SmogBlog Redesigned!

I am aware that my blog posting has been somewhat erratic lately, due to my complete lack of a fascinating life. I cringe at the hours I suspect you, the faithful reader, have wasted in coming to this site only to find the same tired post from a month ago with nothing new to report. In order to save you the time and trouble, I have decided to organize my posts by simply retelling the events of that week, and posting them on either Sunday night or Monday morning. I figure that for those of you with real jobs, Monday will be the perfect time for some Internet tomfoolery, and for those of you without jobs, well, the day of the week probably doesn't matter that much anyway. Also, check the end of each post for something I like to call Winners & Losers, which will be explained at the end. Read on for my adventures of this past week!

Tuesday
Back to Busch Gardens! It's been a while since I've been to Busch Gardens, so when offered the chance to go again, of course I grabbed it. This time it was business though. Kumba is closed for repainting, and Busch Gardens was taking the opportunity to redo the photo booth where you get your picture from the ride. Dad was there to install a new countertop, and I figured I would go along to help. It was cool to see Busch Gardens from the back; I got to see where they feed the white tigers they keep on that little island. Kumba looks spectacular with a fresh coat of paint!

Wednesday
Today was my first day of Aprons training at work. After several hours with a very excited "meal specialist" learning such useful things as instrument sterilization and how "a smile is the most important part of my uniform." Later, when I went on the floor and started preparing food, it became immediately clear that I was not taught how to keep old people from bum rushing the free samples. All I did was set out some sausage and angel food cake, and it looked worse that lions descending on an antelope on the Discovery Channel. It was pretty much all I could do to keep the people from taking the sausage right off the George Foreman grill with their bare hands. I think next time I'll take a taser or at least a big stick to smack people with.

Thursday
I concluded my Aprons training today with Lars, the meals specialist. I don't know about you, but when I hear the name 'Lars' I expect some large, jovial guy with a booming voice and forearms that size of a small child. This particular Lars, although he claimed to be 100% Scandinavian, seems to have only inherited the red hair from his ancestry. I think he might even loose if he ever chose to get into a fight with a stiff breeze. Anyway, I learned how to keep the grabby customers in line by adopting a Soup Nazi approach the sample giving: if they annoy me, NO SAMPLE FOR YOU! Also, this Aprons kiosk includes a wireless microphone and hidden speakers, which leads to great confusion among the old people about why they can hear my voice from all around. With training over, and Lars sufficiently happy with my ability to cook in front of people without burning or cutting myself, he signed off on my training papers and I officially fly solo on Monday. We'll see how that goes.

Friday
Either God is supremely angry, or a series of scientifically explainable events has culminated in a torrential downpour on a grand scale. I believe when all was said and done, this county got something like 15 inches of rain, and it rained pretty much throughout the day. It started out as my day off, but I was later called in to work the frozen truck. In a moment of miscalculation, I accepted. I had to change my route to work 4 times, and before finally getting there, I almost drowned my poor car. She survived though, thanks in no small part to Chevy re-engineering the position of the air intake on late model Camaros, and I arrived to work to trumpeted fanfare as I heroically set to work on the frozen truck. OK, that last part wasn't true. With all the rain, there were no customers in the store, and everyone from baggers to office staff were pitching in the work frozen, and it was pretty much done by the time I got there. I hung around anyway, because I worked hard to get there, and dammit I was getting paid! I hope this is the end of Biblical weather for awhile.

Saturday
It seems the Perfect Storm comes in two parts. The first part is the actual storm, and the second part is when all the people who normally would have gone shopping on Friday have to wait until Saturday, where they mixed with the people in a fever to get their Super party fixings and resulted in a complete madhouse. If I may go off topic for a moment, here's a note to all you future last minute party shoppers: by your hot dog buns a day or so early. The added day or two of staling will affect the enjoyment of your hotdog much less than a complete lack of bun would. Anyway, the casual shoppers were still determined to take their sweet time scrutinizing the same products they look at every week, while the power shoppers on a mission for pretzels and beer were growing continually frustrated and the whole store turned into gridlock. Those of us on the stock crew were hopping around like paupers in pay toilets trying to bring out one thing at a time as per customer requests, and got very little done indeed. On the plus side, I did get a moment's rest in the form of driving to another store because ours had run completely out of $1 bills. Leaving the store on the clock always feels like such a treat.

Sunday
Hooray for the Super Bowl! Let's add Super Bowl XL to the list of Super Bowls that I have worked through. Fortunately, I'm not much of a football fan, so I didn't really mind. I got a kick out of all the advertisement for this game with the 'XL' all over the place, like this game was to be Extra Large. I'm curious to see how they'll handle Super Bowl 50, which will just be L. If you can make a marketing campaign around L without it looking lame, then you have certainly earned your marketing degree in my book. Thanks to a large Super Bowl display in our front lobby at work, we have had no room for Valentine's Day candy anywhere, until I put it out last night. My prediction: we will have a LOT of half priced Valentine's Day candy on Feb. 15.

Winners & Losers

This section will be a (usually) brief note on who I feel is a winner and a loser for the past week. There really are no rules for inclusion in either category, just whatever comes to my attention as something good or something bad, the perpetrator will be listed here. It should be fun!

Winner: Katie for becoming a member of the Knightsbridge Theatre Company. I will not pretend to understand how actor unions operate, but I gather this is big news, and Katie can tell you all about it!

Loser: Mike, the scumbag at work who quite in the most cowardly fashion of just walking out and leaving everyone to shoulder the load. I maintain that if you can't take all the inherent strain of stacking groceries on a shelf long enough to give fair warning that you are leaving, than your future employment prospects are bleak indeed.