40 Hours and a Mule

Boy! This 40 hour-a-week thing really cuts into your leisure time! How in the Hell did I do this for so long. At least it feels like it does. Brian points out that I probably have more leisure time as a working stiff than I did as a grad student. That may very well be true. So maybe it's the work schedule that jumps around. You see, it works like this ...

There are basically three shifts at the wineshop. There's 9 - 5, where you open the store and that means going through the "setting up the store for the day"/"checking the sales from the night before" rituals. There's 10-6 -- the store's been open for a half an hour when you start, and you do a basic "day shift" or 12-8 (1-9 on Fridays) when you close the store and go through another set of rituals. Robert, the owner and scheduler, has had me at different shifts so I could learn different things. Today, I opened for the first time solo. It went well ... I think. No major or minor mistakes that anyone has discovered.

And it's getting easier physically ... only last week I was hurting. Having gotten used to existence in the wineshop where I hung around the register (where the chairs are), I broke out and spent more time restocking the beer and wine rooms. Owwwwwww! The beer room is the worser. In the wine room, there's a computer with a chair at it for moments of rest while you look up stuff. The beer room is like King Street in Charleston, SC ... lots of reason to be there, no place to sit. It's just you, the room, and stuff to lift and shift, which half the time is full cases of beer.

Oops ... must go watch TV with Brian.