every moment

2:34 PM 9/26/10

Today I'm at home blogging about work instead of working. I'll be going to McDonald's, but I couldn't bring myself to go to Weis this morning. I might lose my job there. On Saturday, when I went in and Sam asked me if I wanted to go home, and I said yes, I told her, 'This is making a long story really, really short, but someone I care about was threatening to hurt himself.' I explained this as part of what's been going on the last couple weeks.

It's been harder and harder for me to go to work there. First, without Curtis there, I have nothing to look forward to. Then, we've lost lots of people in the deli, and one of our managers was moved to another store, and we got a new manager. This new manager is as bad as a manager I worked with at the Nittany Mall McDonald's. She is a sweet, nice person - I can see her as a human being - but as a manager, she's a lunatic.

I am afraid to cross her path. I am afraid to be seen by her. Anytime she even *SEES* me, she immediately tells me to quit doing whatever I'm doing, and do some other random, trivial thing instead. It doesn't matter what I'm doing. It doesn't matter if I'm doing something that she herself told me to do five minutes ago. Nothing matters. If she sees me, she tells me to do something random and insane. And the thing is, I like her. I really do. But I can't work with her as my manager. She is as bad as Linda who I worked with at McD. Linda did the same thing. Drop what you're doing, and come over here and do this instead. You can't even work on the same project for five minutes before she changes what you're doing to something else.

An example. We had piles and piles and piles of cardboard. SOMEBODY has to take it out. Also, the trash wasn't being taken out either. It was all piling up in the back room of the deli. Somebody had to take it out, but nobody was doing it. I had a few minutes left before I had to leave. I wanted to do the type of project where it wouldn't matter if I had to leave before it was finished. Garbage was the perfect project to do. I could do *some* of it, and every little bit would help. So I started taking out the cardboard.

But I wasn't careful enough to avoid being seen. I started pulling the cart full of cardboard out the door and she walked in and saw me. 'No, don't take the cardboard out now! We can get somebody else to do that. I want you to make hoagies.' I had like 20 minutes left, no time to get into a big hoagie-making project. 'How many?' I said. 'I want you to make four hoagies.' I went over to the hoagie table and saw that somebody had already starting making four hoagies, and left them abandoned there. I asked Nancy if she did them. 'No, they're not mine,' Nancy said. I looked at them and said, 'We don't have any peppered ham.' But then I realized, we did have peppered ham, but not Capicola. Okay, so I need to go slice Capicola ham, in the twenty minutes before I leave, so I can finish four hoagies. The manager was opening the cooler doors and looking to see if we had any other hoagie meats sliced. We didn't. There was a tiny bit left in each container, not enough. If I went up to the front and started slicing meats in the twenty minutes before leaving, she would tell me, 'Nicole, help this customer,' because I would be up at the front of the deli (the busiest place) slicing meats, where the customers could see me. So I would end up slicing meats for the customers, because I was up there, instead of slicing meats for hoagies. That is the type of insanity that I am doing, every day. I can't do ANYTHING without being dragged away to do something else. ... So I quietly went back to my cardboard cart and finished pulling it out the door and back to the baler.

Today when I got up, I had that exhausted feeling again. If Curtis was at work, I would have been like, "oh well, I'm exhausted, but I have something to look forward to." So I might have tried to go in. I cherished every moment that I spent with him. But I couldn't look forward to seeing him. And I knew there would be the insanity of being dragged from one random task to another. And maybe I really did have a cold, too, because there was a cold sore inside my lip, and I really did feel exhausted and painful.

There was this despair of not caring that much whether I lost my job or not. I would lose some familiar faces. I don't like to be separated from familiar faces in my social environment. I've tried so hard not to lose my jobs anymore. McDonald's is the job I love the most, and I've been working for them since 2005, with a period of about a year when I was fired, and then I went back, but went to a different store. That's the job that feels most like 'me.' It fits me the best. (It used to be much, much better back in the days when the stores were owned by a private franchise owner. Also, it just so happens that I am now working at the crappiest store in town - all the other stores are much better. But I still love this job in spite of all that.)

But I don't really enjoy the work I do at Weis. It's not the right type of work for a chaos-loving SP Artisan personality type. (It's the wrong kind of chaos.) Not only that, but there are a lot of things that just don't work right. It's hard to explain. We never have anything we need. We never have our supplies. We never have the tools we need. Every time I want to make anything, I never know whether I'll have meats sliced or not, and I never know if I'll have all the ingredients I need to make salads, or anything. Broken equipment sits there for MONTHS and doesn't get fixed. And the store does crazy things like, for instance, they got rid of this big cooler in the front of the deli - it was a bunch of refrigerated shelves where the deli meats used to sit - and they told us that they got rid of it because it was 'an eyesore' to the customers - but in reality, 'the voices' told me they probably sold it for cash because the business is mostly bankrupt, and I think that's probably the truth. Since that refrigerated shelf was taken away, we've had to run to the back every time we need to get a new piece of meat to slice. It makes it hard to serve the customers when you're always running to the back room for things. And we have no room in that back room cooler anymore because all the meats are back there now, so it's a mess. And the new manager rearranged everything, but the rearrangement was pointless and made everything harder to find, not easier.

A lot of the 'familiar faces' are gone from there anyway. There are people who I recognize, and sometimes, I don't even remember their names, because I never talk to them. But I know their faces. Some of them are long-timers who've been there for many years, people who were there when I started in 2007. (I can't believe that's when I started there. Three years.) But even some of those people are gone. And the other people have a high rate of turnover - they're ALWAYS changing faces. People come in and stay for a couple of weeks, then leave. (Or people like Curtis stay for a year and a few months and then get ripped away from me - I've been describing the way I feel lately as 'having my heart ripped out of my chest.')

I'm going to *TRY* to talk to the store manager and negotiate something because of all my calling off sick incidents lately. I've told them I'm having problems and I told them I don't want to quit my job completely, I just want to drastically cut back my hours. This was supposed to be the first week of having fewer hours, but I couldn't make it, it didn't come soon enough. I couldn't wait three weeks or however long it was. I started cutting my own hours before it was official, because I just couldn't make it.

(Someone I love was threatening to hurt himself. I told that to Sam, and that was the truth. I told her, that was making a long story really, really short, but it was the truth. It's not the whole story - I didn't tell her that I loved someone who worked in another department, and you know who this person was, and now that he's gone, I don't care about going to work. And you might not understand how I love him, or how much I love him, or what I would do for him, or what I would give to him, and you might not understand why I think that 'signing up for the army' is the same as 'making a suicide threat,' and you might not take it seriously if I told you that this threat made me not care about anything but that, so that I could hardly even care about showing up for work.)

***

So, this is more about Curtis. I was with him for over a year, a little less than a year and a half. I'm not sure exactly when he started, but it was early in the summer of 2009. Maybe May or June of 2009? So, he left in late August or early September 2010 - I don't have the exact date of the last time I saw him. I suppose I could piece it together if I looked at the dates on my frantic emails to his girlfriend. That was a little over a year, a year and a few months. During that time he was all that I looked forward to. I was thinking to myself that he made my life worth living for over a year. That would be worth, like, thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars, if I put a dollar value on it. I can't pay it back all at once. Deeply indebted and grateful. I enjoyed almost every moment that I spent near him, even though there were a few painful moments. Every moment that he was nearby, when I could look up and see him, when I could see that he was there across the room, even if I couldn't go talk to him or be close to him. Every moment of every conversation we had. Every time I touched him or he touched me. Every time I looked in his eyes. I don't want that to end. I can't stop loving him.