Faith and commercialism.

I mentioned last night that I was working at this Women of Faith thing, that happened today as well and was a fairly grueling experience, I will talk about my day then share some thoughts, jump to the end if you don't want to hear me bragging/complaining about work.

My day started, well, the previous day didn't really end, I was unable to sleep and needed to be at work by six thirty AM, so I pretty much just puttered around all night, stopped at Plaid Pantry for cheap energy drinks to share with selected other who had to be in early as well as the staff at my stands, and arrived at work about twenty minutes early as is my standard practice.

Once there I was informed I was to manage an espresso stand as well as the neighboring Salt and Straw stand; the classy ice cream joint. After the usual flurry of worry about supplies and figuring out where my staff had got to we opened without trouble at eight AM and then did not have more than thirty seconds without a line until about four thirty or so when I was able to close down. We made something in the neighborhood of four hundred fifty lattes, mochas, and iced coffees during that eightish hours, that equates to a little over on per minute, which I feel like is a pretty good speed. Once we really got in the swing of things I had to dial back my participation, having the ice cream stand to keep an eye on too, they "only" sold a couple hundred scoops and required slightly less management.
My job is basically to make sure my CSR's can do theirs with a minimum of interruption, today that meant refilling the water in the espresso machine an making sure I had back up five gallon bottles ready to go when we ran out again(we ran conservatively thirty gallons through that thing today), making sure lids, cups, java jackets, syrups, and so forth were stocked and in easy reach of the CSR's so they did not have to interrupt their flow to pull more out of cupboards, handling every customer complaint(there were few) and last minute, or post last minute change to order(there were many) without interrupting the lineup of cups waiting to be filled. Keep the grinder stocked with beans (we went through perhaps twenty five pounds at my stand. And keeping in communication with the warehouse to make sure anything in danger of running low was restocked before it ran out, we used thirty or forty gallons of milk today, I lost count, and our cooler in the stand only holds about ten, so that was a constant job.
Meanwhile I had to do similar with the ice cream guys, the cups we serve it in stick, so I had to manually separate stacks of cups, they needed a constant supply of water to rinse off ice cream scoops with, and the water at the stand was turned off so I was running with containers back and forth all day. The warehouse ran out of certain flavors of ice cream so when we ran out of those I had to run up to a closed ice cream stand and haul five gallon tubs of ice cream through the crowds to the stand.
Then I also had to make sure my guys all had their legally required breaks, we usually try to send people on breaks during slow periods, but there were none of those today, so basically we all just had to work harder when breaks happened, so I jumped into the mix, I scooped ice cream, ran registers, pulled shots, steamed milk, etc. etc. and I still did not have it as hard as the CSR's who I was managing, at least I got to lean against a wall and take a deep breath now and again, they couldn't and didn't.
Afterwards we all pretty much agreed it was the hardest day at work any of us had experienced, and between the six of us at the stands I had by far the hardest work experience and was also the youngest by a good decade, so we had a pretty good pool of experience to make that judgement.
That's a lot of work for ten bucks or less an hour folks, think of shit like this when you make judgements about service industry workers wanting the minimum wage raised.

Part 2

I of course was not too busy to be judgmental, so I shall share some of those judgements now. Women of Faith is at it's heart a cynically calculated capitalist enterprise, designed to take advantage of thousands of people's very real faith and need to belong and strip them of as much money as possible.
It costs at least one hundred dollars to attend, more if you want better seating, a packed lunch, or a VIP ticket, the organization provides a dozen or so vendors providing memorabilia, devotionals, books, videos, and services that you can use to bring faith, love, or whatever the hell you are looking for into your life, indeed it is hard to see how you can have any of those things without purchasing these items. I was personally stationed next to a stand offering to "find your child" it didn't actually appear to be a lost offspring location service, perhaps a program to visualize potential children? Convert them? Could the child be a metaphor? I still have no idea and was unable to ask, but there were DVDs for sale to those who decided to find out.

Speaking of confusing, the name of the event baffled me and still does, Women of Faith, Loved: The Farewell Tour, no where could I find anyone who could tell me what they were saying farewell to, one of my supervisors suggested that maybe it is the farewell tour because God is dead, which is hilarious so I am tentatively going with that.

In the end though I feel like the business my stand did is rally indicative of the priorities of a large portion of the attendees, they paid over a hundred bucks to be there, some of them traveled from all over the country to see these speakers and hear their stories(for some reason) Yet when it comes down to it rather than sit in the arena and listen, hundreds, perhaps thousands of them, chose to wait thirty minutes or more in line to get coffee
I guess I know what their god really is.