In an addendum to my “Geez, aren’t I the boring blogger!” post from Thursday, I should note that one factor of the job that has me tired over and above the fact that I’m even employed again in the first place is that the store has me coming in at 5:00 in the morning twice a week to work on a special cleaning project. I haven’t had to get up at 4:00 on a regular basis in nearly five years (while managing the morning shift at a family restaurant), and even then, it was a struggle getting up that early each and every day, five days a week (to say nothing of the current two days a week on a temporary cleaning assignment).
What’s the cleaning task? Well, the side of the store where the produce, bakery, deli, meat and seafood departments are located is designed as a large open space with somewhat softer lighting (albeit, still quite bright). The perimeters of this area have these faux-ceiling grates that provide the illusion of a ceiling and a nice visual counterpoint to the dominant earth-tones of the store’s main color scheme. It’s hard to describe, really — but the actual store ceiling is the typical “warehouse” type of thing you’ll see in larger stores these days, with steel beams and giant heating-ductwork and large spotlights all clearly visible. But then there is this faux-ceiling setup, which consists of a grid of one-inch piping from which small spotlights are suspended, and the spaces of which are adorned by the afore-mentioned grates. It’s actually very appealing, visually, but it also poses the problem that all that grillwork overhead is a gigantic dust magnet. And we haven’t even come ’round to the grillwork above the bakery, where the combination of dust and flour coating all this metal grates is….well, I’m sure you can imagine.
Enter the intrepid blogger, new on the job, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and willing to do anything disgusting with a smile (albeit occasionally a fake one — I’ve been around enough to know what they’re about to ask me to do something really icky). The managers approached me to ask if I’d be willing to come in super-early a few times a week to help clean all that detailed grillwork, and I, of course, acquiesced to their request. Because I’m just a team player, you know.
(Now, to be fair, they were pretty up front about what they were asking. They didn’t try to butter me up with a lot of babble about “helping the team” and all that other Godawful manager-speak, which I found really refreshing. This was a case of, “Hey, we’ve got this rather annoying, highly labor-intensive, and not-really-gross-but-still-icky cleaning job that will require some very early mornings. Can you help us out?” I found this really refreshing.)
So, that’s probably a big problem with my mental functioning as to blogging lately: I can’t get into a routine yet because the job itself hasn’t settled into routine. Luckily, this cleaning job should only require three or four more weeks. Until then, I shall probably move my “No blogging at all” day to Fridays instead of Saturdays. Or maybe not. Hell, I don’t know. I’m just amazed right now that I’m back in a situation in which sleeping until 7:30 am constitutes sleeping in.
(By the way, any list of “Biggest lies of all time” has to include telling people that they’ll adjust to getting up at three or four in the morning, if the job requires it on a regular basis. I did it five days a week for a year and a half, and it never got any easier. Maybe that means I’ve just got unshiftable circadian rhythms.)
