Monday, August 14, 2006

The Job and my last 2 day weekend in the near future.

I survived my first 5 days of work. It is a lot of running around and pretending to have a clue about what is going on. Today we got 3 other trainees and one came in wearing a t-shirt. I was pretty amazed. I am slowly getting the hang of measuring people for their tuxedos. I am pretty good at walking the floor with them and helping them select styles. The other guy that started with me took an hour and a half with one couple. I was floored. Like anyone wants to spend that long talking to him. Speaking of the guy I started with this is an interesting story. I got to work on Friday, later then I would have liked but 5 minutes before I would have to start. SO I clocked in and went to work running around, measuring people, and talking to the guy who was leaving the company. I was at work for a half an hour before I noticed that guy was not there yet. We will call him J for the sake of this story. Anyways J was not there and he hadn't called. 2 hours later he was still MIA. They called his phone and he didn't answer. He did not call at all on Friday. So we wrote him off. We figured he had moved on to bigger and better things. So I show up today and we are looking at the schedule because he had figured prominently in this week's schedule and we had figured we had seen the last of him. It started getting busy and I was checking suits back in and sorting them out to be cleaned. All of a sudden I hear Carolyn (the store boss) say "J! What are you doing here?" He went into some stupid story about being on his way to work and having his car break down. He tried to get it startedbut it was not his lucky day. After 15 minutes he called someone to have it towed somewhere. At this point Carolyn says "Oh well we hadn't heard from you and we were worried. We thought you liked it but you just didn't show up or even call." J says well I called Pam (the regional mgr) because all I had was her number around 1 PM. She did not get back to me until Sunday.

Carolyn and I were talking during J's hour and a half sale. She doesn't believe him and neither do I. First of all how do you not have the number? It's in the yellow pages. Don't you think if it is your first week you would be trying to get in touch to tell people you are having a day of bad luck as opposed to being fired?

Seems fishy right. Let me help you read between the lines. For whatever reasoin J got up and did not want to go to work. Maybe he overslept, maybe it was the 9 am to 8 pm shift he put in or maybe he had a sweet interview to go to. I am not sure but for whatever reason he decided to not go to work today. He waited until late enough in the day to call Pam and wiggle out of it with a car break down story. Except she had had a full week and she had called it a day early. She got back to the phone and called him when she felt like dealing with it. Then J pulled out all the charm and talked his way back into a job.

Meanwhile that day of having him gone really earned me points and helped me build confidence in how I do my job. I can handle a lot of scenarios now.


So work is going well. I can't say I love it but I can handle it. My weekend was good though. Unfortunately it is the end of the 2 days off in a row as long as I have this job. My dad rolled into town Thursday for a Friday conference. Thursday night we headed to a Chinese food place in my near vincinity in his big ol' (make that new) Dodge Ram. Friday night my dad cooked. Saturday we hung out all day in downtown Portland. We rode the bus into town and we just went romping about. We headed to Henry's for the burgers. I had a Brewery BBQ Burger and he had the Mushroom Swiss Burger. We split them up so we could have half of each. I learned that I prefer my burger to his. We cruised around on the street car and ended up at Bridgeport Brewery. We shared a sampler and decided that if we had our druthers we would go somewhere else but we did find a few beers that we could stomach.We liked the Amber, the porter and (suprisingly) the ESB. We could tolerate the Stout and the IPA. We did not like the Pale Ale or the Barleywine. The Supris made us nearly revisit our lunch. From there we headed to Borders and spent some quality time with books we had no intention of actually buying. Then we headed back to Henry's for a beer during happy hour. My chice, Paulaner Octoberfest, had went bad and it soured my experience. Even the excellent Hoegaarden did not revitalize the experience. We threw in some great crab cakes into the mix and then headed back home on the bus. Sunday I cooked breakfast and we ran a few errands and then he headed back home.

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