Sunday 29 August 2010

Swaps, Sanity and Staff

The Word of the Week is...nonplussed.

Aug 23 - Bang, it's Monday
 

A story in two parts,
Is not a story,
But a promise kept.

Want a great way to start off your week? How about being audited? That was how my day started today – for the second week in a row, one of my branches was audited while I was there. A glance at the pile of work I was scheduled to catch up on today, as I do once a week every week when I work at my smaller Millstream branch, a shrug, and then into the audit. By the end I was cheerful on the outside and brain-dead on the inside – it was a struggle to maintain my equilibrium as the score was tallied. I told myself that it was all small items, that my staff were on the ball and that things can be greatly improved in the next month or so with not too much effort. I kept telling myself that. Yeah... I’ll be pretty bummed for the rest of the week while I plan what I’m going to do to fix the details.
 

Aug 24 - Training
 

Where poets fear to tread,
Hollywood gladly gambols,
And many pay in tears.

Yes, it’s more about work, but good things( for a change ): I’ve been training two new hires for the last week, and they’re dynamite. It’s been a rare pleasure for me to show these two the ropes, as they’re always on the ball and I have yet to have to explain something twice; they’re sharp. Goes to show that our updated hiring practices are paying dividends already, focusing on hiring the best candidates, not just people who look like they can fill the space needed first and learn their way to competence second. So in my current stress-ball of tangled yarns, theirs is a shiny, bright thread indeed.
 

Aug 25 – Argh, brains...
 

If you're dead serious,
Do people take you seriously?
Or do they just ignore you still?




There’s a new show coming out from AMC: The Walking Dead, based on a graphic novel series of the same name. It’s more gritty, realistic and far less stylized than a lot of the current crop of zombie works out there – apart from things like World War Z, of course. Aside from Stephen King’s The Stand, there’s been precious little in the way of television work about the apocalypse / undead in general... and if you mention Twilight or its ilk, I’ll send you snarky notes. One question about a TV series though: how long can it go on? Will the focus go from discovery of How Bad Things Are, to Discovering The Real Reason for The Disaster, to What Will We Do Now? And beyond? We’ll see where AMC takes it, if they can go from a shuffle to a run, without tripping and being devoured. Its premiere date? Halloween 2010! For now, Resident Evil: Afterlife will have to suffice, which opens September 10th nationwide.
 

Aug 26 - Bambi?

Fawns, stags and does cavort,

Eating shrubs meant for looking only.
Is it any wonder they're so cute?

Deer, deer everywhere – it’s really unbelievable how many deer I see in a day. I could go months in Ontario without seeing one, but here I see up to a dozen a day – since they have no fear of vehicles or people, they line the roadside some days. Today I drove in to work on my usual side-route through a wending series of roads down the mountain, which passes one section where a ravine skirts along the side of several properties. Wouldn’t you know that on one fellow’s front yard, no less than SIX deer were standing in his garden, devouring his plants? It made for quite the sight, though I am sure that that homeowner wouldn’t have the same point of view.
 

Aug 27 - Vacation soon?

If you can't play at work,
And you have to work to play,
Does that mean you're confused?

Like yesterday, today was a double shift: open Colwood, try to get some work done when the staff arrive, then over to Millstream to do the same and simultaneously close the store. All this because I’m short one staff member, but as I mentioned above, I am very pleased that her replacement is coming along VERY well so far. The end is in sight for long days where I get nothing done as a manager, and I can actually start thinking about some vacation time for myself AND my staff - I have two weeks at a minimum that I have to take before the end of 2010, so scheduling THAT sooner rather than later is a slice of heaven I dearly want on the menu soon. Yum.
 

Aug 28 - A Dozen Days Done
 

Every day should be a Day Off,
Where they're not special really,
But just a vacation waiting in secret.

Saturday... my first day off in 12 days straight, so I slept in until nearly 9am – for some reason I couldn’t fall asleep until well into the morning last night. Breakfast was brief, as I headed down to the storage lockers to spend the morning and some of the afternoon emptying, sorting and repacking two lockers – one for keeping, one for selling and the difference to the garbage / recycling room. It was fairly successful; we managed to whittle things down to the space of a single locker, with more likely to go in the coming months. After that massive effort, I spent a good hour napping( and woke with a headache? )then over to the Mountain Bean until dinner, which was fairly crowded for a Saturday. Considering that ALL I’ve done this week is work and recover FROM work, the day off today was really, really needed. Sanity.
 

Aug 29 - Make Me An Offer!
 

People own things, not the other way around.
Making room for more things causes problems.
Find the balance, and you find yourself free.

We were out the door today shortly after 7am, the car packed to the gunwales with Stuff for the Swap and Shop. We arrived at the Western Speedway to find a spot in the middle of the Pits area of the track and proceeded to set up for selling, which was remarkably easy. Two more carloads of things were brought by my parents as the place filled with seller tables – imagine a racetrack totally lined on both sides with seller tables! Quite a lot of things were gone by 9am, and the crowds really started arriving soon after that – we had a lull around 11am, and after that we starting giving away what was left, which was in the main of little value anyway. I would be surprised if we made a dollar on ten of actual value, but what I took away from the experience was not only how NICE all of the people wandering around the track browsing were, but how thrilled most of them were when they bought items from us for next to nothing that had some worth to them. I'll definitely go back, though I have to say that going with the firm intent of NOT accumulating stuff is the way to do it - there was a lot of what I'd now call junk, not collectables, all on display / for sale / swap. Since I need little right now of what I saw, it was quite liberating to wander and not walk away with anything save a little nostalgia.
 

As I said: different. Is less more? Or does it leave one wanting for more? You decide... me, I’m going to get some sleep. It’s going to be a long week, but at least the weekend ended well enough.