Brin (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
brin_bellway) wrote2020-03-28 01:30 pm
brin_bellway) wrote2020-03-28 01:30 pm
Entry tags:
I hate being an essential service
[cw: illness, (fairly mild) venting]
I have to leave the house three days in a row!! Oh god!!
---
Doing Passover shopping by myself was terrible. It took me nearly an hour to find half a dozen items, and most of the items on Mom's list I couldn't find at all (they seem to be carrying a lot less Passover stuff this year?). The cloth mask she made for me felt like it was leaking around the edges a lot, and since we *do* still have 14 surgical masks I think I should switch back to those until we get more desperate.
(Of the dozen or two people I saw in the grocery store, I was the only one wearing any kind of face covering. One customer was wearing plastic gloves. A store employee ducked in right next to me to put up a sign about the importance of social distancing, which is probably a fucking metaphor for something.
(Mom thinks I should have told her off. I feel like "never be mean to service workers" has been too well hammered into me for me to ever tell one off for anything. (Also it's very hard to keep up with what level of germophobia is socially acceptable this week: I'm still operating under ~15 years of "your preferences are unreasonable and we will not abide by them, there's nothing you can do to stop us, shut up and deal" baggage.) I merely got out of the way as quickly as I could.))
---
I assume Meta-Boss faces some sort of penalty if he ever allows anyone to go an entire week without working for any reason: he's *extremely* reluctant to fire people, to give more than a few days of even unpaid sick leave, and now to allow me to quarantine with my family. Probably something tied to unemployment benefits: the official threshold for unemployment is one week without work.
But, like, that explains insisting on *one* shift a week. Why do I have *two*? What purpose could that possibly serve? I find it very hard to believe that *everyone* else wanted this shift even less than I did.
Every employee at every takeout place is saying "oh, it's deserted, you basically stand around and occasionally wipe things down with sanitiser", but I have long been cursed with busy nights and the curse is not letting up now. I personally made *thirty-three* entrees last week (I fucking counted). It was *physically impossible* to sanitise things as often as we were officially supposed to: you can't sanitise the customer area hourly if you spend an entire straight hour doing nothing but serving customers, one after another.
(Between that and the increasingly severe cut to staff hours, obviously I finished my evening cleaning checklist late. I was planning to clock out late, since you *can* usually get away with that to some extent if you cite the unusually large number of customers you had.
And then I did the evening accounting, and I saw *just how unusually large* my number was. Only 3.5 out of the 11 hours since the morning accounting were mine, but I did more than *two-thirds* of total business. Overall, our revenue was about 40% of normal for that time period. It really *was* nearly deserted whenever I wasn't there: I and my curse almost single-handedly carried the day.
I thought about it, about wanting my job to still be there when the danger eases, about where he's going to find the money to pay my wages. On my hours sheet, I wrote that I had left on time.)
I have to leave the house three days in a row!! Oh god!!
---
Doing Passover shopping by myself was terrible. It took me nearly an hour to find half a dozen items, and most of the items on Mom's list I couldn't find at all (they seem to be carrying a lot less Passover stuff this year?). The cloth mask she made for me felt like it was leaking around the edges a lot, and since we *do* still have 14 surgical masks I think I should switch back to those until we get more desperate.
(Of the dozen or two people I saw in the grocery store, I was the only one wearing any kind of face covering. One customer was wearing plastic gloves. A store employee ducked in right next to me to put up a sign about the importance of social distancing, which is probably a fucking metaphor for something.
(Mom thinks I should have told her off. I feel like "never be mean to service workers" has been too well hammered into me for me to ever tell one off for anything. (Also it's very hard to keep up with what level of germophobia is socially acceptable this week: I'm still operating under ~15 years of "your preferences are unreasonable and we will not abide by them, there's nothing you can do to stop us, shut up and deal" baggage.) I merely got out of the way as quickly as I could.))
---
I assume Meta-Boss faces some sort of penalty if he ever allows anyone to go an entire week without working for any reason: he's *extremely* reluctant to fire people, to give more than a few days of even unpaid sick leave, and now to allow me to quarantine with my family. Probably something tied to unemployment benefits: the official threshold for unemployment is one week without work.
But, like, that explains insisting on *one* shift a week. Why do I have *two*? What purpose could that possibly serve? I find it very hard to believe that *everyone* else wanted this shift even less than I did.
Every employee at every takeout place is saying "oh, it's deserted, you basically stand around and occasionally wipe things down with sanitiser", but I have long been cursed with busy nights and the curse is not letting up now. I personally made *thirty-three* entrees last week (I fucking counted). It was *physically impossible* to sanitise things as often as we were officially supposed to: you can't sanitise the customer area hourly if you spend an entire straight hour doing nothing but serving customers, one after another.
(Between that and the increasingly severe cut to staff hours, obviously I finished my evening cleaning checklist late. I was planning to clock out late, since you *can* usually get away with that to some extent if you cite the unusually large number of customers you had.
And then I did the evening accounting, and I saw *just how unusually large* my number was. Only 3.5 out of the 11 hours since the morning accounting were mine, but I did more than *two-thirds* of total business. Overall, our revenue was about 40% of normal for that time period. It really *was* nearly deserted whenever I wasn't there: I and my curse almost single-handedly carried the day.
I thought about it, about wanting my job to still be there when the danger eases, about where he's going to find the money to pay my wages. On my hours sheet, I wrote that I had left on time.)