AT&T Can Suck It

California.

They are sending him to California.

Guess when he leaves? 5 days before my birthday. Guess when his mother comes in to visit? The day after he leaves.

Who doesn't have a 'normal' job? Me. I'm lucky that I have a set schedule, but duh, as a restaurant manager, I have to work other hours. How on earth am I going to do this without Dave here?

I'm starting to flip out about this. I mean, honestly, I have most of this covered. My mom's going to help - I have some friends who can help - BUT it's the unknowns. It's the "oh shit, we have 200 covers and 7 servers" nights when I need to get up there and help at a moment's notice (I sound like Superman LOL).

Ok ok, deep breaths. People do this shit all the time - people who have SPOUSES IN THE FUCKING MILITARY, which I don't.

I think I'd be a lot better dealing with this if I knew how long he's going to be gone.

He could miss Alex's 13th birthday. I'm sure Cassie won't care that he's gone for her birthday, too, but I'm seriously hoping he could at least fly back then, since it's Memorial Day this year.

This just sucks. There's no two ways about it. But, I'll deal. Because I always do and I have no choice.

Well, shit.

Dave just called. You know it's never good when he says "so I have some kinda bad news." This means a) it's not KINDA, it definitely is and b) it involves his job.

He's been volunteered for strike duty. Which means that if there is a strike, which is pretty likely, he will get assigned to another state to work for several months. Don't know how far away. Don't know how long. With my work schedule, this is definitely NOT a good thing. I told Dave we'll deal with it when the time comes. But, my mind is already racing at how I'm going to do this.

I guess I'll have to fall back on Cassie. I figure it's the least she can do at this point. She's off on Sundays, which is my open to close day, so she can watch the boys on that day. That's the most important day that I need covered.

I can more than likely have my friend Ann pick Zack up from after-school care on Thursdays and Fridays. Gotta figure out who can watch him on those nights.

This is where I start to get more angry. Why can't Alex be normal enough to watch his little brother? He's almost 13 years old and there is no way that I can leave them alone on nights that I work and that's not how it should be. I hate the idea of spending money on after-school care and then big chunks of money on a sitter for Thursday and Friday nights. It would be nice if Cassie's work schedule could work with mine, but I'm not entirely sure if it can. We'll see.

I guess I won't worry about it until the time comes, but on the other hand, I really should have a plan in place. Blah!

Oh, not a minor thought here - months away from Dave? The longest we've been apart is 3 weeks. This is not going to be easy. At least this time, we'll be able to talk all the time, unlike when he's been out of the country. Blah x2.

I Just Don't Get It...

I had to change my cell phone number again yesterday. Sigh. My bosses have been saying for months that I should get a new cell phone number and not give it to any of the staff. I kept saying, no it's fine, it's not really that much of a bother. Until recently.

Please remember - this is Valentine's Week. This means that I'm looking at a VERY busy weekend where all three of us managers will be working every day and the servers are going to be tired. My servers know we're stressed and over-worked right now. Saturday night, one of them keeps texting me (on my night off) asking me if he can have off on Sunday. That's where it started...but it gets better...

I had one of the most hellish days at work on Sunday with everything breaking. I'm not kidding. Here's the run down of Sunday:

Around noon I realize the internet isn't working. Yes, this is a big deal. It means our online reservations won't work. It means we can't run credit cards. It's a big deal. I spend 30 minutes on the phone with Verizon, only for it to work again for 20 seconds. Call them back and it's "Oh there's an outage in your area, but we don't know when it will be fixed."

2 hours later, I call back. Oh, the problem's fixed but our internet still doesn't work. They end up having to re-set our router. Ok, it's all good. Cathy doesn't stop to think that if we now have a new IP address, some other things aren't going to work.

Sure enough, Open Table (online reservations) is down. I call them. 20-30 minutes to get that fixed.

Poof - all of the POS stations go down (where the servers enter orders, print checks, etc - like the most important things in the restaurant?). 40 minutes on the phone with that tech guy. What seriously pissed me off about that was I told him "look, we had our router re-set, we have a different IP address, so how do I fix this?" He goes through 20+ minutes of troubleshooting only to say "yes, it's the IP address issue." Yeah, fuck you - I'm not a moron. FINALLY get that working.

Internet doesn't work on the machine that sends all of our data to corporate. I finally figure out how to fix that. Ugh.

It was NOT a great day. Let me also mention that earlier in the day - between the hours of 8am and 9am I'm getting a ton of text messages from two servers that don't want to work that night. Are you kidding me? I'm not even IN THE RESTAURANT YET at 8am. I end up in tears frustrated by 9:30 because I've wasted over an hour arguing with people over texts instead of getting shit done around the restaurant.

So yesterday, I'm off. I'm sitting at home around 11:30am with David, watching TV. RELAXING. NOT working. Same server who was texting me on Saturday night calls me. I answer because he's a part-time manager, too, so I figure it's probably something important.

That asshat.

He starts bitching about how I wrote the schedule for the following week. No, I'm not kidding. Asking why I scheduled everyone at noon on Sunday instead of staggering shifts. I was NOT being nice to him with my responses. One and two word answers - lots of pauses in between. It's obviously I'm pissed off.

What upsets me the most is that he worked on Sunday - he KNOWS the day I had. Yet, he thinks it's appropriate to call me on my day off and bitch about the schedule? That was the straw that broke the camel's back.

I called AT&T immediately and got a new number. Not giving it to ANY of my employees, except for one of my kitchen guys who speaks English and he won't give it to anyone else. He's my go-to guy whenever someone in the kitchen calls out. The other employees? Fuck them. They can get in touch with me the same way as they get in touch with John & Dana. At the restaurant. WHEN I'M WORKING.

I can't tell you how quiet yesterday and today have been. I didn't realize until now how often my employees texted me or called me before. It will be nice to work an opening shift tomorrow without the barrage of texts of "are we busy? are you cutting?"

What I don't get (the title of this post) is how people think it's OK to bother their boss on her day off? Where do you get the sense of entitlement that you think you know better about writing the schedule than me? And you're going to call me on my day off to tell me about it? Seriously? I don't get it.