5 days in retail

   I've been working at the yoga studio for eight months and it’s been great. Monotonous, repetitive, tedious but great.

Bored but happy.

   I was making the province-approved minimum wage at half the hours an adult works per week. The job was cushy but following the imposed budget was not.

   Broke and boozeless, I applied to dozens of jobs online but it seems my on-paper skills are worth nothing and all I've got on my side is the keen ability to shmooze.

   In a fit of desperation and/or mania, I applied to a Canadian outlet retail store that caters to vapid young adult women and really young mothers and their kids. It's like someone invented everything I can't stand and made me sell clothes to it. Banter and jocularity are not appreciated like they are in more laid-back workplaces.

   My first shift was a four-hour shift and I came home and cried. No, I almost made it home; I sobbed on my way home without any sense of dignity or self-awareness. And, because they don't let you wear supportive (read: ugly) shoes at this store my feet were giant stumps of elephant-man pain from supporting my dumb body-weight in flats.

   An nonagenarian-lady came in to shop for shoes on my fourth day. Old ladies love me and I was thrilled to talk to someone whose physical age is so close to my emotional age. I enthusiastically began to help her in her search for a pair of shoes

   She later yelled at me for having red hair.

   While shopping, practice common sense (sēnsus commūnis) and courtesy (kur-tuh-see). Retail people are supposed to help you find stuff and with product knowledge but not be your servant. Put things back where you found them, mind your offspring, and use your god damn manners.

Also, don't switch tags to get a deal. Which decade do you live in where everything isn't catalogued on a computer?

   On my fifth and final day, I entered the sales floor with a quiet peace in my heart. I robotically unpacked pashminas with a dreamy (some might say creepy) smile on my face. I was kneeling to reach the bottom scarf-hangers when the assistant manager came over to tell me not to sit while working. She was tapping her toes and had her arms folded and looked the way humans look when they're assholey. I was too far-gone to care.

and I waited. My lunch break came at 2:30pm and I left. I walked home, turned off my cell phone, took off my work clothes, put on my pajamas, and never went back.

Like an adult.

February - New Beginnings

   Hello there faithful Ottawa This Weekend readers. It's been awhile, eh? Where have you been getting your weekend news? You've been over at Apartment 613, haven't you? HAVEN'T YOU? It's been three months since the last post; who could blame you for straying?

   The past 91 days haven't even been particularly busy.

   In early December, I worked at a car dealership for seven days calling customers to let them know that their vehicle had been recalled:

   For seven days.

   By day three, I would sit down to make these calls, affix the incredibly sexy and not humiliating at all headset to my face-head area, and think of all the different ways I could get out of working for them:

   On a Tuesday, I called my representative and said I wouldn't be returning to that job and that I was sorry for being such a flake; good luck in the future, lady.

   I spent 45 minutes on the phone trying to explain why I didn't want to work there anymore. The list of reasons included:

• “it's making me sad”
• “I feel empty when I'm there”
• “I think I'm incapable of doing the job correctly”
• “my heart hurts when I think about going back”

  

... to my employment-representative. I'm an idiot.

   The good thing I did take away from my time there is some solid information about the man who hit me in the ass with his car in 2011 (just kidding, if that's illegal).

Around the same time, a wish of mine came true: 

   #TeamMiggie is together at last. Here's a post from PugBurger about her introduction/dynamic. She sleeps next to me now which is HEART EXPLODINGLY nice. 

   Biggie hates her guts :

   To fill my weekends and to leave this fur-covered hell I call a home I've started working at a yoga centre. I love it there. Beautiful people in yoga pants, walking around without shoes on, and (as with any customer service job) there's always a handful of weirdos — it's pretty perfect.

   However, it is a part-time gig so I've been begging different retail places and restaurants to give me a job to no avail. I don't know why the retail stores are being so uppity (I'm a motherfucking customer service guru) but I feel like the restaurants can just tell that I'm a taste-testing plate-dropper. How do they know? I can't promise that I won't steal someone's french-fry but I can promise to try really hard not to drop anything. Restaurants aren't in the game of chances, are they?

   So I've been Googling how to sell worn-underwear online. It seems the worn-underwear game is for people who don't quit their steady employment because their hearts hurt from lack of job-love.

It's a cold, competitive scene in the underthings-selling game; you really have to have a mind for marketing — plus, I call them 'underthings'.

   This has all lead me back to Ottawa This Weekend. I love it here and I've been feeling guilty about my lack of diligence in updating. Ottawa This Weekend is going to be done a little differently from now on, though. The general talk-around-town is that, with the exception of my father/number 1 fan (who lives 500 km outside of Ottawa), nobody likes to read about the upcoming events. Even though they're hilarious and I put a lot of consideration and time into how best you'd like to read about upcoming events, you ungrateful pack of swines, they are tedious and not nearly as much fun to write as the reviews. Ottawa This Weekend will, from now on, be stories, reviews, and memories from around Ottawa (and maybe a few that aren't about/from Ottawa at all). I'm super excited about it, you're super excited about it, and I'm sorry, Dad.