I have more pictures of boxes. Of the final load going out. Of what was returned to the store (more on this later). Of the empty spaces where boxes used to be.

But there is a more pressing concern. So, the way that store off-sites work is that (typically), we process the sales by hand, and then when the staff that did the off-site comes back in, they manually enter them into the registers. This does allow a certain amount of tweaking.

Why we would do such tweaking is this.... See, our store has a policy where if we meet or exceed our sales goal, everyone in the store gets an extra dollar an hour (for that week). This may not seem like much to most people, but in my income bracket (minimal, I assure you), this is about a 10% increase per paycheck. To me it's huge.

Aside from the Congressional Cookie of Valor that my manager bought me (oatmeal, if you're curious; and yes, I did take a picture (I'll post it later (parenthetical asides, why does no one understand me (they do, they just hate diagramming your sentences (diagramming is for wussies! (true, dat)))))), and a lottery ticket that my supervisor bought me, I'm getting no bonus for the extra work I've done for the BGE. Which was last weekend. Sure, I did get extra hours, but I was hoping that those extra hours (to a max of 40 -- overtime is verboten for The Company) would be hours with bonus. I could have scored as much as 40 extra dollars -- to me, that's a hell of a lot of money!

And with the BGE income, we reasoned we couldn't fall short of goal in any way.

The manager was even planning on cheating on when the transactions were entered, so we'd make goal for two weeks, instead of one! Unethical? He'd have the entirely plausible excuse of it taking that long to enter all of the orders.

But that's not how it went down.

First things first -- Friday has a single BGE event, and we've picked up about 300 copies of the two books that will be sold for that event. A fraction of the sales of this event were put into the system on Friday night at our store. We closed the week 700$ short of goal (week ends Sunday).

The head office decided that after all of our hard work, they were going to process all of the sales themselves.

Yeah. No bonus for us.

In addition, the warehouse screwed us over by taking a portion (about 40%, I'm given to understand) of the books that weren't sold, didn't give me or our buyer any kind of manifest or packing list, and just transfered them to the warehouse as stock for all stores. So now they've shafted us on the bonus, and completely screwed over our inventory.

The buyer (my supervisor: Joan) now has to go through the list I wrote by hand of the books that we DO have left over from the event, figure out which ones to send to other stores, which to keep, which to send to the warehouse, and how many we even actually have left by hand. I have to box them up. We're starting tomorrow morning. We have to be done by 11:00, more-or-less, since that's when the truck shows up to cart things to the warehouse.

I feel an urge to kill something.

Anyway. Aside from that, yesterday I managed (finally) to get my future roommates together to try and work out the finances of the new place. I had foolishly assumed that since they told me I wouldn't have to pay more than 300$ a month in rent (a steal, but I felt bad paying so little and said at least 400 -- what I am paying (and can just afford) now), that they'd worked the costs of everything out.

They hadn't. We got that hammered down, but now Jim is upset because he wanted to pay less, and he's going to be paid the same. Knowing exactly how this dynamic worked last time, this essentially means I am going to have to pay more to make him happy. Oh, he won't say anything to me about it, but he'll build up a festering rage and eventually demand that I either pay more, or make room for someone who can. Just like happened with Peter.

So I'm working on getting a license so I can get a better job (a pity, since my current job really does make me happy -- except for the low pay) so that Jim doesn't go ballistic again. In the meantime, Jim has offered to pay the remaining half of the deposit -- 1000$. But even though he made the offer, he wants to pay as little as possible, meaning that he's only barely satisfied with me handing over every single penny of my next paycheck after my dental expenses are taken care of.

Some days, I just want to cry.

I've been trying to save up for a new computer for a few months now. Key word there being trying.

Frustration.