C'est Non Un Blog

So the new guy quit today. That sucks, but really it’s great, because we were just going to fire his dumb ass anyway. No one wanted to keep him on. He was so damn unreliable. Of the five weeks he has officially worked at Bose, he’s maybe worked half of that. And of those days I’ve maybe seen him half.

His problem was either that he had the worst fucking luck known to man, or he was the biggest liar I’ve ever met, or a little bit of both. His car broke down. His girlfriend lost her job after, like, two days. His mom gets beaten up by a crack whore. His step kids get taken away by the state. Most of his electronics equipment gets broken (usually by him). His hot water breaks. He loses his belt (underneath his house). So forgive me if when I heard that his cousin shot himself with a shotgun my first question was “what was his cousin’s last name?” Apparently the straw that broke the camels back was that his cousin’s father tried to kill himself. That’s all just some messed up shit.

So we are back down to four people running the store. AGAIN. Just at the start of my fucking manager’s vacation. Poor woman hasn’t had a vacation in over a year. She still isn’t going to get one. Although it’s kind of her own fault. I mean really, if you have a job opening and no one knows about it, will it ever get filled? This sucks. My vacation was the week after next. Ain’t going to get that. Again. I’m fucking sick of working 6 days a week. Now it’s starting to get busy too. Oh joy. I’ve never seen so many people as I saw today. I’m just exhausted. You can’t run a store with only three people on a busy weekend. It’s just insanity.

On the plus side, our store got Swung this weekend and I think we nailed it. A Swing is when the district manager comes in and pretty much grades the store on how well we take care of it and work with customers. I fucking knocked it out of the park this weekend. I was wicked proud of myself, I was doing so good. Perfect salesmanship, if I do say so myself. I know it sounds cocky and arrogant, but that store really needs me. For instance I sold more systems this month than everyone else combined. And almost then some. I’m in the zone. I’m also incredibly overworked.

The last two nights I got home at 9. 9 o’clock! That’s just crazy. I come home, I eat something, maybe watch a movie and then I’m back up at 8 in the morning to go back to work. All I do is work. I’m going to kill myself, I swear. I feel like Barbie at the end of Toy Story 2, so exhausted from being happy and helpful all the time. When someone asks about home theater or plasma televisions I just want to tell them to go fuck themselves. That doesn’t really jive with the Bose higher ups though. U Music is cool and all, but I really don’t want to have to explain it to another person (and I’m not going to explain it to you!). I may be the show master, but if I have to do another show I’m going to lose it.

On the plus side, overtime does mean more DVDs…

Here is a bonus post for all of those loyal readers who actually read this thing, and a bitching about how I never update anymore. Here is the uncompleted post from my trip down to Bard last spring that I promised I would finish (remember that?) and, well, never did. Here it is, completely unaltered and unfinished. I’ll leave it to you to figure out what came next:

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So, what’s up? To my loyal readers it may seem like I’ve abandoned you. It’s been over a week between posts. No Monday Movie Review. What’s the deal? Well, I have been up to a few things so I’ll try to recollect everything in my noggin so that you all no longer feel all left out on all the intimate details of my life. (And for all of you who really missed the Monday Movie Review–what, like one of you?–you’ll probably be glad to know that I’ll catch you up on all of the movies that I’ve seen since the last Review next Monday.)

So work. One reason it has been so long between posts is that I worked my first 40-hour week. Of course when you add up all of my driving time I’m out of the house for my job like 10 1/2 hours, five days in a row. That’s a long week. I have about time to eat something and watch some TV before I’m back in bed, getting sleep for the next day. Hence no random weblogs.

Well, what were the highlights of work? I had one woman ask me if she could hook up some of our small Acoustimass cube speakers in her car. Um, no. Well, you could, but something about this woman tells me that she really wasn’t up to the challenge of completely rewiring her car.

A group of deaf people came in to buy some Acoustimass speakers. Yes, you heard right. Deaf people came to our store to buy speakers. It doesn’t get much better than that, folks! Actually they were looking at the 15 which has the most bass power, so that they could presumably pump it up real loud and feel it through the vibrations of the base module. Man, I’d hate to be their neighbors. But deaf people buying speakers…crazy, right?

FedEx decided not to deliver our checks this week, so I was without any gas money. Always fun. Jim was kind enough though to lend me forty bucks for my trip down to Bard, to which I was very thankful (more on Bard below).

I was kind of in the middle of this mini-feud between my Assistant Manager and one of my fellow Demonstration Specialists. Things were said, words exchanged. Weird energy everywhere until it was quickly resolved. I’d get into more details here, but heaven forbid anyone from Bose ever read my blog and swiftly canned my ass. I like money. I ain’t losing my job. You want to know all the gritty details, talk to me somewhere outside of this public of forums.

I got commended for my superior skills at putting people through the show Friday. I did a shit load of shows. I did pretty awesome and was really pleased with myself. And my peers recognized me. Yes, I am a productive member of the team. That makes it a lot easier to work there (especially now that sales are extremely slow lately).

With Sunday came Daylight Savings Time, both a blessing and a curse. The curse mostly has to do with the fact that I had to get up at freakin’ 6 in the morning (7 DST). That is not fun. I was not pleased. But the blessing came with the added hours of sunshine at night, which was just perfect because Sunday was the night I decided to head down to Bard to hang out with old college friends. My driving luck just kept on coming too. First of all, I was scheduled to get off of work Sunday at 5:15 because we close the store an hour early on Sundays. Then on top of that I got out of work an extra, Extra hour early because I hadn’t used my entire 30 minutes for lunch during the week and had thus already worked an extra hour over my forty hours. (Since working three days I don’t quite make my 25 hours and we are still a part-timer down at work, I’m allowed to not take my whole lunch to make up my time. However, as a part-timer I’m not really allowed to make overtime (anything after 40 hours) so we had to clean up that little mistake.)

So, since there was news of an approaching storm and all of my coworkers knew about my trip down to Bard, they let me out an hour early (things were extremely slow that day anyway). The weather held for me too though. I got home with no more than some rain to slow me down, took my time eating, changing, and packing up the car, and then left for Bard. Halfway to Troy things started to look bad, as the rain started to turn into rain/snow, but then it let up and I actually had clear skies all the way down to Bard. It was, however, extremely windy out, and I feared for my life while my car blew three feet back and forth all the way down the thruway, almost pushing me into the other lane at least twice. Not helping my nerves was the fact that I was driving 75 mph the whole way down, and almost EVERYONE was passing me. It was nice any sunny the whole way down though, and I got to Sara’s place in one piece in awesome time and with the sun still out.

Sunday night was pretty awesome. Sara and Dave met me at the door and caught me up on the status of the lasagna they were making (Dave forgot the egg!). Kerri and Ryan showed up. There were shots of Tequila, drinks of vodka and orange juice, and the infamous Olde English 40. Good time had by all. I finished my 40 before Dave, even though he had a head start on me, and then started drinking Sara’s. What can I say? It’s been a while since the last time I got to have fun drinking. We closed out the night watching some Aliens (being too drunk to figure out Zombies!!!) but despite the fact that it’s my favorite movie and because of my drinking and the fact that I had been up FOREVER, I almost fell asleep. Give me a break, my normal bedtime now is like 11!

I didn’t get sick from the drinking, but when I got up it did feel like I swallowed shards of glass the night before. Damn 40s. I actually had that destroyed intestines feeling for the next two days, but whatever. It was still a fun night of drinking, definitely worth it. The next morning I awoke to Dave watching cartoons in Sara’s living room, and I joined him for a while. (OH! I thought I had seen “firm” mattresses before, but damn that mattress in the guest room was fucking FIRM. It was like sleeping on a board with padding on it.) We quickly got sick of waiting for Sara’s lazy ass to get up though, so we went out to Red Hook to get ourselves some delightful Dunkin’ Donuts.

Around noon we went to Bard. It was weird in that we actually saw two different people we knew within seconds of leaving the cars. That started to give me that pleasant nostalgia feeling for Bard again. At first it was really cool to be back. I felt at home. It didn’t take long for it to start feeling weird though. Then it kind of got creepy. Wait, I’m not suppose to be here. Wait, I don’t even really WANT to be here. I’m glad I’m gone. I mean, Bard was fantastic, probably one of the greatest periods of my life, but I’m damn glad I’m gone. I’ve lost my need to learn right now. I want to kind of chill, decompress and just DO.

I met Emily at the Manor Café.

I always found those people who try to cram before a big test pretty amusing. Because, really, who are you kidding? If you aren’t already familiar with the last three months worth of information, what makes you think you are going to memorize it in one night? Making sure you remember the main points is one thing, but these people who go all out studying just baffle me. It’s better just to have confidence that you know what you are doing even if you don’t than to try and memorize everything and then freak out when you can’t even remember your own name. Don’t be afraid to fly by the seat of your pants people!

Driving home tonight in the middle of nowhere, on a road I’d only driven on once before (going the other way) my engine temperature light starts to creep up to a dangerous level. I crank up the defroster and hope for the best. Luckily it dropped back down to a safe level. More to come….

Some statistics for you:

# of CDs acquired this year: 140
# of DVDs acquired this year: at least 150+

# of Bond movies I now own on DVD, thanks to eBay: 21

Total # of DVDs I now own: 434
% of my DVD collection acquired just this year: over a third

# of songs I’ve loaded onto my iPod: 4685
Amount of space left on my iPod: 11.65 GB

Total # of movies seen this year: 219
Total # of movies seen this year, for the first time: 189
Total # of movies seen this year, in the theater: 39

Total # of movies seen last year at this time: 170
Total # of movies seen last year at this time, for the first time: 96
Total # of movies seen last year at this time, in the theater: 30

# of weeks working at Bose: 24
# of weeks we’ve had a full staff at Bose: 0
# of weeks I’ve worked over 40 hours: at least 12
# of days off this week: 1
# of days off the week of my birthday: 1 (my birthday)
# of shitty people I’ve worked with: 3
# of awesome people I’ve worked with: 3
Most # of people I’ve worked with at Bose at one time: 5
Least # of people I’ve worked with at Bose at one time: 1

Today I hit on a married woman. God, that was fun.

Thanks again to that funny guy at http://www.defectiveyeti.com/ for this post. It seems innocent enough at first, but wait until you get to the fourth paragraph. I was laughing my ass off. I hope you all enjoy too:

WWAD

The Catholic Church has been a little down on its luck recently, what with the abuse scandals and the Pope running out of people to confer favor on, to the point where he has to resort to blessing breakdancers. What they need is something that will not only refill their depleted coffers, but also enable them to earn the goodwill of people across the world like they did during the crusades.

That’s why I think they should found What Would Atkins Do, Incorporated.

Here’s how it works. The church opens a series of bakeries across the nation, selling all varieties of grain products: bread, muffins, pasta, you name it. Each outlet also employs a deacon, who sanctifies everything before its shipped to locals stores. It would be sort of like the kosher food deal, but, you know, Christier.

And wah-lah: moneymaker! The 96% of the American population currently on the Atkins diet could enjoy all those baked goods they’ve had to forego, without having to worry about mettlesome carbs. Thanks to the (literal!) miracle of transubstantiation, those WWAD cinnamon rolls and bagels will turn into the (literal!) body of Christ after consumption, thereby converting a carbohydrate-laden doughnut into a the relatively carb-free hunk of Messiah. Dieters get to eat bread again and stave off eternal damnation, all at the same time — it’s win-win!

If WWAD, Inc. is successful (how could it not be?), they could even branch out by opening vineyards and launching a line of sanctified wine for vampires.

While it is nice that we finally got another full-time at work and we don’t have to always work overtime anymore, when someone does decide that they want to take a vacation, well, back to 49-hour weeks we go. Gah! Will the madness ever end?

Also, have any of you been getting that “back to school” vibe? I’ve been out of school two year, but all the sudden it gets a little chilly in the morning and I’m making plans for the fall. Am I always going to be programmed this way? What’s going on?

You ever notice how often it is that the phone rings but you’re busy and can’t get to it immediately, and then just as you pick it up the person on the other end hangs up? What’s up with that? It’s just freaky.

——

Any of you who have seen me recently have probably noticed that I became the hippie I was always meant to be and grew my hair out. Although you couldn’t tell from the curls, I could pull it down all the way in the front and it would reach all the way down to my chin. For me, that’s really long fucking hair.

Well, it’s all gone now. The Wednesday of the other week it wouldn’t dry out from the rain and it kept getting in my eyes and it pissed me off so much that I vowed that I would cut it all off to make it pay. I kept my promise this Wednesday, and now my hair is really short.

That should send a message out to not fuck with me!

It’s kind of weird to look at myself in the mirror now. Despite the fact that for most of my life my hair was in fact probably this short, I don’t really recognize myself anymore. The funny thing is that my family has been in Cape May all this week and I told them nothing of my getting a haircut. Should be interesting to see their faces tomorrow night.

——

I had bat problems the other night. For like, 45 minutes me and a bat had a showdown in my house. Stupid bat. I’m trying to watch some Sealab 2021 before going to bed and suddenly there he is, flying around my room. So I start turning on lights and ducking low every time he wizzes by my head. What to do, what to do?

You ever think about what you would use to fight a bat, should the situation ever arise? I mean, everyone says net or tennis racket, but how many of you actually have one of those things close by? Trust me, trying to think of something on the fly while keeping an eye on the whereabouts of a bat is very tricky.

So the whole house is lit up like Hiroshima except for the breezeway, but it won’t go in the breezeway, wouldn’t you know? Instead it flies under a teakettle my mom has up above the cupboards in the kitchen. I can’t see what it is doing, so I get a step ladder to get a better look, knowing full well the fucker is probably going to latch on my face like in some National Lampoon Vacation movie. Lucky (or not) for me, it didn’t move. At all. Not even when I poked it with a broom.

And I poked it a lot.

And then I poked it with the bristly end.

Still nothing. So I ended up pushing the teakettle off of it, hoping that would freak it out enough to get it moving again. That actually worked. It flew out, I almost fell on my head. Everyone’s happy. Except I go to look for it flying around and it’s gone.

What happened is it flew once around the room and then landed right next to the dog. The dog got up like it had just gotten hit with an apple after unaware sitting under an apple tree. I then freaked, thinking the dog now somehow had rabies.

Let me just state that at this point that neither dog had barked once, or even reacted, to the bat flying around the house. Why, I have no idea. Bats must be build like stealth jets or something. The dogs just watched me freak out in complete wonder.

But the bat didn’t move from where it landed. So I found a box, threw it over top of the bat, and threw it outside. Of course you knew it took one last lunge at my head before flying off, just to say “ha ha, gotcha!”

——

My assistant manager is a complete dickhead, but you probably figured that out already.

This is the shit. You’ve got to see this cartoon. It is so fucking awesome.

In other news yesterday I had a gigantic headache that was about this close to becoming a migraine. So how I made it through work (just barely) and got home in time to pop to Excedrin Migraine, which is filled with enough caffine to kill a horse. Let’s just say I didn’t fall asleep until 2:30 (I went to bed 11:30). Today was good though. Sun finally out again. Summer smells abound. Believe it or not, my favorite part of my drive home from work is the smell. It’s just awesome.

Tuesday Harry and I went on a crusade to find beanbag fill, to which we very possibly hit every KMart, Walmart, and Target between Albany and Troy (by accident and a wrong turn, nonetheless). It rained all day and I got soaking wet, which I think was the cause for the migraine. I also managed to buy a ten dollar DVD at every store we hit. Thank god he finally found what he wanted before I went broke.

For those who haven’t seen me in a while, I’ve pretty much just let my hair grow almost nonstop since my senior year at Bard. And now my hair is seriously pissing me off. Just the last couple days I can’t fucking stand it. It’s flat and hangs in my face and usually looks awful. If it doesn’t shape up, its days are numbered.