It's What I Go To Work For

GFC.

It always takes me a little mental minute to process acronyms. Whenever someone mentions the GFC my brain kicks into overdrive. Does it stand for Games For Consoles? Gluten Free Cooking? Grease Fried Chips?

Alas, the rather prosaic answer is the Global Financial Crisis. Nothing quite so fun as the other food-related alternatives my mind tossed up.

Anyway, the 'GFC' has meant that consumer spending has dropped, which means that retail stores are laying off staff, cutting hours and slashing wage budgets. Which means that when I walked into work today for my first shift in two weeks, I was apologetically informed that I wouldn't get another shift until the 10th of July. And this shift would be a grand total of three hours. Huzzah.

However, given the lack of consumer enthusiasm, it meant that my Thursday night shift was very very quiet. This was basically my night:

(M is my Manager, AM the Assistant Manager, 3IC the third-in-charge).

5:45 p.m- Arrive early for shift. AM has downloaded two episodes of Season Four of Supernatural on his iPhone for my viewing pleasure, so I stand in the backroom annoying M, making little squeaky noises when the little Jensen Ackles on screen lifts up his shirt. I get an inordinate amount of pleasure turning the iPhone upside-down so the image rotates too. Why doesn't everything come with built-in accelerators?!

5:55 p.m- M and AM start humming. They enjoy stringing my name along to the Spiderman theme, probably because my full name has three syllables and the tune is as catchy as anything.

6:00 p.m- Shift starts. 3IC is having a teary argument because apparently the Area Manager noticed her very frayed pants hems and told M that 3IC must buy new ones. M informs 3IC that if she doesn't get new pants and comply with uniform standards he can send her home for her next shift. 3IC threatens to call the Union, because obviously the Union does not have better things to do with its time than look at people's trousers.

6:25 p.m- M gives 3IC way too much leeway. I make a mental note that tears will get you out of anything. M and 3IC leave.

6:45 p.m- Colleague is stuck with an Asian woman and her two kids trying to haggle down the price of some kind of robot kit with Bluetooth capabilities. In three years, I have never seen a customer successfully put that thing together. The control box always karks it or something.

7:00 p.m- Am stuck with someone looking for Components. Crap it.

7:05 p.m- Have located a crystal earpiece, but am now combing the Components area for bloody ferrite rods.

7:10 p.m- I emerge triumpantly from the midst of fuses and resistors with three ferrite rods, only to be told that they're not suitable because they lack coils. Why do ferrite rods have coils?! It's a rod! It's ferrite! Why add coils to it's rodly goodness? AARGH.

7:15 p.m- Am now stuck looking in the diodes section for some kind of obscure diode. I hate diodes.

7:18 p.m- Asian woman still haggling.

7:20 p.m- Find a dude roaming the tools section looking for an AV switch. Dump him in front of the right section while discreetly checking him out. Final verdict: nah.

7:25 p.m- Asian woman still haggling.

7:30 p.m- Another customer wants to know if he can ask a tricky question. I say sure- he's holding a SCART-3RGB adaptor, it's not like there's anything else he needs to know about. Except:

"Is it bi-directional?"

EH?!

7:32 p.m- Apparently bi-directional is just a fancy name for input/output. Point-of-Sale database, how I love thee.

7:45 p.m- Boss brings me giant coffee, latte with two sugars. Wish my favourite barista was working so we could bitch about the trials of law school during the coffee-making process. Ooh, it's a large coffee. Daphne the Caffeine Squirrel ain't gettin' any sleep tonight.

7:50 p.m- AM hooks up his iPhone to a 22" Samsung in the back room and Jensen's glorious visage fills the screen. Were my life a Stephenie Meyer novel, I would be gasping at his smouldering dark eyes and chiselled chest, thinking how sweet and intoxicating his breath would be and bemoaning my own feeble insignificance next to his heartbreaking beauty.

AM tells me to stop drooling.

7:53 p.m- Jensen is sharpening a knife. How manly he looks in his singlet and his gun arsenal.

7:54 p.m- AM asks me if I can blow up some more balloons for the sale display.

7:56 p.m- Have filled the last two minutes with blow-related jokes.

7:59 p.m- I attempt to earnestly give a brief etymology lesson to AM by arguing that the word 'erect' cannot be used in relation to a balloon, as 'erect' implies something being built from foundations or rising up, and really, the word 'inflate' is more appropriate. What can't you do with a B.A in English?

8:00 p.m- AM decides to test out iPhone and component cable on a larger LCD screen. Am impressed that such a compressed file can be shown in clear 576p. Have reevaluated my scorn of the iPhone, but I still wouldn't get one.

8:30 p.m- Remember that my coffee is still sitting out the back. Coffee is duly sculled, luke-warm and all, but still coffee.

8:45 p.m- Almost home time!

9:00 p.m- End of shift.

And they pay me $21/hr for this* :D

*Well, in the good old days when I had weekly shifts