But The Hours are Good

Blog No. 4

Mon, Nov 8, 2010

When you’re sick, simple things, like writing a post on your blog, turn out to be a much more daunting task than most people would expect. At least it was for me. As it turns out I was much more ill than I had originally thought, but thankfully, (due to the magic of doctors and medication) it has all worked out. Bonus, I now get to wear a super cool medic alert bracelet.

I am back to work after two weeks off and a smattering of partial weeks. Today was my first full day and thanks to the Christmas retail season I am getting mostly full shifts. My bank account is going to be happy, but helping customers for eight hours isn’t the easiest way jump back into the fray. For anyone who hasn’t worked in retail, it is either a very easy and boring job where the hours creep by so slowly you can feel yourself age, or chaotic ride of abuse and anger with lines of people waiting to yell at your for waiting in lines, ironically making the wait that much longer for the next person. You can probably guess where the Christmas season fits. So far things are slow, but every day the line gets a little longer.

Those of you in retail know what I’m talking about and would probably get a nice laugh at Norm Feuti’s comic, aptly titled Retail found here: (www.retailcomic.com).

Honestly, after missing so much work it is great to be getting so many hours to help pay the mounting bills and upcoming present purchases, but it really isn’t any fun spending most of your day working. With all work, days off are scarce and something to cherish, though, in retail, managing to get two of them off in a row are generally improbable. There’s also no such thing as nine to five with retail and weekends are really work-ends. Work is kind of like dropping your ice cream, retail is like dropping it all over your shirt, it sucks just a little more.

Whoever first said, “do what you have to, so you can do what you want to,” was right, but that doesn’t make it suck less. The worst thing of all was that I was too sick to do anything for Halloween, and I had the day off too.