A good day

Wherein “good day” really only means “not awful but not super fantastic, either”. Work was work; my assistant manager, some of my coworkers, and I all spent some time slacking off in the office (“on break”) eating junk food as said supervisor-type has a habit of handing us his debit card and/or phone with his google wallet account open and tells us to go buy drinks/snacks (today was my turn). A couple of sodas, a bag of peanut M&M’s, and a box of Mike & Ike’s later and we were almost ready to actually do work. He actually gave me a “that’s all you got?” when he noticed I only bought myself a bottle of soda.

Slacking gave way to discussions of meals, where he “bragged” about his delicious tri-tip fajitas he made the night before using some of the meat he’d purchased about a month ago–as with most grocery stores, ours majorly marks down meat that’s at or a day before its sell/freeze-by date and my assistant manager somehow managed to snag about 20 of them one day–for $2.50 each. And given that these are regularly $20+ cuts of meat … yes. He let me pick one to buy for myself when he bought them, and it was delicious. But I digress, as the point of this was to say that during this story he said he still had a bunch of them left, to which I replied “Damn, man, hook a sistah up!” “You working tomorrow? I’ll bring you one.” “No, but I can drop in.” “Cool, I’ll bring one. Text me when you’re on your way and I’ll pull it out of the cooler.”

It should be noted that this is this the same man whom while on vacation last year asked us to save him some boxes because his daughter was moving. Upon arriving to pick up said boxes, we (myself and the one other coworker in the department at the time) jokingly told him it would cost him a dollar a box. “How about a six pack of IPA.” “Sure, that works.” Lo and behold, ten minutes later he shows up in the back room with a six pack which was then stored in my coworker’s car until I got off that night, when he then gave me half of him in what probably looked like the shadiest deal ever–a fairly young-looking woman getting alcohol from a man very clearly in his 50’s out of the back of his car in a dark corner of a parking lot in one of the most ghetto parts of town, at somewhere around 11pm.

Once again I digress. Point being I get free delicious, delicious cow that I almost never buy because meat is generally stupidly expensive and I am a poor, broke college student. It’s sort of a running joke that I’m a vegetarian by necessity and not by choice, simply for the “meat is expensive” reason.

Other good work-news is that according to my most recent paystub (which shows up online a day before the check hits) shows that my problem with not being paid out for vacation time has been fixed. The really sad part is that I made more money not going to work than I do on an average work week (partially owing to school, which cuts into my hours).

In non-work-related news, I went out to dinner with my brother and sister-in-law after I got off tonight and had some delicious, delicious sushi. There’s a cute little Japanese restaurant a few blocks from my house that has really good food, so we hit it up. Caught up with them a bit, got caught up on various life happenings for other family members, and life is good.

The business with my wrist is still sort of there, but it seems to be calming down a bit–I’ve switched my brace to the right for work the last couple of days and it seems to be helping. It’s not as stiff as it was and icing seems to be helping, too. I may have just strained it a little too much working on projects for school. I plan on resting it as much as I can before I go to class tomorrow.

All that said, I am a tired human and should probably crawl into bed.

Work work work

So, last week was my very first paid vacation in my 15+ years of holding a job. “Awesome!” I say. “I get paid to sit on my butt and watch Netflix all week.”

Apparently that was a pipe dream. Generally speaking, when we get paid out for vacations, we’ll get two paychecks in one week–one being our regular pay, and the other being our vacation pay. I get paid every Friday. This past Friday? No paystub, no paycheck. I had school all day yesterday so I couldn’t get to work to look into it, but upon asking a coworker this afternoon about when we’re supposed to get it, he told me that we’re actually supposed to get it the week before we leave for vacation–vacations start on Sunday, we should be paid for it the previous Friday.

Aaaand so I had to go talk to my boss about not getting paid out for it, who asked the usual questions–did I turn in the vacation form, etc. Answer to all questions was “yes”, so he told me to fill out another one just in case and talk to miniboss (the ASM, who takes care of 99.999% of the payroll stuff). So that’ll have to wait until she comes back in on Monday so she can call corporate payroll department and see if they got the form (which should’ve been turned in by managers responsible for scheduling).

I’m hoping they’ll be able to cut me a check straight out, rather than making me wait until my next payday or longer. Because I didn’t get paid out when I was supposed to have been, I’m down to $35 to last me until Friday and have more than that due in bills this week–bills that are of the “if not paid on time service gets shut off” variety. It’s also nearly halfway through the month and I have nothing saved up for rent yet–I usually pull a set amount out of every paycheck and set it aside as “do not touch” money, and my first paycheck this month mostly went to last month’s rent.

I am going to be most upset if this isn’t sorted out soon, because it’s someone else’s fuckup causing extreme financial hardship on me. I’ll just have to see how this goes.

Back to work

My work vacation ends in roughly an hour and I’m in that phase where I’ve had too much free time and now I don’t want to go back.

I left the house early because I had to go to the post office to send off some eBay sales. It didn’t take nearly as long as I thought it would, so I’m sitting at the Starbucks across the street from work leeching their WiFi and enjoying black tea lemonade. The barista accidentally made it a size larger, so that was a nice surprise.

Here’s to steeling myself for another day in grocery store hell; Mondays are always awful at my store and it’s even worse when you’re one of the swing shift workers.

At least I have tomorrow off for school?