Annabelle and I have
been rather bored lately. Today we sat around the round kitchen table job
hunting, drinking tea, and eating tons of food. It was nice and peaceful, she
got a lot done, I got some. But nearer to the evening when we ran out of things
to apply for we felt that tinge of boring setting up on us.
Jeremy says I use
the word boring a lot, and to justify myself, I actually mean it this time
around. This is the first time since Annabelle has gotten married that she’s
spent an extensive amount of time at home with us, and life here is just so –
the same. In her own house she has a million things to do: clean, paint, cut
the grass, shovel the driveway, put out the trash – and here, it’s just sitting
in front of the computer. It’s this type of idleness that causes her to miss
Vinay, who’s in the thunderest bay at the moment, all the more.
I was bored
because I had run out of things to do to entertain Annabelle. I can never be
truly bored at home, there’s always something to do (like watching all of the
Legend of Korra, a Pandora ’s Box I don’t think I’m ready to open yet). I
painted her nails (yet again) and made dinner (my version of meat pie: potatoes
and ground beef). And after that … well she’s not the type to watch movies,
play games, watch drams, or other idle things normal people do.
Anyway, I guess I’m
bored because I’m also waiting for Jeremy to come ‘home’ (even though Quebec is
his real home). He’s been gone for about a week now and he’s coming back
tomorrow, not that I’ll see him. And although I’ve been busy this past week
(with the holidays and all) I can’t help but be irritated with time when I
realize there’s three-two-one more day left until he returns. It’s familiar to
when I only have an hour left to my shift at work, it’s always dragged on long
and tortuously.
Speaking of work,
that’s one place that never gets boring. This past holiday season was probably
the most irritated I've been working in retail. I don’t usually get mad, but I
was the closest to being mad on Boxing Day with the large amount of people and
huge pile of mess they were trailing behind them. I wonder if it ever occurs to
non-retail workers that there is actually someone who has to clean up after
their mess when they decide to open up ten packs of underwear just to see which
size fits or after they've let their children mess around in the toy department
or after they decided to unbox all of the coffee makers in the isle just to see
if it comes with a coffee pot. Maybe people think things just magically get
cleaned up afterwards.
Wrong.
Here’s a secret:
When you open up packages in stores, we have to throw them out. That’s right. It
goes in the garbage. Why? Because no one else will buy it. They’ll see an
opened box and buy the unopened box behind it.
Of course we lose
money for it, but we’re also not allowed to yell at you when we catch you in
the act either. (There’s nothing forbidding us from giving you the stink eye
though, something I’ve gotten to be very good at.)
Ok ending this
post off with this before my ranting goes on any further:
Last week on Saturday
the store was still fairly busy. My very pregnant co-worker, S, was working as
a cashier that day. It had been five-six long hours into her shift when
suddenly she felt extreme pressure so she sat down on the floor in tears and
told Jean that she was in labour. They got her a seat and called the leaders in
the store, who led her to the fitting room where she’d be able to get privacy.
Someone called the ambulance and they came in no time to whisk her away to the
hospital. S had been crying – from the pain or from being scared, I don’t know.
It was all very
traumatizing to me. I couldn’t stop thinking about S, and there was nothing
much I could do except pray for her. I mean, her unborn child could have
potentially died or be in fatal condition. I still don’t know what happened.
But the funny thing is that no one else thought anything much about it.
Everyone went back to work as if it was normal or that nothing had happened. I
was a bit annoyed at this, and started to think that maybe I had thought the
situation was much worse than it actually had been. That she wasn’t in that
much pain, that the baby wasn’t in trouble after all.
Still. So this is
what the holiday shopping season is like for us retail workers. We’re tired,
irritated, and unhappy with consumers who stamped through the store as if they
own the place so that we’ve become unfeeling to human needs.
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