Jobs and my Self esteem

I’m sitting here writing this and I have to be up for work in three and a half hours. I have the opening shift which begins at 5:30 in the morning and I only am working for five hours today, so my shift ends at 10:30. My job pays well considering it is retail. It’s decent. For part time work.

I hate telling people that I’m a Front End Supervisor at a retailer. I can see that they immediately are starting to judge me. It’s worse when they find out that I have almost seven years of office admin experience, an Associates Degree, two classes from a Bachelors, and my life experience. The next thing that comes out of their mouths is usually some form of “What are you doing here?” and “You’ve got so much potential.”

Yes.

But when you get sick suddenly and have to leave your job and are on SSDI for months, not many places want to hire you back. And everyone else sends you links to retail jobs. Because apparently that is all you are good for now.

Now there is nothing wrong with retail, if you have ambition, a good work ethic, and you are a people person, you can go far. But you better hope you have another gig. Because most jobs pay around $8-10/hr just to step in the door. Supervising pays a bit more, between $9-14/hr. And its not guaranteed to be full time. I work about 20-26 hours a week, my contract says they can schedule me for as little as 10 hours. To continue to get those 20-16 hours a week my schedule has to be open every day. So it’s almost impossible to pick up another job. I can’t even begin to pay my bills on what I make.

It takes a toll when I can’t even pay my basic bills. I feel like I’m a failure even though I know it’s because of the illness that I had to take time from work. I can’t pay for my medication to get better, so I cringe when I ask for more hours, even as I struggle to stay up right. I can see my managers looking at me thinking, “Really? More hours?” And I hate it when I say I’m broke and someone who knows I’m part time has the audacity to talk about budgeting and how they are making it work. Most of them are married. Or still live with their parents. And I have to stop from screaming at them that its not the same thing.

I could finish my last two classes. But I need money for that. The way the university set up their scheduling now means I need to take two classes at a time in order to receive financial aid (loans). I simply cannot do that, so I need to pay out of pocket. I can barely pay my rent, thre is no extra $1,000 for classes.

I apply to job ads weekly. Nothing yet.

All I can do is keep trying. And hope that I’m not causing more damage by not taking my medications. And that my body will recover from being malnourished.

One day.

Just relaxing

The last few days have been busy and stressful. I’ve been writing and also working three 9-hour shifts at work. Usually I work about three days a week and never all together, but a coworker took the weekend off. This is fine normally, but the entire weekend was under staffed and I have a few call outs. Also customers can be out right nasty.

WP and I have been working on our project but there have been some road blocks. We realized we weren’t on the same page with our timelines so now there is a major edit and such happening. Which is fine. Except I’m so stressed out from this weekend that this latest road block is causing me to be more stressed than I should be.

So right now I’m pant-less on my balcony enjoying a cigarette in an attempt to relax. I have eight files to edit and space out to make eight months instead of it only spanning six weeks. I don’t know how I’m going to do this. WP says he’ll fix it but I’m kind of protective over this part of the project.

I feel sleepy but I can’t afford to take a nap when I’ve already slept half the day. It would be nice if I could get paid to write this project. I work 4.5 hours tomorrow beginning at 5:30 in the morning. And I’m already exhausted thinking about it. But this is life.

As always feel free to leave a comment or question. I’ll post more writing later this week.

Retail is a motivator

I worked a closing shift on a holiday weekend today. For those that don’t remember, I work for a home improvement retailer. (The red vest one). It’s a holiday weekend and we are running on a skeleton crew as many of our seasonal temps have gone back to school.

I have no idea why people think they can yell at us. I’m pretty sure I had a customer do something unethical and when we had to figure out why his items which were only sold by a pack (30 individual unit in one sealed pack, no way to piece it out), he started to get loud and saying he wants a manager and why would we sell a half opened box (That was torn open and had half it contents missing — we’re good at marking returns like that and other things down, so no mark down, it didn’t come that way). I ended up giving him a mark down and only charging for the pieces in the box. Then emailed Loss Prevention.

Got yelled at by a customer because his wife’s card wouldn’t go through. She wasn’t in the store so I tried to look up with her information but the system wouldn’t let me and I can’t do anything else. I suggested they call the card company. He blew up at me, yelled at me for suggesting that he may have to call. His wife wasn’t in the store, I’d get fired. Called my manager over, she swipes his card in a huff and it goes through. She walks off. He yells at me more for suggesting it was his fault and it was a system problem.

I need to find a new job.

I’m not lost, I just like taking the long way

Hello.

It’s been a while since I last was blogging. Years actually. I’m really bad at being consistent so I’m not sure how long this attempt will last. My writing partner has abandoned me for a few days and I don’t know what to do with myself, so with my parents encouragement (Hi Mom! Hi Dad!), I’m doing this. While also writing a short epic to teach my writing partner (hereby known as WP) that he shouldn’t leave me alone with the instructions to “do something fun”.

So a little about myself. For those who know me, you can skip this section.

I’m a 30-something who works as a Head Cashier in a home improvement retail store. (The one with the red vests.) I work part time and I write full time. But the writing has never paid. I’m hoping to someday be paid to do it. Right now it’s a hobby.

I have a cat. Her name is Miss Murder Kitty, but in polite company her name is Miss Kitty. She’s cute, but her favorite activities are biting for attention and scratching. She also believes that she is being starved but no such thing is happening.

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WP and I are working on an series. It’ll end up being somewhere between like six and ten books. We’d also love to see it become a television show or a movie. We both work jobs with schedules that vary so writing is hard some days. Our series is mainly a science fiction drama, as there are two of us working in a partnership there’s a little genre crossing but (I may be biased) I think it works. It’s also not for the easily squeamish.

So I guess the big question is what is this blog about? My journey in getting back to writing and being a retail worker in my 30’s. Some cat stories. Some food. Me. I hope you enjoy it!

Also, let me know if you’re the pay for content type. I’ve got an idea for a serial that will tie in with the writing project. I’d love to sell it through a platform like patron. Let me know! It would more or less be the journal of Mia, our main character about two years before our story starts, and would probably go into the first day or so after it starts.