Workin’ Girl

Last week I got a job at McDonald’s. I am not joking, but it is McDonald’s Garden center not the fast food joint. I assume that this is just a tweener job until I find something better. But in the mean time I am learning new things about horticulture, which is definitely one of my interests. I was also hoping, I admit, that I would be getting free plants like I did at the last previous similar job. However, that is not the case. This is a smaller operation and every plant is used, leaving no left-overs. Eventually I will get a 25% discount to use in the store and I plan to take advantage of this to get my vegetable garden started this spring.

So I have worked a full 40 hrs this week, something I have not done since 2007. How was it you ask? Fairly lousy. I was hoping that the exercise would be beneficial to my shoulder, but no. I spend so much time hunched over trays of plants that all the knots in my shoulder that the physical therapist had managed to work out have returned. I had to quit physical therapy too, so that hasn’t helped. My co-workers and supervisors are nice enough, but like any work place, there are the underground dynamics of who likes who and who freaks out over nothing. I want to safely skate by all of this without being mired, but unfortunately I share the same last name as one of the less popular supervisors, so I am already entangled by accident when some assume I am related to this person. If I compare this job to my other similar job, they would balance evenly, each having their perks and downs. Here the perk is that I am switching jobs fairly often and doing things like planting cuttings and pinching plants to make them branch, all of which I am interested in learning.

The biggest downer and the reason that I am most likely to leave this job is a no ipod policy. That is right. I work by myself most of the day doing mindless tasks and there is no music and the employees are not allowed to listen to headphones. The reasons range from safety to another method of employee control and none of them make very much sense to me. One of the reasons that I am willing to take a job like this is so that I can listen to books and podcasts, so this policy is not working for me. At first I thought that I would be able to use the time to think about various projects and problems with my writing, but I realized that I think on paper, so that was not a viable solution. If I am completely by myself I will sing the three songs that I know over and over again, but that too gets old very fast. By the end of each day I am ready to go nuts. Sometimes I can talk to people, but some of them have heavy accents, which, combined with the loud fans and my poor hearing, generally results in a frustrating experience. So the end result of all of this is that I have a job where the benefits do not really outweigh the costs and I have little time to look for a better job. Sigh.
Oh yeah, the MD job is also in Hampton. Although it is not far, I have to drive through a tunnel to get there and in my first week I already spent a half hour waiting while an accident cleared. In the summer it will only get much worse. I really expect that I will not be working at MD’s after a month and a half. Long enough for me to learn what I can of horticulture, take advantage of the discount and hopefully find a new job. Maybe I will end the job in style with my headphones firmly glued to my ears and commenting that I decided that the rule didn’t apply to me. I’ve never been fired before, but it might be worth it.

I am working on a new color pencil drawing, which I think is turning out well. I hope to enter it in a color pencil show this summer and sell it. Here is a picture of the work in progress.