Busy Spurts

For funsies, here are two pictures Kevin took of my ladder obsessed cat. Kevin didn’t know that my cat Alex is so obsessed with ladders until he brought one in the house. 

The inventory service me and Kevin work for is about to get insanely busy, starting yesterday. However, yesterday was only a four hour day- but I had to do my routine mammogram in the afternoon. I’d rather have a full day at work than that. Today we are going to a small town outside of Victoria, and then we are going to Louisiana. After that, we are doing a bunch of Mexican stores locally. I’m going to be working long days until at least Halloween. 

This job goes in busy and slow spurts. I like it that way!  I think a lot of older people will say I’m not supposed to like it that way- I’m supposed to want something more steady, 9-5 with no traveling. But, well, that’s just not the case. If I need money during the slow spurts, I can do the apps. 

I did this job some 22-24 ago, when I was in my early 20’s. I’m 46 now, so maybe I was 21-23when I did this?  I lived in an apartment that cost only $400 a month and I remember paying 2-3 months of rent at once with the busy spurt checks. I liked the slow times/ times off. Some of my coworkers at the time collected unemployment for the slow spurts, but my parents told me I wouldn’t be able to qualify for it. Now that I look back on it, I would have qualified just as much as my coworkers, but I didn’t know any different than to believe whatever the older people in my life at the time were telling me. 

I also remember that there was an older lady working at the inventory service with me. She was probably in her mid 40’s to early 50’s at the time. She was very bothered by the fact that I was happy in that job and wasn’t in school. She lectured me all the time. She constantly told me that I HAD to go back to school and that I couldn’t do the inventory service “for the rest of my life.”  She would stand there, hands on hips, and demand to know how I was paying my bills. I used to be intimidated by her, and I would stand there and explain my finances to her. She knew how much I paid in rent, she knew I didn’t owe anything on my car at the time, and she knew about any other expenses I had. It was none of her business, but at the time I didn’t know it was none of her business. To me, I just had to do what the older generation said. If she was in front of me nowadays, I’d probably tell her to go stick it where the sun doesn’t shine. One time, a store we did inventory at had very cheap tubes of toothpaste, limit 3. I bought 3 tubes, and she even had something to say about that. She said something to the effect of, how I think that getting good deals makes up for not having a regular job and having dropped out of college. (She had the exact same job) 

It’s so funny how things turned out- how not only did I end up back doing this and still happy with it in middle age, but that I found love because of coming back to it. She’d be screeching if she saw me now. 

Kevin and I tend to disagree about busy spurts vs slow spurts. He makes a salary, and I get paid hourly. So not only does he get scheduled for smaller jobs that I don’t, but he prefers the slower spurts because he is getting paid the same either way. Being hourly, I prefer busy spurts due to the potential for overtime. He never gets overtime pay, but is worked more. I don’t get paid when slow, but I have side hustles. I’m also not expected to drive long distances for this, but I’m on the clock while riding in the car. 

Yesterday I was kind of dreading the upcoming busy spurt. Halloween and All Saints’ Day never seemed so far away on 10/20. But now that we are about to leave for Victoria in about three hours, I’m ready to bring it on. When I am busy doing this job for hours upon hours, I tend to just think a lot. It’s tedious, but I tend to be able to split my mind in half, with a separate half thinking about other things while doing scan, quantity, scan, quantity. It’s also very physical with so much up and down stepladders and kneeling down, etc. All of that is a core workout. If I stopped doing this job, I think I would gain 5-10 pounds from just the fact that I wouldn’t be doing all that up and down anymore. 

By the time we are slow again in the first week of November, I will probably have a Cajun haul from the stores in Louisiana and a Mexican store haul. So I’ll be in a cooking/experimenting in kitchen mood.