Today's rambling: At a dead end
Written on August 12, 2001 at 1:38 a.m.
while feeling a bit

I have been stealing Jam's blank space comments! BWA HA HA! No, but seriously, I didn't mean to be a copycat, I just need closure to my entries, and sometimes my fried brain can only think of recycling stuff! :oP Hehehehe....how about 'once blank space'? Or 'filled space'? ;o)

Yeah. That was my moment of cheerfulness. Now I'm going to be ranty and bitchy and just generally very emotional-ish. Because I'm feeling rather high-strung!

Woke up this morning for work, and I could have seriously just started crying. I can't stand this place, and no one seems to understand me! I mean, Mum keeps saying, "Yeah, I hate it too," but I just don't think she understands how MUCH I abhor this job! It depresses me to think that I have to go there for 6-8 hours a day, even though before, I thought I was only going to be working weekends!

I walked into the bathroom, looked at my antihistitabs-which-contain-amphetamines, and thought "Y'know, if I DID take maybe 3 of them or something, they might actually work like 'uppers', and I'd be able to get through work."

If you don't know me, then you might not see anything too terribly serious in that thought. But I don't do drugs. I've never even CONTEMPLATED it before. And now I'm seriously thinking about taking over-the-counter pills and seeing if they work like illegal drugs just to get me through the day? I tried telling Mum that, too, and I think she just took it as me joking. Believe me, if I'd known how many of those little bitty pills I could take without serious harm coming to me, I would have done so. I needed to, and that scares the hell out of me.

How can a JOB make a person feel so trapped?

So then I walked into work, and as usual no one knew what I was supposed to be doing. There were already 2 cake decorators scheduled (Karen and Joanne), but I thought that I had been scheduled to help as well. Karen came in first and was showing me different basic things like product rotation, blah blah blah, and then Joanne came in. She gave this little disbelieving laugh-ish thing and said, "Uh, today isn't the best day to be teaching her!" I've never met this woman before, so I felt like saying, "Yeah, nice to meet you, too!" Again, I just felt tears well up...I don't even know why I've been so emotional!

Anyway, Manager John came in a bit later, and Joanne went up and whined to him, so he told me that I'd been scheduled to help Mare. Fine, I wanted to help her anyway, since she was working by herself (Debbie had surgery and will be out for 2 weeks or something). But then he started telling me about how he was going to be able to give me lots of hours during the week, and I was like, "Um, well you told me before that you only had availability on weekends for my hours, so I got a job at a nearby stable, and that's starting at the end of August."

Now, let me just say that when he first told me about the weekend thing, he'd made it sound like I would only be able to work weekends (with my hours), period. He didn't specify that it was only this week, or that it would only be for a short period of time. But today he gets this attitude like I've made some grievous error, and says, "I only meant last week!" And then apparently he went over to Mum and got on HER case!

So I don't know what the hell I'm going to be doing. I'm working at the stables, I don't care what he says. I've already got it arranged (for the most part, anyway), and I'm not going to back out on Sharon just because His PansyAss didn't specify! What, am I expected to lay around and wait for him to hand out scraps?

As I've said before, this store has absolutely NO idea what in the fairying forest (to use a t10k phrase) it's doing. Even today, when I was just thrown into doing setup work, they didn't give me a list of things to do or anything! So I'd finish up something, and then just stand around because I obviously didn't know what was expected of me! And yet I felt bad for just standing there!

My god, I HATE THIS PLACE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I feel like I'm at a dead end. Mum won't let me quit, because we need the money. I can't bloody drive, so I can't find a job that might actually be WORTHWHILE, and I'm just STUCK with this place!

Oh! Okay, and then today as Mum and I were leaving. John comes out and says, "I got a one-week notice from a guy in Prepared Foods," and I made this face that clearly said "Yuck."

"What?" says he. "It's easy work!"

Yeah, it's easy...and that's why I got so sick of it in the first place! You can only do the same darn thing so many times before it starts boring you! I need challenges! That's how you keep things exciting!

But anyway, all I told him was that I hated Prepared Foods. And he responded with, "When we talked, you told me you knew how to do all the departments back there."

"I do," I told him, my frustration mounting (which is what caused me to say this next bit), "which is why I quit, because I hated it." And he just said 'okay' and walked away. *bites her thumb at him*

Now, this is the sort of thing that's also been annoying me from the start. From Day 1, he has been misconstruing things that I've said. When I first talked to him back in...June, was it? I dunno...Anyway, when I first talked to him, I said that the other managers had said they'd get me into cake decorating, but that they never did. So on my first day, he threw me into cake decorating--I was supposed to have been there by myself, though thankfully Karen was there part of the day--and this was all because he thought that I'd told him that I had cake-decorating experience!!! I never said that! I'm not stupid! I know some people like to make up lies to make themselves sound better, but that's one lie that would lead nowhere but trouble! And I'm not that sort of person anyway!

He's twisted several other things around, too, and I'm just sick of it. And that day when I talked to him? I told him I wanted to do bakery. I never said anything about doing the rest of the departments. I said I'd had experience in all of them, but I said that I wanted to work in the bakery. And now he thinks he's going to shove me over in the other half of the food court, where the smell of overused grease clings to my skin every day? No. Sorry.

And then, of course, we come to the whole 'weekend availability' thing. I don't know what he thinks he's going to do with me. I'm just fed up with it all, and this was only my third day back! I swear, I won't be able to take much more of this...if the managers actually KNEW what they were doing, that would be one thing, but it's like they're chickens who've just had their heads chopped off (something I might like to do, but I digress); they just run around aimlessly, doing nothing and getting angry at people...

I can't even really talk about all this with Mum, because I think the strain is bearing down on her, too. Tonight when she went to bed, she was obviously troubled about something, but I couldn't ask her what! Most likely, she'd start yelling at me for not doing anything around the house, which would put me in a bad mood...But I feel like I can't tell her how depressed and desperate I'm feeling, because it'll only make her feel worse, and I know she's feeling trapped as well.

I need a psychiatrist. Not because I'm crazy, but because I need someone to talk to. Someone who's unbiased and who can just listen to me cry and complain, and maybe even help me. I don't feel like even my friends can help me with this...it just feels like I'm alone, and as much as I usually like to be alone, this is one kind of alone that I don't like at all. It's almost claustrophobic.

As for tomorrow and another day of work...I'd better keep those pills far away from me.