Ogre put in his two weeks notice today. He was hired by corporate to work at the Goucher Store. “I dunno,” he was saying at work, “This guy is saying he’s going to work me like forty hours a week, so I don’t know if I’ll be able to come by and help out when Greg is on vacation.”
Because forty hours a week is soooo much. Besides, after corporate’s had him for about a week they’ll probably send him right back to us. Joy. Things work out, however, Ogre was scheduled a full slate next week and I picked up a shift and a half from him, as I’ve been neglecting my hours lately and need to, uh, get out of that trend.
This morning, at the other job, the new girl, Sam, let it slip that she is, technically, a midget. It is a bit odd that Gary hired her, as he once insisted he would never hire any girls: “Everybody looks at their asses and tries to sleep with them and no work ever gets done!” But not only did he hire her, he also hired her friend Jo. And, yeah, probably has something to do with their parents being friends of Gary.
(Which also explains why Gary went to every single employee and explained in no uncertain terms how anyone so much as looking at the girls wrong would be chit-chattin’ with the business end of a shotgun).
In any case, Sam mentioned she was technically a midget. And, well, she is rather short. Zap and Gary heard this, looked at each other, and the rest of the afternoon was filled with sacastic remarks concerning the yellow brick road, umpa-loompas, and the hiring practices of midget porn producers.
I almost blew my top with Sam. She’s primarily been on counter, which means she’s taking a lot of phone orders. In two weeks, she has failed to grasp the concept of taking a delivery order to a business. Alternatively, she will forget to get an address, business name, contact name, extension number or suite number. If she remembers that, she forgets to total the order, or neglects to inquire if the customer would like to add a tip to the credit card. Three times – three times! – I’ve written her a cheat-sheet of what information she needs for a delivery time and three times – three times! – it has vanished from sight the next day I work with her. After spending ten minutes running around the Executive Plaza looking for a person who ordered a pizza (Sam didn’t get a phone number, and no business name, but did get a suite number, which is great except Executive Plaza has four buildings and of course, the suite number I was looking for was in the last building I got to). So by the time I got back to the store I was really ready to kill her — throttling her was going to be my number one option, but I was also considering drowning her in the sauce bucket.
In any case, she know has List #4 Of The Very Important Contact Information You Need On Delivery Orders and I’m sure that tomorrow I’ll be writing List #5.
Later in the day, Gary and I were talking about the Jeep Jamboree or whatever it is up in the Poconos in two weeks. He’s taking his Unlimited up. “Need to crawl under it tonight, see what skid-plates I need,” he told me. Yeah, then get ‘em shipped to you express. He signed up for the most advanced trail he can find, and he’s worried they won’t let him participate.
This topic somehow led us into Alpine Sliding. When I was a kid, my family used to go up to Vermont every summer (well, maybe not every summer, but four or five in a row). I think we’d go to Manchester, or Montpelier? The names slip, I admit. It was a small town in a valley, as I recall, and nearby was, what was during the winter months, a hip-hoppin’ ski lodge. During the summer other modes of entertainment were brought to light, namely: alpine sliding. As I recall, you’d take a ski-lift to the top of the mountain, then ride a slide down several different concrete half-tubes.
(God I love Google: this has to have been where we went.)
Discussion then somehow changed to Iceland. Not entirely sure how … anyway, I brought up something Neckbone had mentioned on his blog: the 5th gait of Icelandic horses. When the new girl, Sam, came back for dinner shift, I asked her what the gaits of a horse were. Sam, who claims to have been around horses her entire life, looked at me as if I was speaking Klingon.
“Gait, y’know, gait?”
“Gate?” she repeated, holding her hands together and then opening them slowly and making a squeaking sound.
“No, silly,” Jo chided her. “Gait … speed.”