Ugh. Ennui.

No apologies. No explanation. But I return.

Perhaps.

From the steps of the Temple one can see all the way across Beggar's Town, and to the city. Before the big coal factory was put in, you could see the ocean on clear days. That becomes a real rarity these days, but I try not to regret.

The sunsets have become much more impressive.

It's as twilight's veil is drawing over the city, and especially Beggar's Town, which is the part which remains most clear to me, that reminds me of who I am and where I came from. Watching the city quiet down, prepare for sleep. Watching my own city (as it were) close up and hold its secrets close.

People in Beggar's Town can sleep at any hour, and hold many jobs ... our pattern is a chaotic fluctuation compared to the rhythm of the city. Or maybe it only seems this way at sunset, watching the light of sun fade, shrouding everything in darkness?

I remember distinctly when I was young, I could see the city more clearly when the sun went down. Now it's a remote blur, a life that touches mine, but I no longer know.

Perhaps the sun has not lost it's luster, and perhaps it is not the coal- smoke, either. Perhaps it is that I have drawn away, because I now know that Beggar's Town is my home. Is this acceptance, I wonder?

But then ... I go ahead of myself. All of these things in time, I suppose.

Next time, my friends, my story.

But not this time.

Bwah.

Moved, finally. So the House of Peter is behind us, we're all comfortably ensconced in the new place (three permanent roommates, one temporary), and the good times just keep on rolling. So, a few days after we'd moved in, since I took four days off for the move, I went down to the DMV, and got a license. Shortly after that, I arranged to meet with Peter to discuss his cat (Punk), and offer to take care of her if he couldn't.

So I now have a new cat (she's so precious! (I'm too lazy to upload pictures right now)), a new car, and a new ca...p? Actually, it's an old Christmas present. But I'm wearing it now, so it kinda works.

At any rate, things are going well, so very little to kvetch about.

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.

You see weird things from time to time. I snapped a picture of this on my way to lunch on Friday -- it doesn't come out terribly well, but it's actually a sports-tractor. Or something. Maybe it's just a new model of tractor. But it's totally hot-rodded out in appearance. Not a great picture, but a Mac truck just out of frame edged it out a moment later, and then it was gone, so it's all I've got.

In the meantime, work continues. And continues. On the bright side, I've made a fair bit of progress, and in fact, few books remain to be received for the expo. After mentioning the darn thing, I should link it. Before I go into an exhaustive expose on the perils of working in a bookstore, go here and check out the BookGroup Expo website.

Neat, huh? Anyway. This is Friday morning, when I came in -- stuff finished for the expo. The 'F' isn't a badge of shame (though, the blank spots on the boxes beneath the letters are; I put the wrong labels on, and had to cut them off). They're for an event on Friday -- the first event that we're doing. But mostly, this picture is for reference. The last shot I had of this space had a lot more books in it.

Now this is those books (yeah, I went back into the crawlspace just for this shot. Neat, huh?). I had to hold the camera at a high angle, and you can see that the boxes go aaaaalmost all the way to the ceiling, since the light bulb reduces the top of the image into light bloom. Oops. You can also see the folding chairs just in-shot on the right -- so even though the angle didn't capture the floor (most of it's boxes, anyway), it should provide some sense of scale.

Turning around, this is the other side of the pile -- directly to the left of the previous image. I didn't move the camera too much except to lower it and rotate it to the left. The ceiling is lower here, because the crawlspace is beneath the stairs. That post is in the center of the stairwell (it's actually square, but ... you know. Stairwell). The pipe is probably drainage from the cafe upstairs; I don't know their layout too well.

It's good to be done, but irritating in regards to pay. I get extra hours, but not on the week where we get a bonus dollar-an-hour. Still, you take what you can get, and extra hours are extra hours.

Anyway. Back to the task at hand, we've got what had been done by the morning when I came in. My boss (Manager Eric) took care of the ones I couldn't, since we're not allowed to have overtime (I only left him three of those boxes, but still -- he's a great guy to help me out). This shot is missing some of the boxes I got today -- I'll get another one tomorrow, probably with the missing VHPS and Simon shipments. At least one of them, I imagine.

This is just another angle (you'd think I was a box fanatic, huh?), but shows some of the intricate stacking work that has earned me the title 'Box Puzzle Master'. This is how you put those Tetris skills to work, kids. Reading between the lines: STAY IN SCHOOL. Unless you want to do this.

Then again, my stepfather got a math degree, and it was only good to get a job delivering televisions, so watch out what you study, I guess. Hm.

Aaanyway. This is the other pile, the one behind my workspace (kind of). Those shelves are typically for returns, but now are blocked off/overtaken by BGE. Either way, by Friday of this week, I should be done with those boxes for good!

Well. Until it's time to return all the books that didn't sell, I guess.

Dangit.