It's Quittin' Time!

My, but it's been a while since I posted a comic, hasn't it? Here:

Well, that pretty much wraps up THAT story arc. I'm sure none of you are shocked that it ended this way. Shortly after quitting that deeply demeaning and abusive job at the boutique, I landed myself another position a little higher up the chain but in Connecticut. More details will be coming. It's better, but as you'll all see, it's not all sunshine and rainbows and unicorns. My GOD, I wish there were unicorns.

Lunch negotiations

There comes a time in a young woman's life when she has to stand up for all that is right and good and delicious. I don't care WHO you think you are. You do not get to make me work during my lunch break. Lunch is only for eating and decompressing.

To see the comic full-size, click here

I swear if I had to eat in that place, I would keel over from the sheer physical pressure it would require to keep myself sane. And it wouldn't actually be do-able. I would probably throttle her first.

Dis R-E-S-P-E-C-T

There isn't really much that gets my heart pounding more than being called into the boss' office and being told to shut the door. Because once that door is closed, people have not reason NOT to say some really incredibly offensive things.



Maybe I'm just soft from my days working out on the west coast (where they not only probably coined the phrase "passive-agressive", but they also have positive opinions toward taking "mental-health days"), but I was sure that working in some no-name boutique would at least be a little less militaristic than working at a company where I'm nothing but a number. Harsh.

Leading by WHAT Example?

Good Heavens! Where have I been? Oh, that's right, looking for employment. It's certainly been a roller coaster (the least fun kind--the kind they have at the kiddie parks that just goes in a glorified circle and is shaped like a snake or a dragon and you feel mortified by the mere thought that someone might see you on it and recognize you).

Ultimately, my struggle for the acquisition of money meant that I couldn't very well turn down a job offer, even if it was a crap job with no benefits, poor pay, and a mean-spirited boss. A job in the hand and all that.

Meanwhile I keep looking for something significantly better. To give you an idea of the range of pay scales I've been offered, I'll tell you that the hourly salary of the highest-paying job was 10 times greater than the lowest paying job. That is a SIGNIFICANT difference, even when you don't consider statistical significance.

My current job suffers from a great amount of apathy from all who work there, including the owner of the gift shop, where I now wrap gifts [while being heartily lectured on "girl" colors and "boy" colors for gift wrap ('where does green fall on this binary gender range,' I wondered? 'Don't use it,' the managers replied. But come ON! There's a whole stack of green tissue paper and several rolls of green ribbon! If you didn't want me to use it, don't put it out there to tempt me!).

The best option, at this point, is to just find something better. I will feel unreasonably guilty about quitting, but I'll certainly have a much happier outlook once I'm out of there.

True Story

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This really happened yesterday. Sometimes I like New York. Sometimes, I get really skeezed out by it.

The whole state's just one big (punch)line.

True Story:
I went to the DMV yesterday. I guess when people leave New Jersey, they don't usually come back, so there was a lot of confusion over which forms I needed to fill out and which documents I needed. Was I renewing my registration? Or maybe this would be considered a brand new registration? And by their account, I was missing 3 or 4 documents required to get everything done. Since I've just moved back to Jersey, I needed to redo pretty much EVERYTHING: driver's license, car registration and plates, car inspection. At one point, they also told me I'd have to retake the driver's written test. Which is about when I really lost it.

I decided then that the best way to handle the situation was to simply act like I didn't need any of those documents or special procedures. I figured, if they didn't know the appropriate work flow to give me what I needed, then the only thing standing between me and my fully licensed glory was them. Why not simply pretend that I knew what they were supposed to do and guide them accordingly? Surprisingly, that actually worked.

A quick aside about the NJ DMV. It takes roughly 3 times as long to go through there as it did in California. California was all about those deli-counter number tags. They assigned you a letter and a number and when you were called, they took care of all your stuff at once. In New Jersey, they are ALL about the assembly line approach. First the reception area. Then the document checkers. Then the counter, the waiting room, the counter again. And if you're really lucky, that's when you get to leave. If you came to the DMV for more than one thing, you need to start over again.

If the lines were short, it wouldn't be an issue. But due to budget cuts and the miserable economy, my county (which contains Newark) halved the number of DMVs from 4 to 2. Additionally, one of the remaining DMVs only does licenses, not registrations or inspections. Which means, 800k people are attempting to use this one DMV per year. Tell me that's not an infrastructure problem of the highest magnitude.

Something Fishy's Goin' On

When I first contemplated moving back to New Jersey, I forgot to account for a few things I had acquired since I had moved out to CA. Most notably, my fish, Leonard Nimoy, and what seemed to be about 40 tons of paper.


I'm not the kind of person to go buying pets and then abandoning them. the purchase of an animal is a special contract that says you're taking responsibility for their life and welfare. Even if it is something as mundane as a blue Betta.

Figuring out a way to transport my fish was a bit of a conundrum. There was no way he was going to fit into those little shampoo bottles with their narrow necks. No, what I needed were spice jars. I was sure I'd seen jars large enough to hold Leonard, but small enough to get through airport security. More importantly, I remembered where I had seen them: the Ace Hardware store in El Ceritto had sold me several spice jars for my spice collection while I was in housing for work. I desperately hoped they were 3 oz. or less. Sure enough, the label on the shelf said they were 3 ounces, even though the plastic didn't claim it anywhere.

I made sure that when I packed for the flight, I included the Ace Hardware bag and the receipt which claimed I had purchased three 3oz. plastic bottles. Exactly what I was carrying. It ended up not mattering. Security didn't ask.

Leonard Nimoy and I did raise quite a few eyebrows at the Oakland Security Screening, though. And I'm guessing that at 6am (or any time, for that matter), they probably don't see many people taking their fish on the flight with them. Dogs maybe; cats potentially; fish? most likely not. And a few of the security screeners got a good laugh seeing how freaked out I was when they joked with me that they had run him through the x-ray machine. I just about lost it!

For all the pain and obnoxiousness they put you through when you're rushing to make your flight, at least the screeners still have a little bit of a sense of humor.

The Final Straw

Oh, for pete's sakes!

My coworkers and I might just be the only people who can say "we hate our job, and our job hates us."

Clap On, Clap Off. Clap On Clap Off!

Repetition makes long strips easier. Luckily, while I am an office drone, repetition is ALL I do.



This is seriously my day. Call the TIME phone line 4 times a day, Sign a piece of paper 4 times a day. All for the sake of making sure we're actually IN the Building. AT work. Not necessarily DOING work but at least they know we're there.

Additionally, they've incorporated a new game into our day: Musical Rooms. In which all 28 of us manage to settle into a room that seats 20 and only has enough outlets and ethernet ports for 20 computers, and then someone tells us that we've been moved to another room on an entirely different floor which is also insufficient to seat us all. So we all hustle as quick as we can to the other room, fighting tooth and nail to get a spot where we can A) sit and B) plug in a computer. Rinse, repeat. They had us switch rooms THREE times.