fuck this job.com

Isn't it fun when someone you've never seen before stops by to let you know how many things you've been doing wrong for years, and furthermore, how to do them? Well, if you're anything like the majority of the teachers that I deal with every day as a school's tech monkey, then you might as well go ahead and brace yourself for the happies, because I'm that someone.

Good evening. I don't imagine I have many readers left after my prolonged absense, so please allow my history to speak for me. That's what I have here. A history. Read on, old readers and new, for a brief breakdown. Hey, that has two meanings!

I've said before that I'm a technology parapro for my area's Board of Education. The bulk of the job involves swapping out monitors with inexplicably missing connector pins and generally plugging things in for people who can't do so for themselves. Armed with a paycheck somewhat unfit for even this less-than-gargantuan feat, I also (equally inexplicably) do web design for said institution.

Let it be known that I recieve in compensation... for both of these tasks together... roughly a third of what a web designer alone recieves. That monetary issue is completely and unequivocally not what this blog is about. It's about me casting off some of the crystallized acid building up in my brain and arranging it into text for you, my readers, to gaze upon in wonder of what has me so worked up all over again.

Teaching is not a task to be undertaken lightly. I understand this. I have enormous respect for those stalwart individuals who so often delve into the realms of science and math so rarely tread upon by those outside of the classrooms in which they work. I mean... how many of you can still recite the atomic number of any particular noble gas without referring to the chart?

This is it. The countdown to freedom from the chains of cashier... dom... has finally reached zero. This one goes out to everyone who has read and appreciated my work on this blog. This will probably be my last post about cashiering, and I want to go out in the same fashion by which I came in... by offering you a glimpse into that mystifyingly evasive realm that is "shit that I don't need from you."

I emailed my boss-to-be today to check in on the status of my job, because I was told that there's a possibility that it will start sooner than the penciled-in date of July 1st.

Indeed, it will start sooner. Nearly a month sooner. June 6th is the day, and that means... drumroll please...

The clock keeps on racing toward July 1st, 2005... the date on which I finally throw down the old nametag and hang up my kakhis one last time.

As I sit and write what I hope to be one of my final blogs, I ponder how this site has bled over into my real life.

My days are numbered. That is... my days of being a cashier. I can already feel the breeze of this chapter's final page turning over.

Today I recieved confirmation that a paraprofessional position which I've been persuing is going to be mine. Only a criminal background check stands in my way. All of my greatest crimes have been committed in my mind, and I've never been arrested for any of those, so there should be smooth sailing out of the land of blue collars (and green collards) and into the land of "here's some money for paying bills."

It's been a long, long time.

For those of you who don't know me, I'm a cashier from Georgia.

For those of you who do know me... hi. I'm a degree holder as of December, and the job hunt is ongoing.

As it turns out, the "do not use these phrases" rants are my favorite type to write... probably because "these phrases" are my greatest source of frustration... so I'm going to ease back into the blogging swing by dedicating an entire post to "those phrases" which you should never, ever use in the grocery store.

"You guys don't even know what work is."

Yeah, I've had customers say that to me. Customers who've heard me and fellow grocery store scrubs commiserating over our schedules and workload and such.

What's that you say? The pressures of being a preppy little suburban piece of shit got you down? Need to drown your sorrows in a shimmering pool of cold, refreshing brain poison?

If that "motherfucker of a professor who's so old he can't remember what it's like to have a real life anymore" has given you so much Biology 101 homework that you can't remember which way to turn your baseball cap -- or maybe you just can't say "it's Monday" until you've acted like a rampaging nimrod in public at least three times, then this is the right place for you. Read on, and I will divulge to you the ins and outs of purchasing alchohol underage.

Once upon a time, there was a man. This man worked at a grocery store, and he was a manager. Many years passed under the shadow of his legendary iron fist, and his name is now spoken only in hushed whispers. The time came for this man to leave his management position and pass it along to his second-in-command, a man known to you and I as "Mr. Boss." Where did that mythical manager go? What became of him? Are there any left who know?

Actually, pretty much everyone knows. He's the district manager now.

Today's post will serve as a "Guide to Life" for supermarket customers. My goal here is to smooth over a few rough spots that many people seem to have in common. If you find an item in this list that you feel is descriptive of your behavior, now would be a good time to remedy said behavior before the eventuality that you become my customer and I subsequently discover the location of your residence.

It's those little things in life that really wear away at my drive. When a person does something which is blatantly stupid, rude, arrogant, or all of the above, it's easy for me to roll my eyes, shrug my shoulders, and write the event off as the behavior of an individual bearing negative brain weight. Constant inconsiderate behavior from "normal" people, however... this truly erodes my joie de vivre, which is already on the critical list. The consumer-driven environment, I am coming to believe, has an acidic atmoshere which eats away what was once human, leaving only a hard, black shell of cynicism. It consumes my optimism and good will like a cancer of the soul, and the carcinogenic agent called "customer" remains none the wiser to my plight... it simply feeds the fuel with no more malice than a radioactive wave.

In other words, please think about what the fuck you're doing.

Here's a fun little exercise in the language that takes place between bosses and employees. The example provided is an actual conversation that took place over the phone between my boss and myself on the very morning of this writing.

The format is simple, but I'll explain it just in case one of you happens to be a customer of mine and you therefore don't know the difference between a shoelace and a shotgun, or which one to hang yourself with. The actual words will appear in bolds, and the meaning of the phrase will follow in italics (customers: those are the crooked letters).

If you happen to be my boss, let's hope you have a sense of humor about yourself.