A and B

So life’s been a bit crazy around here, as you could probably guess. Jobs and kiddo basketball games and practices, and kiddo issues with acting out, and just general duties of life.

Ended up having to drop one of the two jobs, basically in the name of sanity.

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Job A is going ok. It’s not bad most of the time, just very physical… a sort of a different change from most of my other jobs that haven’t been very physical tiring but either mentally tiring, or as an introvert being a drain on energy.

The shelf stocking aspect isn’t bad, mostly there’s 2 or 3 of us working in an area, but working mainly independent of each other. Mostly a quiet, left to thoughts and physical task sort of thing.

The sorting boxes onto as they come of the truck really varies by what area you are working in, and how well staffed things are to be able to keep up with the pacing. And has a lot more interaction with the other workers… several of which seem to have chips on their shoulders in general, and several more of which don’t seem to be fans of either seasonal workers or new people and i guess have forgotten they were new once too.

The worst thing about it is the hours… originally they were starting at 6am, but then closer to holidays got moved to 4am. 4am is crazy time to be getting up and functioning.

While not mentioned in the hiring process, it does actually have cross training on cashier too.. having your second day cashiering be an 8 hour shift on black friday starting at 1am is interesting to say the least, but not nearly as bad as I expected the shift to go!

Not too bad overall, but still, not something I particularly hope to have as a job forever. It sort of scares me a bit how many people are doing this and are 40 or 50 or 60 and have been there 7 or 10 or 22 years and are largely bitter at the many early 20’s workers and newbies.

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Job B, the best way to describe it is that it wasn’t as described.

I’d been told it was mostly afternoons and evenings doing recovery… which at most retail stores means picking things up, refolding what needs it, straightening, and just in general putting things back to how they should be. And cross trained on cashier to be able to jump on a register when things got too busy in an area.

During training, this seemed to be what they expected it to be too…. the parts of the videos and such devoted to that area explained it as a team that came in to help get things back in order where needed earlier in the evening so it wasn’t all left until the end of the day.

In reality, there would be no afternoons, or even evenings really. The job scheduling was always to be 3 hours before the store closed and an hour and a half afterwards. Which was ok when the store closed at 9, workable at 10, but really not manageable on an everyday basis when they switched to the holiday hours.

Had they told me upfront that the set hours would be 9pm to 130am, 4 weekdays a week, for the vast majority of the time I would be there, I’d have been able to tell them upfront that wasn’t likely to work well. I don’t consider that to be the “afternoons and evenings” I’d been told at interviews and in the classroom training.

But, even had the hours matched what I was told, the job description didn’t. The only time we did actual recovery was after the store closed, when that’s what everyone was doing.

And I never saw a cash register after the classroom training.

The rest of the time was spent circling through and picking up returns and other unwanted items from the registers in each department, and essentially wandering the store until you found where it went to put it away.

Which might not have been so bad if I were familiar with all of the different departments… but this is a store where I only really shop in two of them, the clothing sizes for me and the sizes for kiddo.

And only really look at the lower end of brands.

So where my on the floor trainer could look at a pink sweatshirt and know instantly by the brands that it was mens and a more upscale brand and know roughly the area it would be in to look for it… to me that totally looked like a women’s shirt… so I was looking in womens activewear. And then just general womens. And then the women’s petites. And then juniors. I’d only eliminated older girls and plus sections by the size.

And so things were going rather poorly anyway, but when you add in a rule to ask anyone within a certain space of you if you can find something for them…. knowing there’s very little chance you are actually going to be able to find it if they say yes…

And then adding in that I pulled a muscle in my calf and was having it be really sore while walking for about 2 weeks….

I ended up quitting because I just wasn’t able to do the hours, especially when job A moved to 4am. But I can’t say I wasn’t glad to see the tasks go to.

Recovery wasn’t bad… it just wasn’t actually what the job was actually doing until the last hour and a half of the day.

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