Sun 10-18

Sunday 10-18 7am

Same old same old. Haven't even had the energy to do any photography. When I get out at night, it's dark, and in the mornings the light is too flat. Besides, the legs need all the rest they can get at this point.

Shane has been browbeating Ryan to actually get some work done. Said he was going to staple the list to his chest for emphasis. Ryan still finds lots of time to stand around and chit chat. He's 17, tall (maybe 6'1"), not bad-looking but has terrible acne. His brother William (whom I replaced) has now gone to auto-tech school in Waxahachie TX and he's thrilled as the brothers "hate" each other. I expect that situation will change as they age.

But if I had inherited Ryan as a worker he'd be fired already. His title is maintenance, and the jobs aren't onerous. But the whole store is filthy except where the customers can see. He'll drag out the mop bucket, for instance, and mop half the store, saying he doesn't have time to do the rest of the floor tonight (it's 5:45 and he's on till 7:30) as he has to stock the coolers (should take about 20 minutes) and fill the soda fountain ice chest (20 minutes) and do the bathrooms (about 40 minutes if he does a good job, which he never does). So he had 105 minutes minus 90, leaving him 15 minutes to fiddlefart around. Mind you, he'd been on since 4:30 but none of those jobs had gotten done. I had dustmopped the entire store in 15 minutes (also one of his jobs but I was bored).

He's talking about joining the army. I think it'd be a big shock after being coddled by his mama all these years. Gossip from Rose and Diane is that Leeann is one of those managers who gets away with lots of stuff that the company would come down hard on if it were a different manager. She's been "written up" several times but nothing ever comes of it. Managers are not supposed to take more than a week of vacation at a time but she's gone for three weeks; won't be back until this coming Friday.

Rose was doing a lot of inventory counting in certain categories yesterday but refused any help -- "oh, thanks, but I'm so used to doing it." Well, yeah, but I'm supposed to be learning this stuff and she gets so stressed out you'd think she'd welcome the help. But she may be one of those people who needs to feel over-burdened and underappreciated so she can moan about it.

Company policy is to check the bathrooms once an hour, and at Picacho Peak we did. Here, it may get done once a day, or not. The store is supposed to be mopped every day, with an occasional lapse. At PK it was, but not here. Ryan also leaves the mop bucket with the dirty water in it sitting in back (mop in it) for days at a time. This is next to the back door, you understand, where it would take two minutes to trundle it out and empty it outside.

I expect the situation to be much different at Alamogordo, first because it's so slow so there's plenty of time to do stuff, and second because Kenn and Carol aren't so jaded yet with the corporate bullshit. We won't have a "maintenance" person so we'll get to pass the jobs around. It's a tiny store, too, about a third the size of this one, so it shouldn't be too much of a hassle.