Relief

Current song stuck in my head: 1979 by The Smashing Pumpkins.

Tonight the fireflies were out, hovering around the front yard. When Prime and I got home, I slipped out of the car and walked into the grass, watching them. I spotted one, sitting on a blade of grass and tried to slip the tip of my finger under it, but it tumbled down to a lower blade. Undaunted, I tried again and managed to gently coax it onto the tip of my index finger. So I carefully held it in front of me, staring in amazement at the steady glow coming from its tail, watching it as it repeatedly stretched its wings and giggling when it finally took to the air. Summer has arrived in Wisconsin.

The heat has finally broken around here; the highs reached the 80s, which is far better than what we had earlier in the week. We were hitting the upper 90s to 100 temperature wise and that wasn't counting the humidity. It was stifling, to put it bluntly and most everyone was cranky and irritable thanks to the heat. I myself was dealing with a case of heat exhaustion: I felt dizzy, nauseous and more than a little weak on both Thursday and Friday, which made work difficult. It's pretty hard to stand up straight at a register when your legs are shaking. It was even more difficult to try and patrol the GM self checkouts on the Fourth of July, as it was extremely busy and I was just starting to feel the effects of the heat.

But try telling something like that to the CSMs. Or to one particular CSM.

According to Mary, I wasn't doing enough. I wasn't walking around enough. I wasn't working hard enough. She tells me this after I've helped several customers, helped a customer find his lost cell phone and sold several bags of ice. But since Mary didn't see it, I just didn't do any work.

Wow. Nice to see just how much she values me....

So no, it wasn't a great week. I was stuck in a bad mood for a few days, or at least until Friday. Then I got some interesting news. It came from one of the people greeters who started chatting with me while I was minding the self checks on Friday, covering for a lunch. I told him about how bad Mary had been acting and he agreed. It seems that Mary hasn't been making a lot of friends lately. Or to put it bluntly, she was making a nuisance of herself.

It seems she ordered--not asked but outright ordered--one of the people greeters to clean the front end. So of course, he had to do as he was told and was cleaning in earnest when a manager walked by. The manager, perplexed, asked him what he was doing and why, so the poor guy explained the situation.

The manager wasn't happy and said that what the people greeter was doing was actually the job of maintenance and that he would have a nice, long chat with Mary.

So yes, Mary got in a lot of trouble. She was dragged to the office in back and from what I hear she was given a long talk.

I spotted Mary a grand total of once that day; she wasn't wearing her nametag and certainly didn't have the schedule/flowchart. She didn't look terribly happy, either. Make of that as you will. But the less of her, the better so Friday was a very calm, quiet and rather pleasant day, despite all the heat.

Today was a bit busier but I was on the Grocery self checkouts for the better part of the day and that made things bearable. What can I say, I enjoy being around "my" machines. When they run well and I'm feeling good we make a pretty good team. And since it was cooler today, I actually had an appetite and my energy level was back to its normal, perky level.

I'm off tomorrow so I can relax. A day off to watch the Brewers and hatch a few more Elekid eggs. (Another day, another shiny hunt.) It'll be great to unwind and de-stress after such a long week. No time to start like the present.

--Weasel, "It can only get better."