Catching up: The Job

Another long gap. I spend too long away from this thing.

For the last half a year or so I have been working nights 2-3 shifts a week stocking shelves at a local grocery store. It's been a great workout. The pay's alright, and has allowed me to not worry about it while acquiring a number of nice new things, including replacing my phone. Most of my coworkers are pretty nice and I found after a while I was getting along with them nicely, but throughout it my fear of the apparent scorn of my immediate supervisor never completely went away.

It seemed he glared at me whenever he looked at me, and seemed he wished he was doing something else whenever he spoke. I heard variously from other co-workers that he's just like that, but recently I've observed him speaking to some of my co-workers in ways that are damn near respectful... far closer to it than he ever spoke to me so far as I can recall.

It became intolerable for me, and eventually I reached out to a bunch of people around me for advice, and one part of that advice was to talk to the store manager, who would likely seek to accommodate my moving positions in order to keep me there. I am, I suppose, possibly considered a good employee. Just not, it seems, by my immediate supervisor.

How that panned out is that I took the commute across town and back on a day my manager had suggested, and called en route to let her know when I'd be arriving... and she was too busy dealing with the district manager and doing something related to a new phase of pandemic lockdown to speak to me at all, so the customer service rep asked me to write her a formal letter on my position. So I left one, including a footnote asking her to call or email me so we could talk this through.

I left that experience feeling even more impatient and frustrated with the branch manager. Checked on the shift scheduler online to find my shifts for next week had vanished, a little while later, so I called in and asked whether I still had shifts and the online version had lost them (that's happened before)... But I was told, no, the manager asked my supervisor to remove them and was going to try to get me transferred to front-end.

She hadn't told me anything. I appreciate that my complaint is being taken seriously enough to act on, but I really should have been part of the conversation about what to do about it. I feel this is being terribly mis-handled and I am feeling pretty unimpressed about it. I still have yet to actually hear back from her at all.

So I guess I'll be transferring to front end? I don't know how that will go. I bet it won't be as good a work out as hauling the products out to be put away. I can do customer service though, I've done it before.

From this kind of start, I'm feeling pessimistic though. My head is starting to buzz with internal accusations that asking for a transfer was not a good idea. I already asked my friends to back me up on this, to remind me that my dissatisfaction was real and the stress I was under was not something to put up with. That... was in the context of helping me be willing to look for other jobs, though. Maybe I should ask them again, to help me validate the move having made it.

I haven't been sleeping well lately. I moved the topper off my bed (I had been having back pains after sleeping) and it seems firm now by comparison. I don't know if that's why for most of the last week it seems like I can't stay asleep for much more than 3.5 hours.

So. That's the big thing which is happening right now. Maybe I'll catch you up on more later.