Touching base.

Thursday, Nov. 19, 2009 - 9:06 p.m.

Today was Maddie’s last day. I’m going to miss her. She has been such an amazing trooper these past two weeks! I’d have run screaming, if I’d had that much thrown at me when I was that new. (Or maybe not. I’m pretty tough. But still…) We have a new girl, Kayla. She’s petcare and cashier, has been training cashier for a couple weeks, and just now training petcare. She had barely 12 hours of petcare experience when they had her opening by herself yesterday. Poor kid. The results were not pretty. Poor me. I had to fix everything when I opened today.

Chrys is back, thank goodness. We desperately need the extra pair of hands. But we have a rank newbie instead of Maddie, so it’s going to be pretty bad for awhile. Not that Kayla isn’t game; she’s just new. I opened today and worked with Chrys for most of my shift. I got along with her by anticipating what needed to be done so she didn’t have a chance to order me to do it.

She hasn’t impressed me yet. For example… We have a laminated sheet where we write down when we fed the snakes. They haven’t been fed in like 2 weeks. She stuck the sign on our whiteboard with a note, “This is unexceptable!!!” [sic] “If you don’t know how, ask someone.” First of all, an inability to spell seems to be a prerequisite for management positions. It makes me laugh every time I see it. Literally, she is saying, “There is no exception allowed.” In other words, this is a good thing, the way it must be. Secondly, the note has been up there for a week. She’s the petcare manager… Why doesn’t she just do it herself? (Or, at least, don’t just stick up a note without following through!) The manager and team lead have always been the ones to feed the snakes. I wouldn’t mind doing it, but I’m not snake certified, and we usually feed them in the evenings, and I always open. I don’t have time to feed snakes! I don’t know why I need to be certified to feed snakes, or even if it matters, but that’s why Crystal never had me feed them. I should tell Chrys to find out what I need to do and just get it done. I’ve been slowly doing more of the team lead stuff lately anyway, kind of a mutual agreement with Mandy to help her pick up the slack from our barely-trained manager.

I flew through opening today. Dunno how that happened. I always work faster when I’m annoyed, for some reason, and this morning I was one annoyance away from putting in my two weeks’ notice. It’s been a horrible weekend and week so far. With Kayla opening and Maddie closing yesterday, the place was a mess, and I couldn’t even complain to anybody. Kayla is way too new to be opening by herself, so it wasn’t her fault, and today was Maddie’s last day—she certainly wasn’t going to care! There was a lot of just stupid stuff, too. We ran out of gloves in one area. The NutraLyte stuff we put in the Quiet Room drinking water disappeared. Someone (I’m guessing Chrys) didn’t hook up the hose right when they filled our big disinfectant barrel and all the spray bottles and it was full of obviously plain water. (We have chinchillas with ringworm!!! I couldn’t let that one slide, although it was tempting. I wasn’t going to risk touching something that was “disinfected” with plain water. I filled a couple of spray bottles and left a note on the barrel. I was going to show Chrys how to fill it, but we were too busy. Maybe I’ll get a chance tomorrow, or maybe Mandy will take care of it.)

Who’d have thought that Mandy and I would end up being allies??? (That’s a very good thing. I don’t like being disliked, and I don’t like disliking people.)

So, yeah, it’s been a crummy day. But, on the plus side, I got to put out our beautiful doves and normal and red factor canaries. I’ve missed having doves and canaries. We’re going to be getting a parrotlet. That ought to be interesting! Oh, and Mr. Nasty the Jenday conure was actually very nice today. He even stepped up for me without a hassle, and only bit me once! So it wasn’t a completely bad day.

So, where have I been?

As Thumper’s mama would say, “If you can’t say nothin’ good, don’t say nothin’ at all.”

Yeah, it’s been that bad.

Not all bad, but pretty bad.

But I’ll tell you about it anyway. Tomorrow.

Now I have to go dose a handful of uncooperative sick cats (part of the bad; don’t worry, not my cats, but fosters) and clean up their nasty cage, then get to bed. I’m pet products tomorrow (yeah!!!), so it’s a 4 a.m. shift for me.