A Series of Surprisingly Positive Events

Well. I guess it's been a while. I've been preoccupied.

Mostly, it's that my distant online primary relationship takes up a lot of my time. My young pup would honestly be very happy if he could play D&D 12 hours a day, and while I will admit, I'm getting back into playing and actually having fun with it (despite having gotten really really jaded with weaknesses due to, effectively, group cohesion and social stuff in my first campaign and subsequent attempts), I nevertheless cannot play that much - D&D is awesome (or can be, as is being proven again), but it wears me out if I overexpose myself to it. My mind needs to rest after being blown too hard. I might get dragged into playing for two to three hours almost every day anyway, though, more for his benefit because he's short on other people to play with than mine. To be fair, Pup does have some really neat and shiny campaign ideas. We are currently preparing a two-character-party Inquisitor game fashioned in the style of Van Helsing, or Brothers Grim... or the default setting of a more obscure role-playing system called Dogs of the Vineyard... in which we will take turns DMing adventures, but have both our characters work together all the time... sometimes I get to be the player without much OOC knowledge, and he gets to play as a DMPC, and sometimes the other way around.

Also, I just got a job! Yay! I just got back from a two hour orientation to get acquainted with things... the job is selling cellphone cases and accessories at a mall island shop booth called Speaking Phones. At first I felt kind of disgusting for putting myself so close to anything quite as covered in rhinestones and cheap as the merchandise seemed to be... but having taken a closer look and gotten acquainted with the prices... erm... it doesn't seem to be overpriced cheap glittery garbage after all. The prices are actually pretty damn good compared to other places I've seen, and there's a lot of really swanky gear, including a pair of shades with 2 gigabytes of built in data storage and earphones, for $50... though I'm not sure whether that does something independently or is to be used with a phone or MP3 player or what. The nature of the business even seems to be fairly low on paper or plastic wastage, my supervisor is a pleasant young lady who laughs at my jokes, used up every inch of the notebook that notes for the staff are written in, and is transferring inventory management to a fully electronic format... in this case meaning "write it down and save it in a notepad file if we're running low on anything". The whole thing seems sensibly run and down to earth, and while I keep being told the focus is on selling and up-selling, from watching my supervisor work, it is quite clear I'm not being asked to pressure sell.

I make a distinction between sales and customer service along the following lines: if the customer already knows they want something from me, and I help them find what they were looking for, show options, and happily lead them to make whatever choice they find preferable, it's customer service. If I have to tell the customer they want something, or tell them what to buy, it's sales. By that definition, this falls squarely in the realm of customer service, despite the fact that my title is "sales associate". And that is absolutely fine with me. I may find myself enjoying this job enough to want to stay at it rather than switching to something else, after all. It was... a lot easier than I expected it to be. All that procrastination and fear regarding a job search, and I actually get a job before I considered myself to have started doing it properly... Well. Um. Well. ...Okay? I guess life is easier when you play by the rules people expect you to. Or something.