New Sofa

Well, new to me. I hadn't planned on adding furniture until my carpet is replaced, but fate stepped in, in the form of a slow leak in my air mattress. After the fourth day of waking up on a flat hard floor, my head was turned by the local second hand shop's £45 sofa bed ad. May I present my new click-clack...

Bought sight-unseen. It's actually firmer than I would like, but it's still miles better than the airbed on the floor. And every time I catch sight of an actual bed in the corner I smile all over again. What a mood booster. And it will work well if my kids come to visit. 

New staffer started today... she seems ok. Her availability is trash. Our frustration with the local talent pool knows no bounds. The only applications we seem to get are sensational people who just can't work when they're needed.

Contemplating a Split Personality

Work has given me so many freebie plants that I really don't need them all. About half have survived (that's par for the course when we can only take them home at the point they are all wilted and half-dead). I am considering selling the survivors on Facebook Marketplace, only that's a bit tacky so I made a new account to protect my identity. Dodgy I suppose, but in my defence I have rescued them, tended them and allowed them to recover and grow bigger. Currently searching for some cheap planters and I might make up a few baskets.

Less free stuff is appearing right now as we have improved our sell-through of reduced items. I prefer the lower waste ethically even though it means fewer freebies for me. I've been shopping at Cheap Competitor Store even though their shop is a train wreck right now with half-empty shelves and an abysmal lack of staff (mainly I feel sorrow for them, it's clear their suits are decimating their payroll and I remember when ours did that to us).

Balance

Well, just as yet another catastrophic day reached a crescendo mid-week, our caretaker boss Lolly declared that it's our shop and if we haven't got time to do all our tasks, it's our call on what to do and what to put off. So we dumped some of the training. Lolly then authorised us to go over staffing budget because it was necessary. So we did.

To her credit Boss Lady has been responsive since she returned, and finangled permission to hire more humans. So we're recruiting and interviewing right now. Yesterday I had the loveliest evening shift I've had in about a month, with an extra human and everything getting done. Ah, peace.

I booked two movie tickets (for free, thanks National Lotteries) but then work has rearranged my weekend into a split, so I don't even know if I'll find the energy. We will see.

Disgustang.

Close to fed up. Demiboss injured her shoulder - agony-level - so I cut my week off short and went in to cover for her. I really don't mind that part, she has helped me so many times and it was nobody's fault. The part that got me fed up is that Boss Lady has been fooled by Teddy's bullshit... and has made him permanent even when he's often ditching us in favour of working his other job. Sigh. Sassy did even worse, refused to change her socialising plans when we needed her to work. Her father called, cussed us out and said she quits. What a completely embarrassing and unprofessional thing to do. If this space cadet is dumb enough to try a pleasant goodbye at the end of her notice week I'll have to bite my tongue. Way to burn bridges.

And we have a new rota that's completely inadequate for running a supermarket. It looks like they've put us on skeleton staff and then shaved a bit more off. It just isn't tenable and now Boss Lady is away on holidays for another two weeks so can't do anything about it. How do you keep a place running at 60% of bare-minimum staffing levels, I just don't get it...

I am the only duty manager who refuses to work like a fiend. I work at my pace. What doesn't get done doesn't get done. But the other three are burning themselves out. Nobody will thank them and nothing will come in reward, just a new expectation that we can keep it up permanently.

Four more boxes of free plants this week. Two trays are marigolds. You'd better believe I am milking the freebies for this pain in the arse work situation.

Side Hustles for May

£0.50 StreetBees

£29.94 Prolific Academic

Ho hum, another lazy month. At least I did a few more PA studies than usual.

Spendy McSpenderson: bamboo incense holder, new mousepad, compost, and more boring wall stuffs like sandpaper pads and filler. A joining fee for becoming a company director of the freehold company, and legal fees to the solicitors handling our enfranchisement (£800).

Coming: a new front door (fire regulations) and that ever-looming roof bill plus the enfranchisement itself, all of which will be rather painful but worthwhile.

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.)

Enfranchisement

I think I've mentioned this before - that the owners of the flats in this building are banding together to buy the building itself (the freehold). Essentially the current management company aren't really doing much managing, apart from sending extortionate bills. Well, the buying up is a go. I've just sent a very hefty deposit to get my shares in the company, and in the next few weeks I'll get an invoice for about £10,000 which will cover my part of buying the building.

Ouch but also yay! Just on its own this fee will increase the value of my flat by quite a bit. And straight after doing this, I will be able to pay £1 for a lease extension which should mean that I have added £20,000-ish to the property value. Not a bad deal all told, plus it will nix the hefty and ridiculous bills that they're sending, and they'll become bills we can control.

Most of the £10,000 will come from redrawing the advance on my personal loan, and the rest from my April pay. My bank said today they can refund all of my advance, touch wood. So all will be within my budget, although I'll be pushed back out to maximum debt. But I had to do this or miss the opportunity. Joining it later would be considerably more expensive. Deciding not to join at all would have ultimately meant my flat lost value.

I will still have to find the money for my share of the roof, which is a whole 'nother interesting quest possibly involving credit cards. We will see. I'll cope somehow even if I have to do that, I do enjoy ramen noodles after all!

Ponderings and Hope

I've just been chatting with Buddy from Sister Store, hoping to convince him to apply for the open role in our store 😊 No guarantees, mind you, but I know he'd be great in the job, and I really think he'll do well at interview too. The only problem is his Boss Man, who excels in destroying confidence, and has led Buddy to believe there's no point applying... 😔

THE WALLS are still taking forever, because I have zero motivation and it's just so un-fun. Today I tackled wall section #5. This has been the worst so far, the one with layers of every wall surface known to humankind. Wash, scrape, prime. As I was priming I could see bubbles appearing all over the surface - really horrifying because if it's lifting, that would mean sanding the entire wall. But now that it's touch dry, it seems flat. I hope this means the wicked-expensive primer has done its job. I am going to give it a second coat just in case.

Lunch: Coleslaw on French bread, choc-chip muffin. And I actually bought the coleslaw 😂

Definition of Excitement?

Getting four free battered cod fillets from work. 😀 You know you've officially become an adult when free stuff is the best thing ever and it's even still awesome when it's fish.

Almost-Pugsley.
Except he isn't this clean.

I washed Pugsley today. I wanted to feel all adult-y and accomplished, which only lasted until I realised that the baked-on bird poop was going nowhere. I now have a sudsy car space and a car looking, well, marginally better. I think he's going to require a machine-clean (or three).

One of my cheery workmates has given me a cold... yay... so that's £15 unplanned spending on medication and a whole load of annoyance and a runny nose and blocked ears. And also some unplanned spending on a ready meal and some ice cream.

My Covid vaccination is booked 👍

I have bought my wall light online, too. I finally found one I liked, with a built-in switch, at a decent price. I hope it's decent quality.

Crazy Days, Lazy Days

This model is called the
Jump Starter Thingy 4000.

So Pugsley just randomly decided not to start this week, at 1pm in the afternoon. No reason, he was cranking over just fine but wouldn't start. Curses... it took me ages to install the road service app, only to be told my policy couldn't be found. Got them on the phone and they took an hour to arrive. I finally rock up to work two hours late - it was lucky that both Boss Lady and Work Bestie were in and could hold the fort.

Nice mechanic man had no reason for me apart from really cold weather, since the battery is fine. I'm unconvinced, his jump starter thingy produced a faster crank noise than Pugsley ever has. I think I will buy my own jump starter thingy. (Yes, that's the technical name for it.)

Then yesterday was One Of Those Days. I walk into work at 5am and the floor is a mess, but it will have to wait because I need to bake the pastries and bread. Before I manage to get them onto the shelves, the delivery arrives. Before we get the delivery finished, reps start arriving - one from a soft drink company, another from a card company. Then a maintenance man turns up and needs to be escorted all over the place. I start trying to get cakes onto the shelves, and the lady from coffee company is here to audit our coffee machine, followed by GrandBoss (surprise visit yay...) who spent quite a bit of time discussing the state of the floor, and general store standards, and giving me instructions on moving shelves about. At this point Boss Lady texted me from home to say that the safety and legal auditor might be in... great, just great. I didn't have much time to worry though because suddenly he arrived, and that meant two hours of blind panic as I worried whether I'd give the right answers.

All this time, Tinkerbell, Poppet and CareBear just got on with things and the store managed to run itself. They even looked after customer enquiries, coordinated their break times between them and kept milk and bread topped up on the shelves. I am so lucky to have a good team of cashiers. Turns out I only answered one thing incorrectly in the audit (which was fairly minor and not a safe or legal issue) and we have absolutely no safety or legal concerns anywhere. Yay team! And ohmigod what a relief.

By then it was 4.30 in the afternoon and I was so tired and mentally exhausted, and, well, starving, that I bought a ready meal. Bad girl. But the next day was a "get stuff done" day and incredibly productive all over the store. So I'm trying to redeem myself tonight by eating from the freezer - dinner was smoked salmon and goat's cheese on a herb wrap with a fresh chocolate éclair (all free). Salmon isn't my favourite thing but the price was right 😁

And, Breathe.

Turns out we did record takings for Easter weekend. Yay team!

I pondered whether to discuss Annoying Face with Boss Lady and decided she was probably sick of hearing it. I did take AF aside and noted that it's important to do things right because the cashiers are watching... she started mumbling and making excuses. Plus ça change.

Another day, another wall worked on. I stripped part of a wall, and filled another part - this particular wall will end up being more filler than actual wall, but it is what it is. I also moved some stuff around and gave the place a good vacuum. The shredded wallpaper, caked in layers of paint, leaves a constant pervasive dust everywhere, and living among it gets it tracked to every part of my apartment, including the kitchen and bathroom. I think I just assumed that oh yes, bits of paper on the floor. I didn't expect it to be like dust!

Dinner: luxury pizza with buffalo mozzarella, semi-sundried tomatoes and pesto (thank you Head Office for accidentally sending us a product we don't sell). Glass of coke. Free Oreo egg from loyalty card offer. A fitting £2.00 celebration dinner for my hard work throughout the weekend, I think 😄

Easter is Insane

It's Bank Holiday weekend and Easter Weekend, so I do understand people "needing" to go out and buy Easter Eggs, or, sweets and crisps and sandwiches for their picnics. I hope they went somewhere nice with their families. I just don't understand the people wandering in for a bottle of drink and that's it, people going shopping just for something to do. On Easter weekend, when shops are heaving with people.

On the plus side we did a roaring trade yesterday, but oh boy, I am knackered, and there's still two days left to survive. Even boss lady (who did a very uncharacteristic late shift last night), admitted that she now understands why we struggle to get all our tasks done of an evening. But yesterday, sigh.

Af overrode me twice in a row, in front of others, on a safety thing. Sigh. I don't want to shout someone down but I don't want customers getting sick. And it all kind of left me fuming afterwards. Food safety is important. And she contradicted me in front of staff members twice in a row, told them to do the wrong thing. Tinker knew the correct procedure and AF tried to tell her not to do it.

I don't need her to respect me for my ego. I need it so that when I say something, the cashiers listen to me. While I am always ok with people asking questions, I can't have AF teaching them that it's ok to argue with me.

I'm just so fed up because UGGGGGHHHHHH. 

Bonus Moneys For March

Prolific Academic £6.45

Switching to HSBC - £125.00 (This took a bit of effort, but was well worth it for the money. I surrendered a bank account that I never used, and now have a bank account with HSBC that I expect I'll never use.)

Hmmm what else is new? Well, I overspent on my grocery budget in March. It was mostly "achieved" by buying up high fibre supplements to take to work. My digestive health has never really recovered since my operation, which is really frustrating, and so I am trying a new regimen. We'll see how that goes.

Achieving As An Elitist

I've been reading articles lately about what income makes people happy, and what amount marks the limit of happiness - that is, there's a magical number, where even if you keep earning more than that, you don't get any happier. It turns out that it's a figure most of us will never earn, namely, around the £75,000 mark. But what I found most questionable is that nobody seems to have taken spending into account, only the earnings.

I'm quite sure it's possible to be financially miserable on £75,000 if you are frittering it all away to the point where you still struggle to pay the bills. By the same token, couldn't I be just as financially satisfied, with a quarter of that amount, if I don't spend money on a gas-guzzling monster of a vehicle, and in wasting things, in buying new outfits every week, and throwing half my groceries in the bin?

To me this says that some people in the western world can still reach peak financial happiness on far, far less.

Mr Money Mustache has another take on it. He claims that Mustachians - those of us who live deliberately frugally in order to work less - can consider themselves part of the elite if they just beat a lot of other people at things. I'm not talking about marathons or maths exams, but in how we consume and how we live. It sounds daunting as a number until you realise how obtainable so many things are. I can give you an example from my work - if you always take your own bag to the shop rather than buying one, you're probably beating half the humans around you. And if you then select even just one item in your shopping based on less packaging, you are probably in that elite 5%.

If you choose to go car-free, bam, top 5%. Even if you plan your car trips to avoid unnecessary travel, still top 10%. Or chose a really small car for the fuel savings, top 20%.

Do you walk your dog twice a day for 30 minutes? You're probably in the top 10% for fitness for your age.

I reckon I am in the top 1% for being frugal. Even in a workplace that gets me a lot of free food, many of my workmates don't have any interest. They don't even have interest in stuff that isn't expired, like tea bags with a crushed box or loo roll we no longer sell. So I get crazily excited when someone else shares my thinking. Poppet always takes the fruit home, Sassy always says yes to the leftover pastries, and Work Bestie and I get the most excited over ready meals 😁 which might also make us in the top 5% for being lazy at cooking!

So. What's your top-scoring elite thing?

More Beaming

It's a yay and nay and hey kind of week. We had an audit of the store to check how we're going - it was on my day off, thank goodness, because I am 100% convinced I would have um'd and ah'd and stumbled through all the important questions and not been able to answer them. However, Work Bestie was on shift and performed amazingly, to the point where we scored a brilliant result, showing that we're doing a pretty dang good job on the store overall. My little beaming moment was a particular question that all cashiers had to answer, because I personally taught them all the "correct" answer - helping them all understand a stock thing that quite frankly isn't relevant to their job and involves concepts behind processes they do not even do! - and yet, the cashier on duty correctly explained the procedure to the auditing officer and we got a gold star 🌟

The nay part is that we, as a leadership team, had some outstanding and incomplete stuff, which was probably me (no way to tell but I suspect it was). Still, we aren't in trouble, it's just listed as a thing we need to get on top of. The "hey" part is that I know how to avoid this in future and it involves intentional laziness. If I just bin all the expired food immediately, it will never crop up later asking whether it was donated or taken home by staff or eventually binned. I really don't like this on principal. So I've been doing the right thing, dividing it for charity donation or for staff, and it comes back to bite me by making more work later...

Dinner: Greek salad, sweet & smoky chicken (all free).