I am in vacation mode. I have been in vacation mode for about the last two three four weeks now. I have three and a half more work days plus probably a few hours working from home this weekend. Fridays have been the hardest. Last Friday I felt like I was seriously on the verge of actual depression. It was okay, I was fine by that evening. I am not prone to being depressed. Aside from an occasional day or two of bluer than blue. Or even a couple hours. My moods have evened out a bit with age and a few losses. Why sweat the little stuff? It’s not worth it. But sometimes I do get wrapped up in the moment. Something is not going my way and I can’t control it. Somebody else gets some well-deserved praise and I feel overlooked. Nobody will listen to me. Or whatever.

My job was fine today, as it almost always is. It was a boring day and I was working on a boring task but the place was in a summer kind of mode with lots of key people on vacation and I was distracted enough by questions from some of those who were left behind plus occasional little breaks with co-workers that it all kind of balanced out into a relatively fun day. I *love* getting questions. I love deciphering exactly what the question is and writing carefully thought out answers and if I don’t know the answer, I love the high-tech archaeological dig that it often takes to find the answer.

Nevertheless, I felt pretty stressed out when I got home. Mouse was cooking veggie curry and she needed some carrots. She had already been to the grokkery store but didn’t get carrots because, when she looked in the refrigimatator, there were carrots in there, so she didn’t put them on her list. Guess what? The carrots in the refrigimatator were too old to use. So, I was dispatched over to the Plum Market. And had my first traumatic checkout experience there. I got in line with my single bunch of multi-colored carrots ($2.99) behind a woman who appeared to be paying for her grokkeries. No brainer, right? Not. The machine couldn’t read her credit card. She tried it again. She said, “Oh, last time I was here, it wouldn’t read my card either.” [Duh.] The [incompetent] young male cashier tried to do it manually. He couldn’t figure it out. He yelled over to the next cashier for help. Still didn’t work. There I was. Standing there with my one bunch of multi-colored carrots nervously smoothing the three crumpled dollar bills in my hand and organizing them so George Washington was oriented the same way on all of them. [Didn’t you know that’s what you do when you are counting money? If not, now you know.] It is always a little embarrassing to me to buy *one* thing at the grokkery store (even though I walked there and so didn’t use any gasoline for such a frivolous errand) and there I was with my one bunch of carrots. After what seemed like an eternity, the cashier looked at me and apologized and I slunk away with my one bunch of carrots and my perfectly smoothed out dollar bills and eventually I got outta there. Totally stressed out at that point. Even the walk home didn’t help much.

But it’s okay, it’s better now. Back in the Jurassic Age, I ran a cash register. It wasn’t a computerized one. It was one of those old mechanical ones with all of the rows and rows of numbers. I was an expert at running that cash register and I loved that job but I made minimum wage, which I think was about $1.45 an hour when I started. We took credit cards. Not everybody did in those days. We had those old manual credit card thingies, that you ran over a carbon paper type receipt. If the customer’s total was over $50, we had to call the store office from our cash register and wait for the office gals to call VISA to approve the transaction. Wait anyone? Irate customers anyone? I felt irate today but I squelched it. I know how hard it is when technology doesn’t work. And people like me are waiting in frustration.

Vacation? Vacation? I need a real vacation. These rocket trips are fun but just about the time you get settled in a bit, you are cramming all of your crap back into your vee-hickle and rocketing back down the I75 SUV Speedway. Which is a long slog but please know there are plenty of rest areas (and McDonald’s, etc.) so do *not* feel as if the only place you have to stop is the Nun Doll Museum at Cross in the Woods near Indian River. I mean, you can stop there but remember that there are many other attractions in Michigan. Sorry, I’m just saying.

Onward and vacation beginning next Thursday afternoon. Whew!

This entry was posted on Friday, July 31st, 2009 at 7:31 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.