unavoidable shifts
Well, shit fuck. Fucksticks. Shit sticks. I thought I was being so clever booking a Thanksgiving Week trip to Palm Springs starting on Tuesday—usually it's just Tuesday and Wednesday of that week that we are basically required to "volunteer" for holiday shifts at one of the stores. I really thought I was getting out of it this year.
So much for that! Yesterday our interim CEO, Brad, sent out an email to the entire off that read, in part:
For those of you who are new to PCC and those who have been with us for years, helping in stores during the holidays is a fantastic way to show your support for our store teammates during one of our busiest times of the year: Thanksgiving and Christmas. This year, each of you will be required* to work at least one 4-hour shift in-store during each season. You are of course always welcome to sign on for more!
*If you have approved PTO during either of these holidays, plan on flexing accordingly and doubling up when you don’t have PTO planned. If you have a medical exemption you are not required to participate, please talk to your manager and let them know.
Ugh. I never stop hating this. And I resent it more when it is presented as a requirement, although I suppose, to be fair, at least this year they're being straightforward about it and not even remotely framing it as "volunteer." And the thing is, this year there are sign-ups for both Thanksgiving week and Christmas week, which is new. Had this been presented as a volunteer thing, I almost certainly would have signed up regardless, knowing how ridiculous I'm bring by resenting it or being anxious about it. I've already done this the past two years, after all. I was just delighted when I thought I was going to get away with avoiding it again.
A link to a sign-up spreadsheet was included. I didn't particularly want to do two four-hour shifts during Christmas week, so I signed up for the requisite 12-4 shift at the Central District store on Monday of Thanksgiving week. This means that the only time I'll be able to do any actual office work that entire week will be Monday morning. And, I think I actually will bring my laptop, keyboard and mouse home the Friday before, so I can just work from home that morning and simply walk over to work at the store.
I then signed up for the 12-4 shift on Thursday, December 23. There's a fair chance I will take the day off on Christmas Eve, as is what I usually do so I can take the day to go down to Olympia, but we'll see. What they have going on now is three days for sign-ups each of these weeks: Monday-Wednesday before Thanksgiving; Wednesday-Friday before Christmas, with Christmas Day this year falling on a Saturday. That's six days total, three four-hour shifts available at all of our 15 stores on each of the two days prior to the holiday in question, and only two shifts per store the day previous. That's a total of 216 four-hour shifts—except, wait, the Greenlake Village, Issaquah, and Redmond stores each have an extra shift, those being this year the only stores with overlapping shifts. That's another 18 shifts, bringing the total to 234 four-hour shifts for 118 office staff to sign up for. I guess that does average out to 2 shifts per staff member, although multiple emails were sent out encouraging us to sign up for more than the minimum of two. Fat chance!
I know it'll be fine. It was fine in 2019 when I attempted to ignore the sign-up drive and Eric "nudged" me to sign up, and it was fine last year, even during COVID, when I just went ahead and signed up without having to get a nudge. Both those years, I worked an afternoon shift Tuesday and Wednesday before Thanksgiving—at Columbia City the first year (when CD wasn't open yet) and at the Central District store last year. And, knowing I had to sign up for something, I opened the sheet within moments so I could at least get the shifts I wanted.
The other moderately noteworthy thing to happen yesterday was the PCC Board Virtual Meet and Greet over Zoom, which started at 4:30 so I just stayed 50 minutes past my usual work stop time to be on that call. I finished a bit of work while the meeting began, which honestly did result in my not paying all that close attention to the first presentations, which didn't present information that was extremely important to me anyway.
Most interesting was when it was open up to questions in the last twenty minutes or so of the hour, only half of which was I able to stay for as I needed to leave early enough to pick up a book before the library closed at 6:00. I did learn some useful things, though, as someone asked if there were any updates on store openings, and Brad offered some concrete, useful information. Namely, that the new Kirkland store is held up only because of supply chain issues with the rest of the building's construction—without which, the store could open on schedule, but we're beholden to that. Brad said the current target date for that is December 8, it won't open any sooner than that, but he's "skeptical" that we'll meet that target.
The only other new store in the works is Downtown, the anchor tenant in the Rainier Square Tower, which Brad says now will open no later than the end of February, because we are "contractually obligated" to do so. That opening was originally slated for 2020, then 2021, and postponed the last time because of how many fewer people are working downtown. But, he says about half the residences in the building have now been leased, and it kind of sounds like we have no more postponement options. God knows when and if downtown foot traffic will return to pre-pandemic levels, so it's going to be interesting to see what kind of sales that store does, or how long it lasts (still, hopefully indefinitely). Either way I'm still going to love having the option of a PCC store all of two blocks off my regular commute to and from work. Although the CD store, much larger, will always be my primary shopping store, if I ever need to pick up just one or two things at PCC, that location is going to make it very, very easy.
As for the library book I picked up, I'm back to reading a novel again, this one called We All Looked Up, a 2015 novel by Tommy Wallach about high school teenagers dealing with the expectation of a meteor set to hit Earth in two months. I can't remember now how I heard about the book when I first put it on hold—maybe it was mentioned on a podcast?—but in addition to the premise already being right up my alley, I only discovered (or relearned?) once I started reading that it's also set in Seattle. Nice! This will give me some good reading on the flights to and from Las Vegas in a couple of weeks. That is, if I don't finish it by then, but if that happens, for me it will be an extraordinary achievement.
I got home and I watched this week's episode of Y: The Last Man in the bedroom. I didn't watch anything with Shobhit and left him to his new programs, although we did briefly discuss the WSU head coach throwing an annual salary of millions by refusing to comply with a vaccine mandate. I bet that guy feels like he's some kind of martyr. Really he's just an idiot.
Quite note to end this today: I happened to run across Brad right when I finished lunch today in the office kitchen. Remembering seeing me on the Board Meet and Greet Zoom call yesterday, he asked me how I liked it. I was just like, "It was good." I told him I always like getting updates on store openings.
The thing that stuck me though was how tiny he was. He's an older guy, very thin, and surprisingly short. I had only ever seen him in a Zoom window before. We still live in a time where we get this sort of cognitive dissonance just because we're seeing someone in actual space for the first time, not just as a digitized screen. What a time we live in!
[posted 12:34 pm]