Work stuff

Going off to the coast for a couple days starting tomorrow, so I may not post until Sunday.

One of my bosses called and asked me to work today, I said no, I am a helpful guy but I had already put in about five or six hours more than I had expected to the previous day and I was tired, still am. Every day is a crisis over there, see, the manager at the store I spend two days a week at is dealing with some pretty sever mental crisis and is having a huge problem finding the meds that work for him, which means he has crippling panic attacks that mean he can't actually function when they hit, and I sympathize, I really do, but if it's not that it is someone else calling in sick, or walking off a shift because they felt like someone wasn't treating them as gently as they deserved. It's exhausting and the job is hard enough already.

Yesterday sucked particularly because we were doing a special, something the owner had put a lot of effort into arranging and advertising for, the previous week was the start of it and it went well, so we all expected that it would be significantly more popular now that people know it exists, well it was but the manager I mentioned above wasn't in because of the aforementioned meds issue, and the owner wasn't in because... I don't know? So that left me to run the store for twelve+ hours without any other management backup, my employees, while good, were primarily under twenty one. Oh did I mention the special was $1.00 beers? And we had new brews donated by various breweries that we featured this week? ALSO I DON"T FUCKING DRINK.

The point is I wasn't set up for success, we did good though, shitloads of sales, I BS'd my way through the beer descriptions after a brief chat with one of the brewery reps and some judicious web searching, but we were still understaffed and it showed, the store was a wreck, which was embarrassing to me in general and specifically because a friend showed up with his family to check the place out and we did not have our best foot forward, now my friends might cut me some slack but strangers probably won't.

We did our best, and the store was more or less in shape by the time we left... at 12:30AM. But there was a lot to do and I imagine the morning folks were not happy with me at all, but screw it.

I tell this story not to brag about how great I am, though I am proud of my work for some reason. But rather to explain why today I chose to let them deal with the problems without me. I am particularly annoyed with the owner not coming in yesterday, to my mind, and I feel like my experience allows me to have an opinion here, if you are the owner that means the buck stops with you, if your manager calls in and you can't get a replacement then you get to fill in, if you create a special event that you know will be busy and are hoping to rely on to bring in repeat customers, you show the hell up for the damn thing and work it, especially when at least one person has called out already.

Dude's busy, I get it, but for those of us on the ground it really doesn't feel like we have support is what I am saying.

I don't have it all bad, like I said, I survived and am going on vacation, I am paid well by the standards of the industry and have minimal fear of being randomly fired for no reason. But this whole thing yesterday just offends my sense of professionalism even though for the hundreds of customers who showed up it didn't seem to bother them.