est la vie. 

Happy Holidays!

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das Erntedankfest 2022

Hello loyal blogspot readers, 

How are you? It's been a minute. Things have been up, down, topsy, turvy. Here I'd like to jot down some notes on what life has been like this Thanksgiving week. 

First, I've been working nonstop since the summer. I've requested a week off for a vacation week every month since September and I've been denied every time. C'est la vie. On top of that, I only had Tuesday off this week so I'm working hardcore. 

Here's an empathetic experience for you. I was listening to classical music on my last ten minute break tonight and this cute girl I work with came in and talked on her phone for like two minutes, probably with her boyfriend. Then she just sat there and cried. It was super awkward. I didn't know what to say so I didn't say anything. But I was listening to a great classical piece without headphones so she heard it, and it seemed to soothe her, especially the last major chord ending the piece. Quite an experience. Did I mention she's cute?

Second, although my job is grueling, it is pretty easy. So although I get mad when I'm there sometimes, in reality, I can't complain too much. Pushing carts in the cold is harder work and I've done that too. I stand there and take cash and throw things in the bag. It helps to have a personality but the job doesn't require you to have any kind of personality whatsoever, so if you don't really want to talk, you can just say the bare minimum. 

Third, this holiday season has been especially rough on the low level employees and the customers. The only way you can really enjoy this holiday season and have a lot of fun is if you're some kind of superman or superwoman. Most people that come to my line have nothing but complaints about this, that, the other, or prices of most things. I could care less. Nobody seems to be happy and you know what, that's not going to change. You know why? Because they simply lack the capacity for happiness. 

Fourth, what is the capacity for happiness? The capacity for happiness is the ability to find happiness within yourself, in and outside of your own makeup and psyche, and being able to see it and fulfill it within others. When you are happy, you are smiling, even if not physically, your spirit will be shining bright, and when others see that, theirs will be too, ad infinitum. 

But again, not to be rude, but most people can never be completely happy because most people simply lack the capacity for happiness. Nobody in the universe, not even God, or Christ Himself, can make you happy. You have to make the leap on your own for your own good. Everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die. It easier to smoke pot or get drunk or do hard drugs. 

Lastly, I've been talking about this idea for years on this blog. Here's a blog from 2020 even entitled Capacity for Happiness, you can read it here. When everything is going well, it doesn't really matter if your happy or sad or in the middle or whatever. But it's times like these, where the world seems to be falling off the hidden cliffs of the abyss, staring back at you, that's when you need to have practiced and gained the capacity for happiness, training within it and without it, your entire life, ad infinitum.

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Covid in the Workplace

Good evening ladies and gents, a happy dawn to you. 

Here I'd like to talk about what's been going on so far at this point in the pandemic. Okay, so we've been at this pandemic for nearly three years now. A lot has changed at my job, I've had to readjust mightily and heavily and I faired pretty damn well, I might add. 

But let us get to the heart of the matter. There are currently fifteen recorded covid-19 cases at my store, and that's only going back from the first of the year, AND that's not including cases that are probably there right now but haven't been reported. 

The new store director has been commissioned by the company to order everybody to be vaccinated by the 24th of the month with an electronic verification online. This doesn't include booster shots, the only requirement is at least the one shot vaccine of any vaccine from 2021. Things are finally moving, but wait, why wasn't this set in place by the company in year one?

I know for a fact that a lot of my coworkers/management weren't vaccinated, yet I've had to work with them all this time, myself being put at more risk. While I do find it comforting that everyone will at least have to prove they've been vaccinated once, it still bothers the hell out of me that this wasn't a requirement on year one. One step forward, two steps back. It's a lot like getting a gunshot wound and putting a band aid on it. 

With so many call outs from colds/flu and covid-19, the store is being run with much less staff and most departments doing earlier closing hours. Social distancing is nearly impossible in our narrow aisles and small front end. Tons of people come in without wearing masks all the time. The unmasked are a nuisance and get aggressive, sometimes physically aggressive and taunt other customers. Some things never change. 

With all this covid in the workplace, I'm more weary than ever about catching the virus. It's not really myself that I'm worried about because I have good health and am still young, it's more my stepfather. In terms of the climactic moment of this plague, and my own personal plague journal here, I would say we've hit the climax in terms of covid disrupting my place of employment with high numbers of cases, and counting. 

It's like a movie. I almost still can't believe it. Two years and counting. Welcome to the plague years. The best years of my life. 

Aristoi

Wow, what a terrific space opera god adventure story!

The way I described this book to people was this: this is a space opera about gods that become humanized. I mentioned Homer and his humanizing of his Olympians. So there's a long cherished tradition here going back throughout time, the western canon, of pathos, from Plato. What does it mean to be human? A god? What is good and evil? Who gets to justify right and wrong? These are some of the existential philosophical questions this book brings to mind in a general sense, disguised in the form of a 90s space opera. 

In addition to that, the momentum of the book never really stops, not even at the very bitter end. The story itself isn't remarkable, its rather predictable, and we've seen this same science fiction space opera tropes used time and time again within the golden age of science fiction and even the cyberpunk and new wave, it's rather space opera cliché. 

However, it is the way he tells the story that is truly a thrill. The style is simple but downright effective. It was never dull and every moment is a good one. I'm somewhat of a science fiction connoisseur but I missed this one all these years and I know I've missed much more. I would even say it's a required science fiction reading in the genre of space opera. It would be extremely difficult for a new science fiction writer in 2021 to write a space opera this good. It might even be downright impossible unless it was coming from overseas [not the US], maybe China.