I <3 my job.

That being said. (see title) I would like to tell my whole two possibly three readers about my job. On a busy day, a weekend perhaps, I wait on customers. I size them for skis and figure out the appropriate pressure setting for their ski bindings. I also select snowboards for customers and adjust the binding settings and give brief instuction on how the snowboard binding works. Other tasks include helping the not-so-rare idiot of a customer fit or tighten their boots. This job for the last 3 seasons and this 4th season has provided me with a whole new appreciation for human stupidity. To say the least. And middle aged women for the record, are a PAIN IN THE ASS when it comes to ski boots. Note : the only customer I've actually helped today was a middle aged women with her boots. I swear if nothing else I will never half a calf three times the size of my ankle and then decide to go skiing. It will never happen.

Now Seven Springs operates one of the largest rental shops on the east coast... both in product and in volume. On weekends we're people movers, not technicians. However these days due to school kids having sports and what-not I work an average of one day per weekend. Most of my hours are put in during the week. Which means a)less tips, i used to be the highest tipped rental employee... not so much now. b)No mother fucking customers. Which means we have essentially nothing to do. So to substitute the fact that we have no real job purpose the following tasks are designated to us at random. And they are....

--- spraying the boots with disinfectant the CORRECT way
--- putting the skis in different forms of numerical order
--- rearranging the arrangement of the skis
--- organizing the highpro pit
--- various tuning tasks

The only truly useful thoughts in this list are the disinfecting of boots, which never gets down properly anyway, and the various tuning tasks which need desperately done. But depsite the lack of sharp edges or functional bases, or even waxed bases on the skis and boards... i'm going to run you through what was designated for me to do today.

I began my day by grabbing a mop and assist in the morning cleaning of the floors. We do this every morning and every night, it's stupid to do it both times so we slack off horribly in the morning as long as night shift did their job. Which usually, they do. So we hurry through that... then there's a slight 15 to 20 minutes where we can get away with doing absolutely nothing. Then I spray boots for roughly an hour and a half. During which I called Rob and woke him up, as well as called Ashlee and just left her a voicemail generally harassing her into calling me back. But my day was brighter for a little while during the mentioned tasks. I decide it is high time for a cigarette. I go out to the hall and proceed. I'm back to spraying boots for about ten minutes when Joey Dix shows up on the scene and hands me two paint markers and announces that he's to give these to me. Assuming this means something needs numbered or renumbered I go to find out EXACTLY what it is that Terry needs done (terry = supervisor). So all he really does is gives me a rough idea of what's going on and hands me a pen knife. I spent the remainding three or so hours of my shift scraping the size numbers off boots and writing a new one on them so we don't have to make up fantastical lies to our customers to explain why we don't really have whole size boots. It's far easier for them to accept the fact that we don't have half sizes that us saying we don't have whole sizes... if you can imagine. But yes, in fact, they are all half sizes. I know, I know, it was stupid. But so is the shop manager.

After 5 hours of this nonsense I decided that I was going to shoot something or someone if I kept going like this... so I asked to go home and I was told NO originally. No one has done anything except busy work all day but for some reason he didn't want to send me... after I know I had to have looked like someone had torn my heart into 3,000 pieces he rethought things and said... yeah okay, you can go. THANK FUCKING GOD.

Now remember though, depsite the fussing... I <3 my job.

Because it's not Burger King, it's not Starbucks, it's not washing dishes. And hey, if nothing else it's my industry, I'm suited for it, I know it backwards and forwards... it's a job I actually belong in. imagine that.