Open Thread for Personal Stuff: November Rain Edition

Neuroticbeagle: Ugh ugh ugh. Black Friday may be the worst invention ever.

@abominalsnowpickle

I’ve been having a terrible time with pain and insomnia and depression (I am disabled and have fibro, among other things)

I have fibro too! (assuming fibro is short for fibromyalgia, if not sorry)

Sorry, I don’t get to talk to fibromyalgia people very often. 😛 It makes me a tiny bit excited.

I don’t know if I’ll look familiar to you; I used to comment more but have kind of away lately.

@ally

That hike sounds really scary, and I hope everyone is doing alright\

I really must figure out how to re-train the auto-complete on this silly phonetraption so that I stop logging in with the wrong email address. I apologize for the double comment.

On top of all the other things you said (totally agree), do you normally work daylight shifts? What the hell sort of hours are these?

Normal (non holiday) hours are Mon-Sat 10am-9:30pm*, Sunday 11am-6pm*
Holiday hours are as early as 7am and as late as midnight*

*These are only the hours in which the store is open to customers. Workers/managers come in several hours earlier to clean(sweeping, mopping, dusting)/ open register/other manager paperwork shit and can leave much, much later than the closing time depending on how trashed (clothes not folded, hung right, sized, put back etc) the store is and how perfect it must be (aka corporate visits).

Occasionally, I get asked to come in really early (5am) to do floor set (aka move shit around for selling purposes/make associates look like morons when they cannot find the product). This I don’t have to do- I like it. No customers, time goes quickly and I get hours.

However, I do not close the store anymore. CEO of store was coming to visit so we had a perfect close. I left the store around 8am after about 15 hours of working and may have fallen asleep for two seconds at a stop sign and crashed into another car. No people got hurt, but my car was totaled.

You know, between the turkey comas and the the fact that more and more people don’t have a lot of disposable income, not to mention MORE cuts to social support programs coming up in the States, it’s possible that Black Friday will not be the bottom-line-saving event that corporations are counting on this year.

A petty part of me almost hopes that will happen, except that it would only result in MORE layoffs and wage rollbacks for the staff. Not the executives and stockholders, obviously, because they’re doing important work creating jobs. Or so I’ve been told.

I am just hoping that corporate will not make the profit they expect during the Thanksgiving hours-just so they don’t pull this shit again next year.

My favorite about retail? What do you mean only managers open and close? I did plenty of both! (Of course, had the head manager had her way, she’d have promoted me in a heartbeat [cuz damn, $800 a month with no rent to pay and a cheap phone? Well, when do you think I started amassing fish tanks ^.^ ])

But no benefits, and that was when I went off my first round of SSRIs, the shitty insurance they offered PT people decided I was pre-existingly depressed. Unlike my current psych who appears to think it’s a personality disorder not a depressive disorder — which is just precious considering that if pecunium didn’t have his wonderful sense of humor, he’d have probably gotten added to the short list of people who’ve seen me cry. Jerkbrain =/= inability to hide it >.<

@Argenti
No, both associates and managers open and close the store. Registers are only open/closed by managers.

My place doesn’t give benefits to part timers and now, part timers are only supposed to get 20hrs a week- maybe 25- so corporate can avoid Obamacare. Fuck Corporate Greed.

Also Fuck jerkbrains. (I have one too which is one of the big reasons I haven’t found another job-along with the !@#$%^&*@ economy.)

That’s fucked up. I was at Joann Fabrics, idk if they still offer PT employees insurance or what, but I was getting 38~ hours a week. You have retail experience already, if you’ em got craft/art experience, or knowledge, and they’re near you, it wasn’t bad for retail. One of the managers was awful, but that’s not corporate’s fault.

Well, he did thank me for being honest, but it’s not like a give a damn about his compliments in the first place. I’m so sick of living with him.

I’ve lived close to mountains and foothills all my life (raised in the Colorado Front Range and living close to the foothills in San Jose), so the fear of cougars is nothing new to me. But rarely do I actually feel afraid of cougars unless I’m right in off-trail cougar territory at dusk – which I was during that hike. I was so anxious that I volunteered to stay up the entire night (when we were still considering camping on the hill) just to watch for cougars. Every time I heard a strange sound in the distance I nearly jumped out of my skin.

I just saw an email from him in which he briefly said he’s glad we’re all safe now. That’s nice, but either I’m too hard to please or I just find it difficult to find his words loving.

Yeah, Ally S, I agree with kittehserf. You are not being unreasonable.

Also, neuroticbeagle, I’m sorry for all your work stress and bullshit.