I am Suddenly a Donny Osmond Fan

After watching This video of one of the takes from the White and Nerdy video. One of the best parts, about 1:53, he signs the letters for ROTFL.

Seriously, that's crazy dancing, and he's having so much fun!

(via theferrett)

Speaking Truth to Boss

It's kinda sad. Even though I know perfectly well one of the biggest flaws with any kind of hierarchy (such as say, the structure of a business) is that people tell the people above them what they want to hear, not what they really think, I still didn't ask our district manager all the things I wanted to. Partly it's the above mentioned thing, (though the threat to my job really isn't great, and it's not that great a job anyway), and partly it's being pretty much certain in advance what the answer would be. I mean, if I suggest to the DM that "Y'know, if we have to constantly run the store with the bare skeleton crew to have any chance of making the sales per hour goals, then maybe the problem's not us, maybe the problem's the goals," I don't think she'll suddenly have a revelation and agree with me and everything will be happy. Her raise and bonus, after all, depend on making sure the numbers we get are higher than our numbers last year, because the people above her's raises and stock options and bonuses depend on the numbers being higher each quarter. Which means the concerns of the working underclass (that's me and everybody who's not a manager) don't really matter, because her incentives that make her better off are set at odds with the incentives that would make most of the workers (and probably many of the customers) better off. And it's the same all the way up.

Yes, it's true there's plenty of times people could end up standing around "wasting the store's money", but there's also plenty of times when running the store on the bare minimum number of people means there's nobody at the customer desk, or there's nobody to cover when somebody calls out, or there's no time to get cleanup and all the other things done because of the number of people available.

There's a lot of factors to get considered in the scheduling and stuff, but the way the incentives are set up for the people making the schedule, it's almost always going to come down on the side of trying to meet ridiculous arbitrary goals rather than the side of making sure there's enough people to take care of the customers and clean up the store and close down quickly and all the rest.

And of course, the easiest solution to this problem, from my point of view? Quit and find a new job, therefore making this foolishness not really matter to me.

Soup

I would have to say my experiment in soup-making was a marginal success. It's tasty, but it doesn't look too great. It was fairly simple stuff, a thing of vegetable broth, plus a bag of "soup mix" beans, and then some carrots and a potato and some green beans and stuff. The problem was I left it alone too long, or there was just too much stuff in it, so some of the stuff on the bottom turned into basically mush. But it's pretty tasty, and now I have three Chinese food quart containers of soup to stick in the fridge and eat over the next few days. In the future, I think I'll add a little less "stuff" to it, to leave more room for the broth. This ended up being a lot like stew in thickness. Which isn't bad, but. Maybe half the bag of beans next time.