Walmart: My Personal Hell

During the summers I work at Century Bank, last summer as a random file scanner/switchboard operator/address label sticker/vault of loan documents reorganizer/anything else they could come up with, and this summer as a teller. All teller training is done at the main office of the bank, which has normal banking hours: 9-4 on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday, 9-12 on Wednesday, and 9-5 on Friday (but you have to be there at 8 and generally don't get to leave until 30 minutes after the bank closes). Normally when someone teller trains, they are kept at the main office for a while, just to be sure they're comfortable with it before they are sent to whatever branch they are intended for; however, when I finished my initial training, there was someone already waiting to start theirs, and since there are a limited number of windows, and I hadn't made any huge mistakes so far, I was sent to another branch. This was fine because the branch they sent me to also has normal banking hours. I was there for a few days and liking it well enough when I got the dreaded call: they wanted me to fill in for someone who had called in sick at the Walmart branch. This particular branch is about the size of my bedroom, is located right in the middle of the front wall of Walmart, between the SmartStyle and customer service, and is open from 9-8 Monday through Saturday. The regulars there work in shifts: one group works Monday-Wednesday and the other group works Thursday-Saturday and at the end of every month they switch. Since I was not a regular, that first week, after having worked the normal 8-4 at another branch on Monday, I worked 8-8 on Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, AND Saturday. I had Sunday and Monday (Memorial Day=bank closed!!!) to recuperate and then worked Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.

The last half of the week is when most people get paid so that's when everyone wants to come cash their checks. Since they don't make it to town before the other branches close, they all head to Walmart. At any given moment on Thursday and Friday afternoon and all day Saturday, the line can be backed up all the way past customer service to the bathroom. It is utter chaos. We don't have time to think between transactions. It's all mindless handing out of money, and when it's all over and the bank is finally closed, we are all so stiff and sore and worn out that we are completely worthless.

The beginning of the week is not much better than the end, but for a completely different reason. It is very slow and we are all quite aware of the lengthiness of a 12 hour work day. We sit at our little windows and watch the world go by, literally since everyone in the county goes to Walmart multiple times a week. When I get tired of people watching I just kind of stare out into space. There are 3 light bulbs within my line of sight that flicker on and off constantly all day every day. You can't escape them. When you look down, the flickering reflects on the floor. Wednesday, I watched a bright yellow "Clearance" balloon escape from its string and float up to the ceiling. It was headed for a sky light, but got stuck on a rafter, so it hung out there for a while. Eventually it unstuck itself from the rafter and made it to the skylight. It floated there for the better part of the day, but by late afternoon had apparently tired of sky gazing, so it floated off towards produce.

I think I'm going to die in Walmart.

Give Me A Break...

What goes through physics book editors' heads when writing questions: Maybe if we give the questions witty titles and make them about totally useful things like using European coffee makers in the U.S. the students will forget that alternating current, impedance, capacitance, and all the other rubbish in this book has nothing whatsoever to do with their chosen major. They will be so blown away by our cleverness in titling and efforts to relate to them that they will be motivated to do all of their homework without complaint and maybe even change their majors so that one day they too can be as amazing as we are!

The End

The end of the semester, or at least this semester, is super stressful. I have zero time. Just thought I'd let you know I haven't fallen off the face of the earth for the past month.

Oh, and Tank, this is for you.

Greetings and Salutations

Yesterday morning in the shower I was thinking, probably about something shower related like shampoo or washcloths, and had one of those stream of consciousness things where you start at one thing and end up at something completely different and it makes sense to you at the time, but you can't really explain it to yourself later, and certainly couldn't explain it to anyone else. The thing that I ended up at from shampoo, or whatever it was that began it all, was the difference between the phrases "Good morning" and "Good afternoon." Have you ever noticed (or maybe it's just me) that saying "Good afternoon" seems way more formal than saying "Good morning?" It is perfectly acceptable to wish someone a good morning without seeming overly formal or cold, but wishing someone a good afternoon just seems awkward in everyday conversation. The only times I have ever actually spoken the words "Good afternoon" they were closely followed by "Vincent's. Can I help you?" or "Century Bank." Why is it that switching the word "morning" for "afternoon" suddenly makes a phrase something you only say when answering the phone at your place of employment? Or am I just crazy and people wish each other good afternoons without formality all the time?

Relief

I just found out that a physics quiz originally scheduled for after spring break (so I hadn't been working on the homework to prepare myself yet) that was moved to tomorrow (so I was frantically beginning to work homework problems this afternoon) just got moved back to after spring break, so I find myself in a very good mood this fine day. Much better than the mood this guy is about to be in anyway:

Ridiculousness

Last week, my Natural Hazards class was assigned a project about tornadoes. We were given a state and told to go to this website and download an Excel file of all the tornado data for our given state from 1950-2007. We were then told to plot all the F1 and F2 tornadoes on one map, all the F3, F4, and F5 tornadoes on another map, and on yet another map to plot the track of all tornadoes, regardless of magnitude on the Fujita scale, from 1970-2000. This meant plotting two dots for each tornado since we had to have a touch down and lift off location to get the track.

I lucked up because a friend of mine ended up with the same state as me, so we decided we'd work on it together. It didn't seem like it would be that hard until we sat down to start working on it last night and discovered that there were over 800 F1 tornadoes alone. We split the work to make it a little bit faster, but still spent about 4 1/2 hours sitting at his kitchen table last night putting dots on maps, and still didn't finish all of the maps.

This morning, when we got to class, our lovely teacher informed us that he had decided that 57 years gave too much data and that we should just filter it until we got about 100 tornadoes to work with. Why, oh why, could we not have waited one more day to start on it, or why couldn't he have told us one day sooner that he was making it easier? That's 4 1/2 hours of tornado plotting monotony that I will never get back.

Anti-Snow

So you all saw my snow pictures from last Sunday (and if you didn't, just scroll down a little farther and you will). Well this Sunday it is 78 degrees and I've been wearing shorts all weekend. Isn't Mississippi weather the greatest?