— पांच हजार दो सौ तैंतीस —
No outings last night, unless you count a trip to Home Depot. Shobhit was off work by 1:30 (and will be off by afternoons for the foreseeable future, it appears—he scaled back his hours) and so he came to pick me up from work at 4:30, then we drove straight down to Home Depot. After spending some time talking to multiple staff people, we bought a new faucet for our kitchen (which we will be getting a plumber to replace for us) and actually two shower cartridges (which we are trying to install ourselves), one of which will be returned once we figure out which of the two is the one that can be used to replace the old one in our long-leaking guest bathroom shower faucet.
We spent a fair amount of time trying to follow a do-it-yourself video on YouTube to do this. We had to ask Alexia if we could borrow an allen key, a big multipack of which she left at our front door while we were looking for other tools we thought we had but can't find, in the storage unit in the garage, where I can't receive texts. When we got to the door, the allen key pack was wrapped in wet paper towels and set on the floor outside our door, which was a little confusing; I then saw the texts she sent, explaining she had sprayed the whole thing with Lysol because she had just learned she'd been in close contact with someone who tested positive for covid for two days. I had a movie night planned with her tomorrow night, which may get either postponed or shifted to virtual regardless, even if she tests negative when she tests tomorrow morning. Laney is coming over Sunday and I probably don't want to take any chances.
Anyway, it took trying several sizes of allen keys before we finally found one we could figure out how to make work, in getting the shower faucet off the wall. We then got about halfway further through the process before we reached a piece that should screw off the outside of the cartridge right by the wall. It's been soaking with WD-40 overnight; we'll see if we can get it off today.
Before that, we watched two episodes of TV while eating dinner, which included delicious flatbreads Shobhit deep fried to eat with it: the season premiere of season 4 of
Westworld on HBO Max, and the season finale of season one of the new, rebooted
Queer as Folk on Peacock.
We also did laundry, which was time consuming in its own right, and my aching muscle in my back/upper shoulder seems to have mostly gone away, just in favor of muscle pain down my right arm, which has been just about as bad as the shoulder pain had been. Shobhit even broke open a supply case for when he once hurt his back, and pretty much insisted I use a therapeutic heat pad on my arm for a few minutes. I was very skeptical and resistant, but in the end it actually seemed to help a lot. For then, anyway.
My arm still hurts today. I am so ready for this shit to heal and be done. I was supposed to do my push-ups yesterday and for the first time ever I consciously skipped them. And I've been doing this every other day for ten years now. But I need to be careful of making things worse. My arm feels slightly better than it did yesterday, at least. Not much better, but any progress, I'll take.
— पांच हजार दो सौ तैंतीस —
— पांच हजार दो सौ तैंतीस —
Unusual experience at work today: I sat in on a "Customer Service Training run-through," really just at the request of Jami, our Customer and Member Services Manager. She asked me some weeks ago if I would join it, after she had heard me bring up the changing culture of customer service at PCC over the twenty years I've been here, during an all-staff Town Hall a month or two ago. She feels I'll be a valuable presence having been here 20 years ago, when our customer service was a specific point of company pride, and it's honestly been a long time since it's felt that way.
We had another all-staff Town Hall between 10 and 11 this morning, and the Customer Service run-through was 11:15 to 3:30, thus explaining why today's post is so much later than usual. (Jami did tell me there would be food available, always a persuasive way to get me to do certain things, especially if they are easy like . . . attending.)
Now that it's done, I have somewhat mixed feelings about it. Others seemed to think it was great, and maybe they're right. It's geared toward people who work in stores, so a lot of the specifics were not relevant to me—although I must admit, I learned some fairly useful tips for when I inevitably have to work a couple of volunteer shifts at a store Thanksgiving week.
That said, I think I'm getting sort of infected by anti-capitalist sentiment, largely on TikTok. This training often felt more about maximizing sales than making customers happy, and I see a delineating difference. Granted, I think the intent is to maximize sales
while making customers happy, but open discussion about literally manipulating people always just makes me a little uneasy.
I certainly didn't feel like my personal presence added any real value, unless that comes down to any feedback I might give, as this is an initial, sort of beta form of the new CST being rolled out this year. So, perhaps I should tell Jami and Steve (the guy who ran the training) some of this stuff.
— पांच हजार दो सौ तैंतीस —
[posted 4:06 pm]
