Gotta give credit…
Long time no post, or so it seems…
The best news this week was that for some strange reason, I lost 7.2 pounds. Now, I have been very diligent about the diet lately and they did get new cardio machines at the gym that are giving me a much stronger workout but, still, 7.2 pounds in six days? I’m going into this next week with some caution in case there is a slight correction.
I’ve also been having enjoyable baths this week now that the black mystery substance has been eradicated. It seems that the flexible pipe connecting my incoming line to the hot water heater was the problem, so now I can take a bath without any possible appearance of black particles suddenly floating all around me, so I’ve got that going for me, too.
As for the weekly check-in, this week, unfortunately, I was once again a retail clerk.
On the upside, I think I have a new strategy for the job. Basically, the job has gotten painfully, dreadfully boring. It is really just 7.5 hours of pacing around the sales floor with nothing to do. So, the goal starting Monday is to spend my breaks and lunch reading the chapter I’m working on (Sunday after work will be spent working on the new intro/chapter one) without doing any actual writing. It will all be gearing up with how it needs to change. This character needs to do that, make sure there’s some of this. Even write down certain things I want to do on the sheet. It’s almost like making the whole workday become an act of foreplay to the writing that will follow. So that, when I finally get home, writing is the obvious choice because I’m bursting at the seams to get everything down onto "paper." That’s the plan anyway.
One of the sad realizations I’ve been having is that I have a strong work ethic. When it was Macromedia, despite how much I had come to loathe the job, I always gave them quality output. Was I difficult and abrasive and talking about how much I hated being there? Sure, but you would never find a hint of that in what I wrote for them. Same with the new gig, it is so dull and boring, but when I work with customers, I am always fine, helping them with anything they want, and then sinking back into boredom when they leave.
A major curiosity for me lately is why I have an absolute distaste for anything "corporate." I have actual animosity toward very benign things once I smell a corporate stench about them. For example, when we had inventory recently, every sales associate had a section of the store to prepare for inventory. This makes sense and was rather necessary. However, they were called "Areas of Pride," and management would invariably ask how you Area of Pride was going. Whenever they said it, I saw the capital letters in Area of Pride hanging in the air and wanted to jab them with a pin.
It just seems that for some reason I am unable to fuse my work ethic with a job I don’t detest. As it has been very, very, very boring lately, it seems to have opened management up to ask us more often about things that used to be infrequent. The store is OBSESSED with us opening credit card accounts. They have a daily and weekly total, and are manic about hitting their numbers.
Now, having previously been in credit card debt, and seeing how godawful people are with cards over the holiday season, I can’t say I’m in any rush to sign people up. I ask if they want our credit card, but I never go as far as to sell them on it. The big hook is that if you open the account, you get to save 15 percent on everything in the store for the following two days, except the card charges a 22 percent finance charge each month, so unless you pay the bill off, you aren’t saving at all.
Today, I was asked if I opened up any credit cards as I was exiting the office after hanging up my jacket to start my shift. I told them that I usually don’t start a good groove with opening accounts until my fifth minute of work, so give it another four and see what happens. An hour later, any credits? Any credits? It was relentless.
It got to the point where the one floor manager was starting to sell me on the benefit of selling cards to customers (the irony being that we only have this much time to talk about this stuff because there are no customers lately). Their big hook is that I get paid two bucks cash on the spot every time I open a credit account. Now, I guess I’m just not poor enough for this to entice. In fact, given the choice between someone adding to their mounting credit card debts so I can earn two dollars and them getting in control of their finances and me not getting two dollars… I’m fine without the cash.
In any event, I don’t expect to be there more than a month and a half more, so the goal is to shift things as much as I can to novelist in that time, try and steer my work ethic to the book rather than the people who pay my meager salary. We’ll see what happens…
