October, or, "I was up above it..."

I've written plenty about how much I hate the Fall/Winter seasons, and why. Some of the cold snaps we've had recently remind me of just how irritable I can get, and especially how irritable I was in October of 2008. The only pleasure I get out of October is that Halloween gives me an excuse to watch lots of horror movies, especially when my favorite theater shows classic horror films as part of their midnight movie series. I found out earlier this week that Saturday is my overtime night for October. There is never a good time to work Saturdays, but between the October midnight movie series and the fact that Saturday is the only day of the week that I get to spend a good chunk of time with my girlfriend, October is the absolute worst month to have to work Saturdays on. We are crazy busy this week, and I don't see me getting out of overtime this weekend. I'm really hoping that either the next two weeks won't be quite so crazy, or we'll bring in enough people to keep it from being quite so crazy, thus giving me either one or both of the following Saturdays this month off. Oh, and the 31st falls on one of my regular work nights, too! If I have to work both of those Saturdays, then my October will officially be ruined. The only good thing I can say is that working Saturdays this month should free up my Saturdays next month.

I intended to mention in my previous entry that another part of my peak season dread is the feeling that not only have I done this before, but that I got to escape it for a couple of years, and shouldn't have to go through it again. Or as Trent Reznor said, "I was up above it, now I'm down in it." 2009/10 were somewhat bearable since we still had the old picking system, and the place hadn't been filled to capacity yet, but I miss 2004/05, when it was still a relatively small company in a smaller warehouse, and my main work days were Tuesday through Friday. Hell, I probably would've stayed on the day shift if I got to work those days, instead of having to choose between a couple of shifts where I had to work every Sunday or one where I had to work every Saturday.

Something I've realized about 10-hour shifts is that no matter how much sleep I get, it's never enough. (Ha, now I've referenced The Cure!) I'm much better rested on those days where I worked 8 hours or less the night before.

The downward spiral of work insanity continues...

I realized last Tuesday that one of the things I hate about working is that it gives me entirely too much time to overthink. When you overthink about stupid shit you've done for the span of 8 to 10 hours, whether it was something embarrassing, something that alienated acquaintances, or something that has set you back financially, it can be pure Hell. Sure, there have been times where something has been eating me up inside, and going to work actually made me feel better, but that seems to have been mostly when I was working 8-hour-a-day jobs.

To add insult to injury, the Peak Season seems to have started, and I am so not ready for it. The only thing that will make this year better than last year is that I'm not a temp this time around, and I'll be getting paid about $2.25 more per hour than I was last year. (Or, $2.85 more than I did at Megalomart!) For the record, I'm getting paid $10.50 right now, and so my overtime pay will be $15.75. You know, if I were getting paid $15.75 for regular pay, I'd be MUCH happier. So while the money will be nice, I just can't stand the thought of working 50, sometimes 55, hours a week for the next two or three months. I am hoping to take two or three days off for the week of my birthday, so I should have a five day break in November before the real onslaught is supposed to start.

One thing that has always bugged me about this place are the breaks. Most places where I've worked give you 15-minute breaks for an 8-hour day, and may give you 20 if you have to work over. Here, they work you ten hours and only give you 15-minute breaks. When I worked in the Photo department working 8-hour days, our breaks were only ten minutes. But back to my current department: when I was on day shift, they gave us a couple of minutes to walk to and from the break area. On the night shift, the "travel time" is included in our breaks, thus really only giving us ten minutes of actual break time. That is complete and utter bullshit! We fucking work on our feet for nine hours and thirty minutes, and they're basically asking, no, telling us to spend another ten minutes on our feet when that time is supposed to go towards resting. I don't know why it took me so long to realize that this shit is made up by people who get to sit on their asses all or most of the day.

The only way I can see myself continuing to work there without going completely nuts is if I go Part Time, but then I'd need to get a second job to go along with it.

I've come to the realization in the past few years that no matter where I work, even if I start out enjoying it, I'll probably be miserable. If I could get a job that pays a somewhat liveable wage and doesn't make me work more than 8 hours in a day, then I could possibly live with it. I wish I didn't like "stuff" so much, then I could probably go drifting around and enjoying more of what this world has to offer. But getting to do things like listening to well recorded music on a very good sounding system can be therapeutic, and I hope to get to do that someday.

Shift Change update

I've been on the night shift for about a month now. There is quite a bit that I like about it, like the extra pay, not having to get up at 5-something in the morning, having the ability to stay up well past midnight on my nights off, and getting to spend an entire damn Saturday night with my girlfriend. But unfortunately, I still have to work ten hours a day. I was hoping that somehow I'd sleep less on night shift than on day shift, thus giving me more time to do stuff like go to the gym, but I sleep roughly the same amount of hours now as I did then. So, I still have to save most activities for the weekend.

Wednesday night was my last night working as an employee of Main Employer (formerly Main ex-Employer). When I go in to work on Sunday night, it will be as an employee of their parent company. Though I'm pretty sick of this line of work, and especially of the fact that most of this line of work are ten-hour jobs, I'm halfway tempted to stick around just so I can transfer to a warehouse in a totally different part of the country. Or hell, if things really suck in November, relocating to a warehouse outside the U.S.

I didn't even realize until today that this coming Monday is Labor Day. Of course I would forget, seeing as that I have to work that day so we can make our customers happy. The only holiday we're guaranteed off is Christmas Day, so I hope all of you internet retail customers who get holidays off are happy with the sacrifices we have to make to please you.

Here is a video that I posted last year on Labor Day, it's "The Machineries of Joy" by Die Krupps with Nitzer Ebb, which if I remember correctly was sort of an English language remake of Die Krupps' own "Wahre Arbeit, Wahrer Lohn". That basically translates to "True Work, True Pay."

Shift change

I put in a shift change request a few weeks ago. I mentioned in my previous entry which shifts I was thinking about going for. My top pick was the Sunday-through-Wednesday night shift (6pm to 4:30am). I found out yesterday that it was approved, and I start my new shift this Sunday. I'll miss the crew, but I just couldn't stand getting up at 5-something in the morning anymore.

I've also been thinking about what I'm going to do with this job in the long term. With my birthday coming up in November, I really want to take advantage of my vacation time and take a couple of days off, and then maybe start looking for a better job after that. Or, I'll wait until February, when The Who plays in Louisville. After all, I'd hate to end up getting a night shift job somewhere else and have to miss that show because I don't have vacation time. The show is on a Saturday, and it would be lovely if I got a job where I wouldn't have to worry about weekends. Yeah, right. Anyway, all I do know is that I can't really see myself working there forever.

Big changes at work.

Disclaimer: I'm totally not naming company names so as not to draw attention to myself in Google searches, but I do feel the need to talk about this stuff somewhere, so here it is. It's been a work in progress for the past month and a half, and is pretty much old news.

Big things have been going on at my job. My employer is handing over control of the warehouses to their parent company (the company who bought them in 2009), so that my current actual employer can concentrate on stuff involving their headquarters and offices on the west coast. So basically, we'll be a (parent company) warehouse that happens to fulfill orders for my current employer's website. I'm kinda holding out judgment on if that's a good or bad thing, but I can tell you that the parent company has already had a negative effect on the warehouse. Last September, they changed "our" picking system over to "their" picking system, and it's pretty terrible. I don't want to go into too much detail, but it keeps us from picking to our full potential, so for the most part it was a step back instead of a step forward. The only good thing I can say about it is that if I need to use the restroom, I can log out of the system, and it won't count against my "rate".

Something that I was hoping might be changed with the change-over is shifts, but I think they'll be keeping the current shifts. I absolutely loathe working Sundays and Wednesdays*, and between that and the crappiness of the picking system, I'm seriously thinking about transferring to a department where I can get a Monday-Tuesday-Thursday-Friday shift. Besides having the choice of that shift, another thing that sets it apart from my current department is that when they have an overtime day, they only have to work eight hours, as opposed to my department where you have to work a full ten-hour day, or even an eleven hour day if we're doing 11s during the holiday peak season. The downside is that their shift starts at 6:30, but I've already been coming in before 6:30 since the Photo and Inbound departments (Inbound being the one I'm thinking about transferring to) come in at 6:00 and 6:30 respectively, thus snatching up the best parking spots, and to get a good spot you have to get there stupid early. I'm already getting up at around 5:20, if I did this transfer, I'd only have to get up at 5:00! But there are things about that department that I'm not sure I could put up with, and I think working that job for ten hours would drive me even battier than my current job. I've also been thinking of staying in Picking, but doing a Sunday-Monday-Tuesday-Thursday shift so I can at least avoid Wednesdays, as well as not have to work more than four days a week on certain months. I've thought more recently about going to night shift. Sure, I would miss out on a lot of evening things and would probably even have to use vacation time just to go to concerts, but I'm seriously sick of having to get up at 5-something in the morning. Plus, it would be an extra 75 cents per hour.

*I don't necessarily mind working on Sundays, I just hate getting up so damn early on Sundays. I hate working Sunday mornings since it ruins my Saturdays, giving it that "Oh, I have to work tomorrow" dread that's usually reserved for Sundays, plus I drag ass at work if I stay up late on a Saturday night. There are two things that I absolutely hate hearing on Sundays when I have to work. The first is my clock radio waking me up to Woody's Roadhouse on 91.9 WFPK. I associate Woody's Roadhouse with ending a night, not beginning a day, and having it wake me up at the start of a work day is just wrong! If I'm lucky, I'm usually awake before the alarm is set to go off, so I can get up and turn it off before it can come on. The other thing I hate hearing is the CBS Sunday Morning theme. It's something that I associate with lazy Sunday mornings at home, or at a home-away-from-home, and hearing it at work is also just wrong. If a TV at work is on CBS on a sunday morning during my first break, I try to leave the room before I hear it. As for Wednesdays, I hate them because we have almost twice the amount of people. Having more people doesn't necessarily help with the way the picking system currently works, and we have a hard enough time trying to get carts and other resources that we need to work with on a regular work day, it becomes nearly impossible to get those things on Wednesdays.

The Photo department (the department I was working in for two and a half years, until I got laid off there the first time) seems to be the most heavily affected. Long story short, some people in that department will have to decide if they're staying in Kentucky, or moving to my direct employer's home in Vegas. If they had asked me four or five years ago if I wanted to take my job to Vegas, I would've totally jumped on it. Now, I'd be more like "maybe", but only because I have a girlfriend here now, and don't necessarily think moving her over there with me would be the greatest idea for her. I have a feeling though that I'd probably rather go to Vegas and continue working for the original employer than stay here and work for The Parent Company.

The Tooth, conclusion (hopefully)

I started an entry three weeks ago about my trip to Indianapolis to see Danzig, and have yet to finish it. It was a way more massive undertaking than I expected, and in the end it probably won't be so massive. Last weekend, I started an entry about some of the big (and I mean BIG) goings on at work, and some other workplace-related gripes. I meant to finish it, but might end up posting it "as is". The one thing that those weekends had in common were that they were four-day weekends. Evidently, four days still isn't enough time for me to work on an entry longer than a short paragraph or two.

This past Thursday, I had a permanent crown put on The Tooth. Now that that debacle is over, my next health project will be getting new glasses. My current pair are six years old, have tape holding one side together, and the lenses have developed a rosy tint in the past year, probably having something to do with the fact that they are old Transitions lenses. You can see the rosiness in my current thumbnail pic (current as of June 2012, it might change in the future). It's important that I get this done in the next month or two before my warehouse is completely taken over by my employer's owner. You'll see more about that if I get around to posting my last attempted entry.

That's all  have for now.

Tooth update

I got to go to the dentist two weeks ago. The main thing I wanted to find out was what was going on with my problem tooth. I found out that it was abscessed, and needed a root canal. The root canal was done on Friday the 18th. The hardest part for me to deal with was just waiting for them to get it started. In about two weeks, I get to go to the dentist to have the tooth permanently filled and crowned. I mentioned back in January that a tiny part of the old filling broke off while I was eating. A lot of it had worn away since then. Anyway, I noticed later in that week that it broke off that I was in a down mood, and feeling less energetic than usual. I had a feeling that it was due to the filling, but wasn't sure. For the most part, things stayed that way until my root canal. I've been feeling a lot better mentally this week, probably because I don't have all that mercury in my mouth. At some point in the near future, I'd like to replace the rest of my silver fillings with white ones.

Hmmm, forgot what the hell else I wanted to write about. :(