Daytime

Cutter's Log - Stardate 0102.20.80
Current Song - Sign Your Name (Terence Trent D'arby)

I'll be working the daytime shift at work in the next couple of days. I only get one or two daytime shifts a month. I'll be doing three this week. It's like having to fill a dayshift quota. Actually, we're a bit short-staffed.

I haven't written in this blog for a while because of being busy. But when I do, it's likely something I need to share (probably because of frustration).

The reason why I'm the "night specialist" is because of me being a night owl. The night shift, to many people, is one where you taper off as the night goes on. The way I avoid this is by waking up in the afternoon. When I come to work, it's as if it's the first thing I'm doing. That philosophy is what made me survive the overnights at BP for a year-and-a-half and the evenings at Shell for over two years.

So when I have to work during the daytime, I'm usually finding my sleep pattern interrupted. I'm entering work feeling groggy. However, through the years I have seemed to manage it well ...

Until recently.

The way I conduct my "clerking" is a bit different. I have a set schedule for chorework. Everything's routine. A good portion of the night is spent doing chorework. This is reversed during daytime.

There's more time at the register during the daytime. There are more customers at the store during daytime. The busyness doesn't frazzle me.

What DOES frazzle me is the make-up of the customer base in the daytime, compared to the nighttime. I have found out that there are more customers who are rude, insubordinate and mean. Everyone thinks that nighttime customers are all drunk and vagrant. I find it the opposite with the 5% of daytime customers I'm writing about.

The real reason why I don't like working during the daytime is because of that ONE such confrontation that will absolutely ruin my day. It is all about disgruntled customers.

I'll admit that I'm the worst at dealing with disgruntled customers. Everyone else who works where I work at, all with a lot of daytime experience and one with over 20 years, is so much better at this. I rarely, if ever, get disgruntled customers at night, and when I do, it is in the early part of the shift (5-7). They scare the hell out of me.

When this kind of thing happens, here is what is going through my mind afterward:

-You are not God.
-If you kill us youth off like that, the cycle of evolution will break, and you are effectively killing society as we know it.
-Johnson Oil's future depends on youthful people such as myself.
-Those guys from Turk 190's are right, people from Sterling really CAN'T read.
-Mr. Williams' lecture on healthy Time Management in my college health class.
-I don't want to work a dayshift ever again.
-Why am I worrying so much?
-You ever notice that it's always the pump and never the card?
-You ever notice that it's always our problem and never yours?
-This never happens when I work at Wende's.

... and I will add more later.