Finally Salesfloor :)

I forgot to mention that the pricing job at Target was just temporary, while they got me switched over to salesfloor. I'm now officially a salesfloor person and it's much better. My only complaint is how I never really know what to do. Like with cashiering, I always knew exactly what I was supposed to do. I kinda of assumed it would be like that though so it's all good. It was funny the other day because I was in charge of five phones in the store, and I didn't even know where they were or how to answer them really. They briefly explained how to do it, but I never actually did it before I was in charge of them. And of course, it's been a little difficult because I'm so used to tuning out the calls, because I've never had to answer them before. I'm getting it, though. Supposedly sometime this week I'll actually be trained and put with someone so I can learn how things are done. Which will be very nice...

The Price is Right

That's what I make sure with my new job at Target. I pulled a muscle in my shoulder a few weeks ago, and cashiering seemed to be making it just get worse and worse till I really couldn't do it anymore. I'd asked to be moved to the salesfloor a while ago so it would be able to heal, but they sure took long enough to move me out of cashiering. It's not quite the salesfloor, but it's definitely better. My hours are 6:00am to 2:30pm every day, which is a little early for me, but manageable. I get up at 5:00 and that gives me about 15 minutes to get ready and go. Basically what I do is put up new prices, put up signs for sales, mark things that are on clearance, and just make sure things are coming up at the right price. It's a party, I tell you. I really like getting off at 2:30. I was kinda tired when I got home today, but hopefully it won't take too long to get a little more used to the hours. I also went to the chiropractor today, and he smacked me around a bit, which definitely helped my shoulder. I guess a tendon was out of place, and that's why it hurt so much. He told me to try not to reach behind me while holding heavy things, and that's exactly what I'd been doing as a cashier. Good thing I'm not anymore!!! :D It's funny though, remember what I said before about how they don't really train you there at Target? Well they did the same thing to me again. One lady told me to work with this other lady, and she said not to give me my own work just yet but to just show me everything today. Well guess what I had within ten minutes? My own work, in another isle. Everything went fine except when I thought the isle went to the back wall when really it went across the back wall too, so I missed some sale things I was supposed to scan and see if they needed to be taken down. But oh well, I can just blame it on the lady because she should have been there. I wanted to ask her to make sure, but I assumed I was because that's how all the other isles went...but yeah, I had no clue where she was. So other than that it was all good. :)

The Great Kitchen Renovation

After having lived in this old farmhouse for almost 15 years, we decided it was time to change the kitchen floor. Actually, I decided it was time, and started tearing it up when my parents were gone. :) They knew though, that I was going to, so it was all good. My mom was very much ready to change it. Who wouldn't be? After all, it was ugly, split-pea-soup green, faded, cracking, peeling, etc. etc. etc. Just gross. Honestly, it doesn't seem to be a horrible looking kitchen in general...but I do think that it looks somewhat better in the pictures than it did in real life. Maybe just because you can't see all the details of the grossness. So, I invited Nick to come over for a couple of days and help us tear it up, which he did willingly. I think the willingness was more just wanting to be with me rather than wanting to tear up a kitchen floor, but it worked. And he only broke two or three of our tools.

Valley Fair!!

The weekend before last, I was lucky enough to get Friday and Saturday off to go to Valley Fair with Nick and his family. It was the last week that the water park was open, so we really wanted to go, but for a while I thought I might not be able to go. My time off request was denied because it was the week of UND's opening something-whatcha-ma-call-it for freshmen, so a lot of people wanted it off. The lady in charge said I wouldn't be able to get it, and she felt really bad about it, but there wasn't really anything she could do. So I asked around, and begged around, and I finally found someone who would work for me on Saturday. Then later on, as I was getting slightly more desperate, I asked one of my supervisors about it and she was able to find someone for me. I was incredibly lucky.

Anyway, I had a great time there. After my first roller coaster ride I was sort of dizzy and and didn't feel terribly good, and I was afraid that maybe I wouldn't take to roller coasters quite as well as I thought I would. After a few more times though, I got used to feeling like my stomach was ten feet behind me and had a lot of fun. I even went on the roller coaster that goes upside down and on the power tower - the tower that takes you up and drops you. It was intense. We were there from 9:30am, before it opened, till after 10pm, when it closed. Luckily we didn't have to eat the nasty fair food, we brought sandwich fixings and ate in the truck instead.

After we rode roller coasters for a while, we decided it was way too hot and that the water park would be a good idea right about then. There was a sweet water slide, with a tube made for four people. We found out that the bigger the people in the tube, the higher it went around the corners. Jared and Nick tried to get it as high as they could, nearly flipping themselves, along with Becca and me, over. Then it started to rain and the wind picked up, so we decided to go back to the roller coasters. Overall, it was most definitely worth $26.95.

The next day, on Saturday, Nick and I went to the Mall of America. We basically just wandered around the whole time looking at random things. I guess that's probably what most people do there though. We did find some pretty sweet clothes...that we didn't buy.

Yesterday Nick and I celebrated an amazing year of dating. We were pretty lucky to both be able to get the day off. We went out to dinner at a nice place in downtown Grand Forks and we both decided we are both way too immature to eat at fancy places. I think we're too immature for a lot though, to be honest, which is part of the reason why we have so much fun together. We went to Sander's and got steaks. Nick's was so incredibly rare though, he poked it with his fork and it bled. Both of us hate sending food back, but there was definitely no way he'd eat it. Or that I'd let him eat it, for that matter. It was that pink. After he asked the waiter if it could be cooked just a little longer, he joked that he should have said he needed a new steak because he poked it and it mooed at him. That was basically what we were like all night. It also didn't help that we couldn't pronounce half the things on the menu, and if we could we probably didn't know what they were anyway, so it didn't matter.

Nick also got me these sweet roses!!!

Just another day

I don't really have anything exciting to write about. Just another long day at work. Actually, it really wasn't all that long at all, only 3:00 - 10:30. Lately all my days have seemed terribly long though, for some reason. Maybe it's something to do with the fact that all I do is robotically slide hundreds and hundreds of items across the scanner, it's just getting old. Or something like that anyway, I don't know. I got to be a breaker the other day, which is much better. Then you get to bag, give people their breaks, pick up hangers and abandoned things, and I even got to be the all-important operator for half an hour and answer the phone. It's interesting when they teach you to do new things there...because they really don't teach you anything. They very briefly go over what you do, then expect you remember it all without any help. So yeah, I had a bit of trouble trying to transfer people to other places in the store when they called. But, oh well. It's good experience, I think.

A few days ago I had an older lady come in and hand her credit card to me, and ask if it was the right one, because she had an older one and a newer one. I was like "uhh...I can't really do anything with your card till you're trying to pay with it." so she tried to pay with it, and of course it didn't work. I told her to either call the 800 number on the card, or ask guest service about it, since they know more about that sort of thing there than I do. She got all mad and asked how long it would take, and if I could just do it, and all this stuff. I basically told her I really couldn't do anything about it, and she paid a different way. Some people are a little strange though. Since when do cashiers fix credit cards that don't work?
Anyway, that's my rant for tonight. I think it's time for bed now.

So you're Canadian, eh?

For some reason or another, the past few days at work have been bombarded with unusual influxes of Canadians. It's a running joke that Canadians always try to hand the cashiers their credit cards instead of running in themselves in the credit card machine the way they're supposed to. One lady came up to me, trying to hand me her card and I told her to use the card reader...she said, to no surprise of mine, "Oh, I'm supposed to use that thing, eh?"

I've met a couple of weird people in the past few days as well. One was weird enough to convince the head people there that I needed to walk out with security. This younger guy came up and bought a small grill, the kind in a box that you can make hamburgers in, or whatever you do with those things. We were just chatting about it, you know, regular small-talk. Right? He left his grill there, which I thought was pretty funny since we'd been talking about it. He came back less than an hour later and asked if he'd left it there. I brought it out from under the counter and gave it to him, saying I was glad he'd come back to get it since he'd already paid for it and everything. A little while later, I heard over the walkie/intercom wherever I heard it, "Becky, 2280, Becky, 2280" which means "You have a call at the front desk." However, there is another Becky that works there, quite a bit higher-up than me, so of course I assumed it was from her. After my break, as I was leaving the break room, a couple of team members came up to me and told me they needed to talk to me about something and asked if I'd helped someone with a grill earlier that day. I said I had, and they got really serious and looked at each other nervously. Of course I was slightly terrified, I thought I'd done something really wrong. They said something about finding a back room to talk in, and I couldn't stand the curiosity, asking what happened. Apparently this guy was trying to get a hold of me and ask me out for a drink that night, hence the call at the front desk. They were afraid he was going to come after me, so they made me walk out with a security guard.
I guess there are two things I can learn from this. One, Target is going to protect me from creepy guys. And two, don't make small talk with younger guys.