Untitled (July 2nd, 2022)

 Life has been really annoying lately. My dad was in the hospital briefly in May. My mom was in the hospital briefly in June. And I ended an 11 year friendship with my ex after the Supreme Court overturned Roe V Wade. She no longer cared whether abortion was going to stay legal or not, and she didn't understand why I would care, since as she put it, I'm not going to get pregnant, nor am I going to get anyone pregnant anytime soon. I care because I'm not a total fucking sociopath! But I'm not sure what pissed her off more, my take on it, or the legitimate reason I gave her to be pissed off at me, which I'm not going to go into because it really was stupid of me. But fuck her, I'm done with her stupid ass, I almost wish I hadn't bothered trying to be more than just friends with her eleven years ago, even if it would mean that I'd be 45 years old and never actually had a girlfriend in my life. She was never very bright, and she was also extremely gullible, but she really went Full Dumbass when she started watching some jagoff Youtuber's videos almost two and a half years ago, some grifter who claims to be a liberal and used to pander to the Left, but now panders to the Right because they're so much easier to grift.

All my life, I've had to dumb myself down to try to be accepted among the general public, or to make myself more "dateable" to a large number of women. No more!

I do have a couple of bits of good news related to my most recent post back in April. One is that I've reached that point where all my medications are now free for the rest of the year. The other is that I found out that I'm not getting paid as much as I'm supposed to be, so I'll now be making $2 more an hour than I have been. It's still not enough, but it should take a little bit of the sting off. I found out a few weeks ago that my temp co-workers were getting paid more than me, so I bitched about it. HR found out that I was supposedly bypassed for a $2 bump in pay last August, so they're not only giving me a $2 raise, but it should be retroactive, giving me $2 for every hour I've worked since sometime last August. I thought for sure that I did get a $2 raise last August, because I went up from $15.50 to $17.50. It makes me wonder if my coworkers were getting paid more than I was this time last year, or if they just didn't want to piss off my current coworkers by cutting their pay from $19/hour to $17/hour?

(Update, July 4) I forgot to mention, I worked half of Memorial Day, but I get to have the fourth of July off! That's the first non-Christmas or New Year holiday I've had off in over a year.

Mo' Money, Mo' Problems, My Ass! April 2022 Edition

 I'm just giving an update for the sake of giving an update. I have a lot that I've been wanting to get off my chest, but don't feel like taking the time to type it all out. The gist of it is that I make just enough money at my work to cover rent, my car payment*, car insurance, phone and electric bills, Hulu with HBO and Disney+, and not much else. I've tried working overtime, but those checks have been underwhelming. We've been so slow these past two weeks that not only do we not have opportunity for OT, but we've been leaving early every day, so my next check is gonna suck. I'm either going to have to get a second job, or find a full time job that pays at least $23 an hour, which is over $5 more than what I'm currently making.

I still haven't recovered from my insurance making me pay almost $300 for a 90-day supply of Januvia a few weeks ago, when I only needed a 30-day supply! Hell, just today, my nurse practitioner took me off of Januvia and put me on Rybelsus, so I now have 60+ days worth of Januvia just sitting around. She did say that I could continue to take it while being on this medicine, but probably wouldn't see much benefit. I may continue to take it until it's gone just to get rid of it, can't let $300 go to waste! And it looks like I'll have to pay this month's phone and electric bills next month.

*Regarding the car payment, I can't help but think, "I wouldn't have this car payment if I hadn't totaled my car three years ago, or at least not had to deal with the amount of bullshit I had to deal with and gotten my check sooner rather than later." But what's done is done, and beating myself up over it is counterproductive.

Kitkat, Halloween, and the end of 2021

 I was originally planning on doing a longer entry about Kitkat, but oddly enough the more time passes, the less I want to write about her. I can't remember what month it was when she first came to us, but it wasn't long after we moved into my mom and dad's new house at the end of 2003/early 2004. I think it must have been February because I remember it being cold out, but it could also have been March. Anyway, this cute little orange furball came to our back door during Winter 2004. I was kinda hoping she would move on to the next house, because we weren't sure how our cat Sheba would feel about sharing the house with another cat. My mom eventually decided she wanted her in the house, so we got her in the house. She wasn't real receptive to anyone at first. I started to get her attention by tapping my fingers really fast on the edge of the couch cushions while I was sitting and watching tv, and I'd let her scratch the shit out of my hand. That's how I managed to domesticate her, and probably why she chose me as her daddy.

She stayed with mom and dad during the two times that I moved out, but I decided to take her with me when I moved out this last time because she was old and I knew she didn't have a lot of time left. She had a hyper thyroid, and just a couple of years ago she went from being a chonk to being skin and bones, and our cat Rascal was starting to see her as prey. I knew she'd get more love and peace being alone with me.

The last week of October, she stopped eating. That Thursday morning, I noticed fluids on the bathroom rug and her bed. I took her to the vet. The vet said that her kidneys weren't doing good, she had ulcers in her mouth that would make it hard to eat, and that her body temperature was low despite not being hypothermic. I asked about euthanization, and he said that would probably be the best thing for her. I got to go inside. I had been preparing for this moment for two years and didn't think I was going to cry, but once the finality hit me, I really broke down. Hell, I had Kitkat before I joined Louisville Mojo, meaning that I knew her longer than I've known the majority of my Louisville area friends! I got to spend a little bit of time with her before the injections, and continued to hold her while the vet gave her the injections, and while she passed away. I had her cremated, and got her ashes in an urn and a clay paw print less than a week later. It took me a good while to get used to not having her around.

That weekend was not only Halloween weekend, but that was also my shift's Saturday to work. I might have went ahead and worked had it not been Halloween weekend, but since it was Halloween, I called in both Saturday and Sunday, saying that I had a death in the family. This was absolutely true, because I loved that cat more than my own dad, or a lot of our extended family for that matter. I went to a show that Saturday night, my first indoor music show since seeing Slayer in November 2019. I knew virtually no one there, and while it sucked not having anyone to talk to in between sets, it was honestly the most fun I had had in years! As for Halloween day, I spent it the way I like to spend all my Halloweens, watching horror movies. I had to stop for a little bit to take a trip to my Amazon "locker" because my Scream Factory UHD/blu-ray copies of  the first three Halloween movies had finally arrived. My movie lineup went like this:

• Frankenstein Versus The Space Monster (via Svengoolie)
• In The Mouth Of Madness
• Street Trash (celebrating the twentieth anniversary of my seeing it at the original Alamo Drafthouse)
• Nightbreed: The Director's Cut
• Halloween (1978), the broadcast tv version via the new Halloween blu-ray.

Was this Halloween everything I had hoped for? Not really, but it beat having to work.

Peak 2021

 This year's Peak season was...interesting. I can't say if it was better or worse than last year's, because they all suck.

One thing that was done differently this year was that instead of having a full night shift crew running the Pick Rings and master carton conveyors, they just had some people picking various kinds of master carton pallets, and they needed some QAs to audit the PTPs (pick to pallet). The night shift started on the week of October 10th. I worked night shift that week to train the two QAs who were going to be on that shift. I have the knowledge, but I do not have the people skills to train people properly. These two people were dumb as rocks, and not good listeners. They were also husband and wife. I was so underwhelmed by their progress at the end of the week that I did not feel comfortable leaving them alone, but I had to go back to A-Shift the following week. I kept track of their work while I was on A-Shift, and was appalled at how much stuff they fucked up.

On one of my days off during the first week of November, my boss texted me saying that they needed an experienced QA on night shift, and asked if I could do it. I said, "Sure!" I knew that they needed someone there to keep an eye on the two knuckleheads, as well as deal with stuff that's beyond their area of expertise. I had been looking forward to having my birthday off that week, but I was now going to have to work it, but figured it would be alright as long as I got to celebrate that weekend. Anyway, these people forgot just about everything I taught them, including stuff that I wrote down for them. I'm not even sure what they did with the notes. I found out sometime that Wednesday that we were supposed to work overtime that Friday night. I ultimately decided that, hey, they've got these two people, I'll just call in Friday night. On the morning of my birthday, my boss texted me to tell me that the knuckleheads' assignment ended, so I was going to be alone on night shift. I didn't have a problem not working with the knuckleheads, but I wasn't thrilled about having to rearrange plans for that weekend. We had jack shit to do on the night of my birthday. I asked one of the supervisors if OT was still on for Friday, and he said it was canceled. I was more than happy to have Friday off, but pissed because I had rearranged plans to accommodate for it.

There were three people left on A-Shift, two guys that I liked, and one guy that I can't stand, I'll just refer to him as Dingleberry. We ended up losing the two guys that I liked on the week of my birthday. One guy quit before the week started, the other guy...died at the end of the week. I was really heartbroken about that guy dying, I had worked with him for a good chunk of the past three years, and he was one of my favorite people there. We were both grumpy old men (he was around 60), and I enjoyed talking to him about all the morons that worked there. I tend to get to work about 45 minutes to an hour early, and this guy was almost always there before me! It's weird not seeing his truck or SUV there when I come in.

I feel compelled to tell the whole story of the Saturday and Sunday of my birthday weekend. That Saturday afternoon, I went to meet up with a friend at a coffee shop, and was looking forward to having that entire Saturday and Sunday morning ahead of me. When I got to the coffee shop, I saw a text from my boss saying they needed me back on A-Shift because our guy had a heart attack while at work, and that it wasn't looking too good, and said I could start on either Sunday or Monday morning due to the short notice. I chose Monday morning. Two hours later, boss texted me to let me know that he died. I ended up sleeping Saturday night, and got up on Sunday morning looking forward to having all of Sunday ahead of me. Just after 10:00 a.m., the A-Shift Outbound manager texts me asking if I can call him, so I called him. He said that he still needed someone to do PTP audits on nights and that he was going to talk to my boss about it, and asked if I could come in that night. I was like, "Sure." So much for having all of Sunday ahead of me. I was actually about ready for a nap around the time that he called, and I had no problem going to bed at noon. The problem was that I could only sleep about two or three hours at best, so I was kind of tired and cranky when I came in.

I got to have the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving off. I would've rather worked Wednesday night and had Thanksgiving night off, but I understand that Thanksgiving night leads into Black Friday, and I guess they have to start getting their Black Friday shit out as early as possible.

During that first week that I was on night shift in November, I managed to miss out on a meeting they had which was about their plans for the weeks of Thanksgiving/Black Friday and Cyber Monday. The knuckleheads told me that they would be running the entire conveyors, meaning the master cartons and Pick Rings, which I knew was going to be a nightmare. I asked the guy who was managing night shift about it, and he said they were just going to run this one particular area that doesn't affect me a whole lot, so I was relieved. But that turned out to be a lie, they did run master cartons and the Pick Rings for most of those two weeks, and it was a nightmare. But by the end of the Cyber Monday week, they let most of the people go.

The next week was supposed to be my last week on night shift, it would technically end at the end of the shift on the morning of Friday the 10th. The 11th was A-Shift's Saturday to work, and my boss wanted me to come in that morning. That would barely leave me with 24 hours between the end of one shift and the start of another. I called in that Thursday night so I could have 48 hours to transition back to day shift. We ended up having historically bad weather on the night of the 10th and morning of the 11th. I slept like shit due to my phone waking me up to tornado warnings, but due to having to work, I was like, fuck it, I'm staying in bed, if the building collapses on me, it collapses on me. We lost power for about two hours, and that really didn't help me sleep, either. I was supposed to be at work at 6:00 a.m., but while the worst of the storms might have been over by that time, it was still supposed to rain pretty hard, and things in general just sounded like a mess, so I called in saying I'd come in at 10:00. When I came in, fucking nothing was working right. There wasn't even any internet for the first twenty minutes that I was there. Things were working slightly better on Sunday, but it was a nightmare. Hell, that whole week was a nightmare, I guess it was like the last big push to get stuff into stores before Christmas, especially to Latin America. For those few weeks that I was on night shift, they had B-Shift come in on their weekends to fill the void left by the two guys they lost, and they hired a new girl for A-Shift before I came back. Even though we were still short one person this week, the boss decided not to have anyone from B-Shift come in since I was back. I trained a new girl on Monday. She said she would be back on Tuesday, but she wasn't. And our woman who works Monday through Friday called in on Tuesday, that really sucked. I was really glad for that week to be over.

As expected, we get Christmas Day off, which I'm doubly glad for since it lands on a Saturday that A-Shift would have to work. I haven't heard anything about New Year's weekend yet.

Mo' money, mo' problems, my ass!

This September has not been my month! I just went through a hellish week of dealing with banks and credit unions. I'll start this story by saying that I just refinanced my car, and my first payment on this new loan was this month. The credit union that I got the loan from (referred to from here on out as "The Lender") included a Savings account to go with my loan. I doubt that I'll be able to add anything to it, since I need every bit of money I get. I got a decent check on the 10th, most of which was going to go to the car payment, most of my bills, and groceries. I was not aware that The Lender was going to automatically take the amount of my car payment out of my bank's checking account (referred to here on out as The Bank) every month, in fact, their welcome letter mentions how to set up loan payments. So, I made a car payment on the 11th.

Right after I woke up on Thursday the 16th, my first day off since the previous Saturday, I checked my bank account to see how much I had. Instead of seeing a few hundred dollars, I saw -$137, $36 of which was overdraft fee. As I said earlier, I didn't know that The Lender was taking it out every month, so I ended up making my car payment twice. I called The Lender to see about having one of my payments refunded, and they said they'd do it. I checked my bank account frequently that Thursday and Friday to see if it transferred. I called The Lender late Friday afternoon to see if there was any progress on the transfer, and they said that it was transferred. The problem was that they transferred it to The Lender's Savings account instead of The Bank's Checking account, where I actually fucking needed it. I don't know why they couldn't transfer it from the Savings account to my proper Bank account, because you'd think that if they can take it out, they can surely fucking put it back in! What I ended up having to do was add my bank account as an External Account that I could transfer money to, but I couldn't immediately start transferring money to it, it had to be verified first. They did this by sending a couple of micro-transactions to the account, and once they posted, I had to confirm each amount to verify it. The micro-transactions hadn't posted by Saturday morning, so I borrowed $200 from a friend to get my bank account back in the positive.

The micro-transactions posted on Monday, but I couldn't verify them until I got off from work because The Lender's mobile banking app didn't have the option of verifying it, and their website didn't seem to work on Safari. I probably could've done it on my computer in the warehouse, but I was afraid that either The Bank or The Lender's web sites would want to text me a verification number so I could sign on from those devices, and I'm not privileged enough to be able to take my phone to the warehouse floor. Oh, and I don't typically get off from work until 6:30. All this wouldn't have been a problem had my automatic car insurance payment not posted that same day, putting my bank account back in the negative along with adding another $36 overdraft fee to my account. By the time I was able to get home and verify the micro-transactions, it was too late to schedule the transfer of funds for that day, so the transfer was scheduled for the next day. Thankfully, the transfer was posted by Wednesday morning, letting me breathe a sigh of relief. I then messaged The Bank on Thursday morning to see if they could refund me the $72 of overdraft fees, seeing as that it wasn't my fault that The Lender refunded the wrong account, and that I had to wait all god damned weekend for the micro-transactions to post so I could transfer the refund to them. I was afraid that I'd have to give them more bad publicity on social media if they didn't refund me, but lo and behold they did it! More relief! As for the friend that I owed $200 to, I paid her back when I got paid that Friday morning.

You know, I've always though that The Notorious B.I.G. was full of shit when he said, "Mo' money, mo' problems!" I prefer Al Jourgensen's take via Surgical Meth Machine, "I want Rich People Problems!"

It kinda sucks that for the majority of jobs out there, you don't get to see your hours of labor translate to cash at the very end of the day, or even that week. Some jobs you can, but that's some real under-the-table stuff that I'm not sure I'd want to deal with. If you're lucky, you'll get it towards the end of the following week. But a lot of us poor bastards get paid bi-weekly, so we have to wait two weeks to get the money from that first week. Take for example, the fucking Labor Day that I had to work. Labor Day was on September 6th, and I got paid on Friday of that week, but that pay was for the work I did the previous two weeks, not that week. I didn't see the hours that I worked on Labor Day translate to money until this past Friday, the 24th. That's two weeks and five days, just two days shy of a whole three weeks! And then there are people who get paid monthly. I'm sure it's fine if you bring home about 3 or $4,000 a month, but any less than that would suck.

The Labor Day that wasn't

 I'm still working at the shithole. I ended up working on Labor Day, the first Labor Day I remember working in years, but it didn't surprise me. What did surprise me was that we worked all god damned day, all twelve hours! And this was after having B-Shift come in for overtime on Saturday along with my shift, who was scheduled to work Saturday as a regular day. The only reason I can think of for them having overtime that weekend and working all day Labor Day was because one of our clients is dealing with a product recall, but that client has nothing to do with a lot of us. My company should've just said, "Fuck the customers, it's Labor Day!" And of course, most of the people who haven't had to work the previous two holidays (all of B-Shift, the QA woman who works Monday through Friday, my supervisor, 2nd Shift Shipping, Inbound, and the warehouse manager) didn't have to work. Also, I ended up working that Wednesday due to B-Shift QA still being short staffed. That was the worst Labor Day and Labor Day weekend ever, and I've had some real doozies! Hell, all that working Labor Day really did was make it easier for B-Shift when they came in on Wednesday morning. I was there, they had fuck all to do.

Hypothetically, A-Shift should be getting Thanksgiving off, but I'm sure they'll find some way to screw us.

This overtime has made for decent checks. It helps that they recently started paying us an extra $2 an hour, which I'm pretty sure is just going to last through the Peak season. But it really pisses me off that I have to work all these extra hours just to be able to pay the rent/bills and have some money left over for groceries with no outside help. I have quite a few friends who surely aren't rich, but can still afford to go to plenty of concerts, festivals, conventions, or even go on vacations. Like, I don't need to be rich, I just want to make enough to go to all those places.

As if having to come in and end up working twelve hours on Labor Day wasn't bad enough, my Labor Day started with the news that my absolute favorite coffee shop would be closing for good the following Thursday. I was already angry, then I was heartbroken. It's not it like it was the only coffee shop I go to, but it had a really good vibe to it, and had the best frozen blended coffee drinks I've ever had, even better than Starbucks' Frappuccino. They basically said that the place couldn't survive another Covid Winter. They did have some indoor seating these past couple of months, but it was severely limited compared to normal times, so you couldn't have tons of people hanging out inside during the Winter. I figure that not having a drive-through, or the ability to even have a drive-through, probably hurt them more than most coffee shops. Rents in the Highlands being sky high probably hasn't helped, either.

I finally got to visit the coffee shop on Thursday morning. The line was pretty ridiculous, but I was determined to stick with it. I got my favorite drink, took a lot of pictures, and even got to sit and soak it all in for a little while. I really didn't want to go to my mom and dad's to do laundry afterward, but with my weekend being compressed into one day shorter than it should've been, I figured it was the best day to do it. My parents watch a lot of news, mostly local, possibly anywhere from four to seven hours worth, depending on how early or late they get up in the morning. I stuck around for dinner, and they typically watch the news during dinner. They had a segment about the coffee shop closing, and I thought, "Maybe, just maybe, Dad won't say something stupid." Sure enough, he did, saying, "Well you can thank the n-----s." I told him, "Bullshit, it was Covid!" Then I went into the number of ways that Covid could've affected this particular coffee shop compared to other coffee shops. Then he said, "What about the crime?", and I said, "I don't know!" I should've straight up told him that crime had nothing to do with their closing. But he's a fucking idiot, and never believes the truth. Crime is up in Louisville compared to years past, but as someone who actually goes out into the city, I still find it reasonably safe most of the time. I don't think this is a problem exclusive to Louisville, but typical of the small town/rural-city divide, but people from outside the city seem to think that the city is like Mad Max, or to reference a more obscure movie, Death Wish 3, where the amount of crime and the amount of firepower used to fight that crime is utterly comical. I ended up going to the Highlands that Friday evening, even taking a lengthy walk from around Longest Avenue to Morton Avenue. It was pretty busy out, especially for the Covid era, and what I saw was all different kinds of people out trying to enjoy life.

A friend of mine recently said that racists must be profoundly fucking stupid. I told him that as the son of a racist, I can confirm that they are indeed profoundly fucking stupid. I don't see how someone can hate or find themselves superior to an entire race of people, other than stupidity, especially when you see the particular people who think they're the superior race, like my dad. What's odd to me is that while my dad seems to hate Black people indiscriminately, he seems to tolerate the Black guy who works for his brother's lawn care company just fine.

A working class hero is something to be!

July 4th fell on a Sunday this year, so my employer technically observed Independence Day on the 5th, meaning that they had nothing scheduled to ship out on the 5th, and those departments that typically work Monday through Friday got the day off. I would've been fine having Sunday off and working Monday. Despite this, they still fucking scheduled us to work on the 4th and 5th! This made no sense, especially since we were miserably slow the week before, and ended up being miserably slow the week of the 4th. We only worked half the day on the 4th, 4 to 5 hours on the 5th, and even got to leave an hour and a half early on the 6th. Hell, we could have had Sunday off, and still probably gotten off an hour or two early on Monday. It really wasn't the worst 4th of July ever or anything, but I was really hoping we'd get that Sunday off so I could actually go out and do something the Saturday night before the 4th. My Saturday nights have been nonexistent since I came back to work, it would've been nice if they could've thrown us a bone.

I found out that it was the warehouse manager's idea to have us work both that Sunday and Monday. It's possible that he might have been pressured by our client, but it was his decision. And guess what? That asshole didn't come in either of those days!

We've been horribly busy since the week after Independence Day. It's not that they have shipments spread out evenly over the entire week, but they seem to concentrate everything on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. They especially like to fuck us on Tuesdays. A lot of time, we'll spend Sunday and Monday working on Tuesday's stuff, then just when we think we're out of the woods, they'll drop another 1,000 to 2,000 picks for Tuesday on us either late on Monday or early Tuesday.

I really, really hate what they've had me doing since I came back, which is doing "dock audits". That's where I have to audit pallets of stuff to make sure that nothing's damaged, they're wrapped up right, etc., before they leave the warehouse. This is sometimes interrupted by having to take pictures of some customers' truck loads before they leave the building. I usually know what's supposed to ship out that day. Where I run into problems is when they decide to mix in stuff that's supposed to go out the next day, or even the day after that, onto a truck that's going out  that day. It will cause me to miss out on auditing some of that day's stuff because I'm running around trying to audit tomorrow's stuff that's getting ready to go out. I hope that wasn't too confusing, but that's about the best way I can describe it. I don't know about the woman on B-Shift who is the Dock Audits expert, but there's no way that I or most people can do all this shit all by ourselves.

I don't know how the Hell the temp agencies decide who they think is QA (Quality Assurance) material. I actually had a little experience doing quality audits before I got this job, but I don't think you necessarily need QA experience. What's more important is to be somewhat adequate with computers, and what they end up giving us is a lot of computer illiterate people! I was told about one person in particular that they had trained while I was on leave that, three weeks into the job, still didn't know how to properly press CTRL+ALT+DELETE to unlock the computer.

I had a significant amount of money saved up when I started my apartment search back in April. It shocked me how fast I blazed through it after moving out. I didn't think it would happen this soon, but I had to ask my mom for some grocery money this week. I definitely have to keep a better eye on spending. I've also applied for refinancing my auto loan, I currently pay almost $400 a month!

It's a little too close to the Peak season for my comfort. I would like to find another job before September, when the Blackout period (where we can't take any time off) starts, but I'm kind of afraid to since I can't afford COBRA insurance without subsidies. The U.S. health insurance system is bullshit. The money from the extra hours, and in the case of last year extra pay per hour, from Peak is nice, but it would be nice to be able to have a life during September through December. It would especially be nice to be able to go to the Louder Than Life festival, but even if I could go, I doubt that I'll even have the money to do it right.