Day 3 - How Much for a Screw?

I work part-time at a large home improvement store. I suppose you can call it work, but I mainly just stand around and occasionally ring up a customer’s purchases. Okay, so we are a fairly busy store, but it is not like I’m performing rocket surgery here. I greet, I scan, I thank.

There are worse jobs out there.

I needed this part-time job to help with the financial woes I’d burdened myself with over the past…well, shit, lifetime of excessive spending. The pay is good and I am able to schedule around my full-time job. Also, the dress code is relaxed enough that I can get away with wearing shorts, t-shirt, and a ball cap. Actually, that’s a big thing. Especially when I find myself working the outside registers (my favorite location), in the heat and humidity of an Iowa summer.

The hardest part of the job is quickly finding the prices of the loose screws and fasteners that customers throw on the counter without any regard to item numbers. Come on folks, that’s why we have those nifty bags and pens for marking such things down.

However, all is not roses and ice cream. The people in charge are often the source of all my troubles with the job. As easy as I may think it to be to respect someone’s scheduled availability, I don’t think there’s been but a few weeks in the 6 months I’ve worked there that my schedule actually matched my availability. Seriously, I know the scheduling is all done on the computer, so how hard is it to work me only when I say I’m available? I know it’s not a huge deal, usually a half-hour or hour difference, but still. It’s the principle of the thing.

And while I’m ranting, if you schedule a person until a certain time, there is no reasonable excuse to keep them late. More often than not, the head cashier in charge simply forgets to send in the replacement cashier so that I can go home on time. Happens easily once a week.

Also – and this may upset some people – why do I have to do all the work that the women supposedly cannot do? I mean, in the job description it states that an employee may have to lift and handle things weighing 40+ lbs. All cashiers are responsible for pushing in carts from the lot. All cashiers are responsible for helping in other departments when it is slow at the front end. And yet…it’s always me. It’s not even always because everyone else working that shift is a woman, most of the time it’s me because I will do the work and I won’t complain, whine, or slack ass.

Sometimes it just doesn’t pay to be a responsible, efficient, conscientious worker. Or at least it doesn’t pay any extra.

Complaints and all, there’s probably not a better part-time job out there for me. It’s been good for me to get out of the house, especially in the summer when I have so much time off, to talk with people other than myself, even if it is superficial small talk. At least I’m out there, doing something, making money, part of the world.