Long Weekend

I took all the vacation time I had and started a long weekend this morning. I couldn’t have picked a better time, either. Not only is Tulsa Tough going on this weekend, but my boss is due to come back tomorrow night. She is going to have to start by terminating a couple of employees including one of our suspects. Meanwhile we do not have enough people to stock the shelves and the store manager wants us to spend more time making the store look pretty.

I usually spend Friday helping set up things along the race course at Tulsa Tough. This year I will spend time preparing and handing out race packets as well.

I am switching hotels this year. I used to stay at a hotel along I-244 just east of Tulsa Tough headquarters on the far east end of downtown. The hotel wasn’t much but the neighboring area was a little sketchy. Last year the homeless started camping in the median of the freeway. Over the last year there were reports of fights in the parking lots of both hotels in the area, naked people wandering around and in your face prostitution and drug dealing.

I am staying on the far west side this year. This is slightly more inconvenient because of the extra distance and the exit I need not being available coming from the west. My boss called and told me that I could just head east one additional exit and turn around. With constant road construction and repair you cannot count on the easy solution being the available one.

Suspects dropping like flies

At work last night, two of our recent hires did not show up last night. One of them did not even bother to call in. To make things worse, two of our longer time coworkers went home at lunchtime. Needless to say with our no overtime edict from on high, the shelves were not completely stocked. Fortunately, tonight is our slowest night of the week and we can catch up.

Drug Dealers, Part two

I posted yesterday about insurance companies pushing you to use certain pharmacies. After reviewing that post I felt I need to expand on that a little bit.

When Clean Harbors sold its transformer division, the company that bought it wanted us to use CVS as our drug dealer. The problem was the nearest CVS was 80 miles away in Owasso, Oklahoma. What they really wanted us to do was use mail order for our drugs.

Rural America has developed a serious mail theft problem. This is bad enough when the junkies responsible for the theft just took the opiates they prefer. Alas, ours are completely illiterate and will take almost anything with a pharmacy label on it and abandon the stuff they don’t want down the road. Fortunately for me, a few months later CVS built a new store in Bartlesville, cutting my drive in half and keeping me off the mail order program. Since I went to Bartlesville on a regular basis, this wasn’t too inconvenient.

Drug dealers

When you work at Wally World and have insurance, Wally is your drug dealer. It is more and more common for insurance companies to push you to use a certain drug dealer. When the company you work for has a pharmacy, they become your drug dealer as well as your employer.

I had to pick up my drugs today. I get off work at 7am and the drug dealer is not available until 8ish. The other option means coming in three hours early. Not much else is open at 7am, so I went to the laundromat to waste an hour or so. It was slightly more expensive than breakfast at a restaurant, but less fattening and I got a lot of cleanish clothes. At least I won’t go through this again until after Labor Day.

Memorial Day

A lot of blogs I follow had a post about Memorial Day.  I didn’t bother because like most holidays, it went by before I knew it was there.  Wally World only gives its employees two holidays a year, Christmas and Thanksgiving, neither of which are paid.  Since most holidays are on Monday or Friday, I don’t get those off at all. 

If I try to take off on a holiday, I get double attendance points.  If I get five in a six month period, I get fired automatically. Because I work overnights, I will miss two shifts if I take the whole day off. This means four points and firing is at the manager’s discretion, even if I have zero points. But since Independence Day falls on a Tuesday this year, I will get to celebrate once I get off work in the morning.

Local Warming

Temperatures are now high enough to make you sweat if you are out in the sun. This is why I normally put my window fan in my bedroom Memorial Day weekend. I had not done that because one of the two fans in my old unit wasn’t working. I was looking for a replacement and no one locally had them. I am not making a 100 mile round trip to the nearest big box store to get one either. One of the local hardware stores ordered one for me today. It will be here early next week. I really don’t think I need it until then.