a few days…

I am about to enjoy an evening of comfort food (deluxe mac and cheese) and red wine mixed with cranberry juice (I had always been more of a wine cooler girl, despite my attempts to truly enjoy wine). Desperate times call for desperate measures. My last few days at work have been terrible. My assistant and I usually complement each other in the way that on his bad days, I am usually the encouraging, optimistic one, and vice versa for my really bad days.

But the last few days, having to fire our best potential shift supervisor, losing one long-term well-trained employee, a variety of personal objections about what I do coming to a head in my head, have led me to a general feeling of hopelessness about the future of our store. It’s been four months since I was transferred there. Certainly, many things are a lot better, but I am still plagued with a situation where I have virtually no promotable employees, and therefore Adam, my assistant, and I are constantly so focused on just getting basic stuff done on our shifts that we never catch up. We never get to really be managers, do any long-term planning, nor train our employees to the degree necessary.

Furthermore, my moral obligations have really been weighing on me regarding my job. Here’s what I mean: Last night I was listening to this discussion about the benefits and evils of Wal-mart moving into urban neighborhoods in Chicago. I meantion this because these discussions remind me that in theory I believe in paying people good, living wages with benefits and all the lik. I care about this, but in my job, I am not always able to do that. I am forced, by the constraints that are set at levels above me, to meet certain budgets for labor, and therefore I really only have certain limits to what I can pay people, and I don’t generally feel very good about that. The other option, however, is to constantly struggle to make labor and therefore not do my job very well.

I was cynically joking about this with my boss today, and she joked that I was literally “the man,” in the negative, oppressing and harassing the masses sense. I usually can remove the dramatic view of this from my daily perspective, but today I was just overwhelmed with the idea that I didn’t want to do this anymore. In addition to the fact that despite my best efforts and he efforts of a really good assistant manager, things aren’t going that well. Sometimes I just wonder why I am doing this. This morning I was really on the verge of just deciding to leave. I would probably never do that, but today I really wanted to, and I didn’t even care anymore. Not caring really scares me, because it’s important to me to like my job, but there are days when the working life is not all it’s cracked up to be.

Time for wine and macaroni.