Checked. Out.

I have finally wrangled Grace's training documents and the training can now begin, yay. Then I discovered two training exams sat by our cashiers with the answers written on word-for-word. Great. Thanks guys, those will look fabulous to our legal team, won't they? I'll just file them into our training records I'll just make them sit the exam again...

Demi Boss also had a mini meltdown this week after walking into one of AF's warehouse cyclones. It's the first time I've seen DB actually lose it and vent frustration about AF. AF also gave her a lecture... so DB spoke up sharply that afternoon. I am not even sure that AF realised she was being told off...

AF has also broken our main alarm panel by brute force. This meant expensive new locks and the shop had no burglar alarm for three days last weekend. I hope there was a lecture involved at the very least. Work Bestie said it should be a job warning but let's get real here - at least we can laugh at that idea.

I responded to the workplace shenanigans by going on a weeks' time off (pre-booked of course) and I know the timing is abysmal - and I did apologise that I was even going - but there's no budget to pay me to work instead, and I'm close to burnt out and I'm not even the one doing the most work. So far I've sat about, played games, washed up and potted another black flower tub with freebie plants. I lack the energy to do much else.

But I did actually go purposefully shopping, which I do less than once a month. So I've enjoyed a 69p frozen chicken curry (full price!), along with free chocolate muffins and free pineapple.

Worked To The Bone?

Just like the rest of us, Boss Lady looks exhausted. She has become the Head Teacher's Pet, complete with a new little subtitle, and is continually being called away to other stores to fix things, leaving our store to sort of pilot itself. She even gave me a card and a scratchie this week as a thank you for keeping things ticking over, which was lovely. In a way it is a real plus that our store is considered to be so well-oiled that we can survive without a manager 😂 since before Boss Lady, our store had a dodgy reputation. The security auditor has done another audit - they now last for hours and are horrendous! - and she started with us, wanting to begin with the store that's the best-run. Glowing pride right there. 😀

We're struggling with cashier cover thanks to several staff on long-term sick leave. But our temps Sassy and Teddy just cba with dealing with this place and it's driving me nuts, I keep phoning them to cover shifts and get complete disinterest. I've called it to Boss Lady's attention - she asked whether we should even keep them, and I've told her no. So she's going to let them go when their contracts expire, and recruit two newbies. They're both nice enough people but they aren't spectacular employees and we need humans who make working a priority in their lives. They are both young and it's a good lesson to them, if you don't want to work then plenty of people are waiting to take your job.

And for months now we've struggled with emergency duty manager cover due to not really having anyone suitable. But Grace, insanely capable and intelligent, has been completely overlooked by Boss Lady, who just assumed that Grace is Going Places™ via university. I asked Grace if she might like to help out, and got a yes - Boss Lady is absolutely over the moon with that idea. So she's going to retrieve the training list for duty cover and I'll somehow pull a rabbit out of my hat and find the time to train Grace on the bare minimums. Wish me luck with that rabbit.

Green Fingers

Here's hoping.

Well let's get real, I tend to kill plants more often than not. But work has been selling "grow boxes" of ground cover plants and flowers, and this week Tinkerbell and I attempted triage on a few wilted hunks of plant life - a day later most had revived from their little drink, but a few looked rather sorry for themselves. I rearranged the boxes to make one "sad case" box and I've brought that home. I spent £4 for some potting mix and I have "liberated" a couple of empty flower buckets from work. 😂 I'm going to saturate the plants again here for another couple of days then pot everything up and throw the buckets under my bay window 😊 so fingers crossed they survive and provide a little bit of colour.

As expected Annoying Face has gotten the job. I have decided to try harder with my grin-and-bear-it routine. She's still a scatterbrained pain in my arse, but hey, she usually doesn't mean to be so annoying. She bought donuts for the team to celebrate her promotion, which was a nice thing to do. I've just come to accept that after she's been in, there will be rearranging, tidying and item-hunting to be done. But hey, I'm still learning myself and I know that I sometimes drive my colleagues mad. We are all still doing too much with too-few human-hours of cashiers to assist us... Head Office are continually throwing little extras our way and we're just expected to add these to our task list and pluck the time required out of thin air. Every staff member has about 5 hours of training to do by next week - which is my responsibility to coordinate - but when I only have one cashier working with me most days, that's near impossible to schedule. Ho hum.

Good news though, I now have a new rota filled with two-day breaks and I am Over.The.Moon. I actually get my two days off together 👏🎈 mostly Sunday/Monday. Finally. Thank Dog. Three months of higgledy-piggledy weeks has been hard going.

The fish and chip shop lady dropped in a little parcel last night - I had a lovely piece of battered fish and a sausage for dinner, yum. There's still enough for lunch today.

No More Room

...in my stomach for more food that is. Tonight: spaghetti carbonara, potato salad (ok this was 10p) and a green smoothie. And there was supposed to be a free ice cream but I'm stuffed, so that's for another day.

(the next day)

The previous owner had bought a new shower head and left it loose in the bathroom. I tried attaching it to the hose that's already in place, but it doesn't quite screw in. Undoing the other end requires disassembly of the power shower unit and taking it off the wall, as the hose attachment is hidden. But I didn't get as far as bothering, because when I turned it on to see whether the shower head was screwed on "good enough", the unit started leaking water out of the switch. Heebie-jeebies right there. It's ancient, I never use it and I keep it disconnected from the power anyway - so this is one item placed on the backburner for, like, forever. I'll replace it when I sell my flat, or if I decide to replace the whole bathroom.

I've now bought a little rubber shower attachment for my bathtub for £5. It will do the job nicely.

Dinner: smoked salmon wrap with salad leaves, plastic cheese and salsa. I don't much like salmon but this was a nice combo and cost me 30p for the cheese.

Hello Today

Work = Exhausting. Not enough humans and too much to do. Worked six days last week and doing seven days straight this week. Ho hum... the state of my kitchen (and flat in general) leaves much to be desired.

I bought three packs of bargain beef patties (66p each) with a plan for a hamburger for dinner. I even got some free bread rolls and bought myself some plastic cheese to go on it. Unfortunately I undid the plan when I walked past the ready meals. So I treated myself to a 63p instant dinner tonight, chicken curry it was. The burgers are now in the freezer. The plastic cheese will last until October 😂

Also spent: £14 on a much-overdue haircut, and a pound for the busker whose singing was really quite lovely - being a professional musician for this past year must have been positively awful for the pocket. £5 for passport pics for my alcohol license. My British passport is just about to expire, so I suppose that's an expense coming in my future too.

April Bonus Moneys

£5.00 ShopPrize (Amazon)

£5.00 SwagBucks

£0.42 Book Royalties

£0.20 StreetBees (for the life of me I don't understand how they cover the payout transaction costs)

£20.00 TopCashBack (Tesco voucher) most of this was from using the site to find my home insurance

£20.10 Prolific Academic - I forgot to cash it out last month

So fifty quid. Not bad.

The mammoth pile of unprocessed receipts finally made me feel guilty enough to start popping them in, and to my absolute disgust some of them were too old to go onto any of my cashback apps 😖 Bad, bad, bad. Throwing away money through laziness...

My power use has been higher than expected. I shouldn't be surprised, because when I do a realistic calculation in comparison to my old place, it's exactly what it should be. I think maybe I'd pretended that being in fulltime work would mean I use a lot less power. But it's still very cold without the heating on when I'm home, and I think I'd rather spend the money and not be cold!

Ten days after payday I had already spent my entire months' grocery money. Some of it went on cutting a spare key, some on a 12-pack of Coke, some on more nutritional stuffs that I needed, and some just on ready meals. I somehow managed to miss my £5 bank bonus too which I'm not happy about because it sure looks like I qualified, but I expect that the cut-off date was earlier than I thought. Anyway, forcing myself to put all additional groceries onto the credit card has been useful in making me think twice. (I have the money in my current account, but doing it this way and paying in full does tend to keep me in check.)