Summer Bummer

Life's been crazy lately with classes ending, but now that it's summer, hopefully I'll get back into my blogging routine.

I recently got a pretty rad job. I work at a cell phone kiosk in Sam's Club, and sell almost every cell phone imaginable. We sell three "contract" phones services, including Verizon, Sprint, and AT&T, as well as the five prepaid plans Boost Mobile, Virgin Mobile, Net10, TracPhone, and AT&T GO Phones. It's a fairly easy job, although the processes take some getting used to. I've only been there a month and a half or so now, and I've gotten most of them down pat. Some, however, I still have yet to learn.

Verizon Wireless, for example is the biggest bitch ever. We have to do everything for them manually, including the credit check and contract. All of the others we can do through the computer, but since Verizon is done over the phone after a 15 minute wait, it definitely takes the longest to finish.

When it's slow, there's literally nothing to do. The best I can do to keep myself entertained and stimulated, sexually or otherwise, is to greet customers and pace around like a lunatic. If there are no customers, I'm stuck using the computer. Once I'm done browsing the 13 pages that aren't blocked, I'm left to my own devices. By that, I of course mean my cell phone. Since I work at a cell phone kiosk, they're pretty lenient about making/receiving calls and text messages. That gets old too after awhile though. Half the people I send my "plz talk 2 me! I'm @ work and bored!" text messages to, don't reply. The ones that do reply, I simply run out of things to say to them.

It's at this point where I hit an all time low. I will look for anyone, in my cell phone's contact list, or someone in the store to talk to. About absolutely anything. Once I find a person, if I don't hold my composure and hide my desperation for human communication, I'll scare them away, worsening my situation.

I've recently found a way around all of this, though. One of my coworkers suggested I bring a book. I was so flabbergasted at the simplicity and obviousness of her suggestion, but I immediately started bringing various books and graphic novels to work. Today, I in fact got paid for 30 minutes of actual work, and 3 1/2 hours of reading comics. It was pretty fantastic.

All this lack of business comes with a price, however. The kiosk is closing at the end of this month. It really kind of sucks, for a lot of reasons. The main reason it does, though, has everything to do with my online training. The district manager was really late making it available to me, so I got it finally after working there about three weeks. After about two weeks of actually having the training and, within the same two weeks, procrastinating doing the training, I found out the kiosk is closing.

Now I'm stuck in an awkward position. I can either buckle down and do all of the training so my last 9 days of work go by smoothly, or I could skip it because there's really no point now anyway. Obviously, I'm going to skip it. It's going to be brutal though.

I'm going to miss this job. The customers at the Sam's Club kiosk were a huge step up from the customers at Sears. As many of you know, you need a membership to get into Sam's, meaning that not just any half-wit can go in there and annoy the snot out of me with their petty retail problems. The only half-wits that are allowed in Sam's are the ones that are willing to shell out an extra $40 every so often to enter the building. They're few and far between, though.

I did have one lady in the store today, who was either really stupid or totally stressed out by her kid. While it was probably the kid, one can never be sure when it comes to the general public. She asked me briefly about a car charger for her phone that she didn't have on her, nor did she know the name of it. During our conversation, she was holding on to her son's arm, trying to contain him and keep him out of trouble. To no avail, he was using his other hand to grab at my fake demo phones and let go, causing the tether to snap them back into their places. After he did that to a couple of phones, his mother turned to him and screamed, "YOU NEED TO STOP THAT RIGHT NOW! IF YOU BREAK THOSE, MOMMY'S GOING TO HAVE TO PAY FOR THEM AND MOMMY CAN'T AFFORD THEM!"

I don't think she knew they were made of plastic with cardboard screens. If she did, she should really consider not spending her money on a membership at Sam's Club and worry more about saving up for the other plastic and cardboard things that her son will inevitably break.

Please say a command! *BEEP!*

I like to stay up late. Very late. I usually end up going to sleep at or around 3am, even on school nights. Last Monday night, I stayed up slightly later than that... which I soon found out was a terrible.

When I get really tired... or drunk... the mental wall I have in my head that prevents me from saying everything on my mind slowly fades away. This because especially prevalent when I was in math class.

For the entire semester, my math teacher has bothered me for a number of reasons. She has to have things exactly her way. She has rules for everything... it's a little ridiculous. One of her less outrageous rules is that you can do the corrections on your tests and hand them in to her for up to 5 point back. Now, before I rant about that, let me just clarify that I'm thankful for the opportunity to get points back. On that note, I think if you do test corrections, you should get a percentage back instead of a set amount of points. That way it's far more worth someone's time to redo, lets say, half the test.

So I sit down in math that fateful Tuesday and listened to the teacher announce she'd be handing back our tests at the end of class. I like to occasionally text in class so I turned off the sound and vibration on my phone so I can just set it on my desk. That way, if/when I get a txt, the screen will just light up and it won't distract everyone. I then opened my phone (which sometimes goes to "speaker" mode) so I had easy access to the keyboard. After I got settled, I groggily raised my hand. She called on me, and in a dazed/tired state, this is how the conversation went:

Me: "I just have a question. Why is it that you only give 5 points back on a test if we do the corrections? I just don't think it's very motivating for someone who got a 50 or something to do all those corrections to still not be passing. And they're the ones who need to do the work, not those people who got a 95. You should be encouraging people that need to do the corrections to do so, and to not waste their time."
Her: "Well the corrections are supposed to boost a person half a letter grade and that's what it does. A lot of teachers don't give their students an opportunity to make corrections on their test, and this also allows them to get some points back. It's not necessarily, supposed to give you a ton of points back..."

At this point in any of my teacher's discussions or lectures, she tends to talk in circles and repeat herself in a number of different ways by restating the information in a slightly new manner. So I looked down at my phone and decided it'd be a good idea to check and see if I had recieved any messages while my heart was bursting out of my chest. What I had said was finally starting to sink in. Trying to distract myself from my nerves, I went to hit the clear button on my phone just to illuminate the screen to see if I had anything, but what I didn't realize in my "sleep goggles", was I hit the voice command key instead. For those of you who don't know, this trigger's the voice command mode on your phone, which typically has a female's voice say "Please say a command!" and then beeps... which is exactly what my phone did. I frantically hit a bunch of buttons to get her to stop talking before slamming my phone shut. Thankfully, the teacher was still talking in a never ending cyclone of sentences. She didn't notice, but everyone in the surrounding desks heard it, looked at me, and laughed.

It was really embarrassing. I still feel like I got my point across though. I've had a lot of teachers in my days, and not one of them set a point limit on test corrections. It was always a percentage.

I've dropped the class since. I'm looking forward to taking the class with a teacher next semester that isn't (as) crazy.

On another note, I'm glad I've finally subscribed to some interesting people's blogs. Everyone of them that I've subscribed to is pretty awesome. I don't get around to commenting as many as I'd like to, but I definitely try to read them as often as possible. I have a survey that I have to do that I got tagged for. I'll have to do that =)