THE MUNDANE MONTH OF BLOGGING™ - DAY 1

Well, the rent's paid.

I have no debts, as the bills are paid as well.

I have a job that I don't hate.

See? I can be positive sometimes.

Today was just another routine day of waking, working, going home. I managed to do my morning workout but no afternoon stuff since I had laundry to do. I like to get ahold of the washing machines in my apartment complex on Friday because usually "normal" people are going out that night, and usually don't give a shit about stuff like chores. There have been times of exception to my theory, however.

One night I tried to get a wash load in at about 4 PM but both machines were being used, as well as the dryers. No problem, I assumed, but a couple of hours later there was still another load going. It wasn't until 11:30 PM that I finally got a washer and when I took my clothes out of the dryer at 1:30 AM, there were two washers loaded and, I had figured, whoever was washing was waiting for the dryer to be open! Now that's what I call backed up!

Work is a lot of fun lately. A few months ago, the company decided to save long term costs by offering voluntary buyouts to a whole shitload of people, and half of the ones that were accepted company-wide were from employees in my division. I had also been given an offer (about 21 weeks of pay, with the standard tax deductions) but I didn't feel like it was enough money to bother looking for another job and so I considered it a non-offer. But as it turned out, I ended up taking duties from not only 2 people who left but also people whose duties were restructured for some stupid reason and now, as if I wasn't overloaded before, my card is beyond full now for the whole week. Well, at least I know that I'm a valued employee.

Of course, the Department of Bright Ideas at the parent corporation level decided to add even more, um, excitement and challenge to our work environment by instituting layoffs of about 10 percent of the national workforce. Because of the previous buyouts being so popular among the co-workers of my division, they only shitcanned one of us. However, this happened to be somebody who was dependable and worked on weekends. As a result of the layoff, a few of us are taking alternating weekend days once a month to cover the ex-part timer's duties.

The fact that we have to do this isn't so bad for us personally as employees, but it seems to defeat the purpose. In my case, I am a full time employee and once I go over my full day or week of regular hours, I'm making time and a half, just like a lot of full-timers do. It has been suggested by my boss that I could take off a few hours early to save the overtime, but the harsh reality is that if the managers want all of this work done I have no choice but to stick around and do it. This is now the case with many of the remaining full time employees. In reality, for what they are paying us in overtime, they could have paid two part-timers, or at the very least could have given generous hours to one person and still have avoided paying medical and other full time benefits. Way to go, corporate leadership!

Nope, I can't complain myself, though. I like the folks at my level, up to and including the managers and executives in my division. I think that I'm lucky to be around people who want to work hard to make us successful. I just hope that the corporate hierarchy doesn't keep coming in and fucking shit up just because they're panicking over the stock price.

That said, I'd better get some rest sooner or later, because tomorrow it's my turn to justify why canning the part-timer was such an intelligent cost-cutting measure. Oh, and on an interesting note, I was supposed to leave at noon or so to "comp" for the weekend hours that I'd be working. I ended up having to stay almost a half hour past my normally scheduled time to leave (an 8 1/2 hour day, counting my unpaid meal break.)

(IMPORTANT NOTE OF GUIDANCE: This post is but one in a series called THE MUNDANE MONTH OF BLOGGING™. For those of you who are scratching your head right now and saying to yourselves, "What the fuck is he trying to prove?", Click Here, Pilgrim)