Well, there went another week. I have changed my schedule for the duration of my six-week photography class, and now I am working Mondays at 8 am rather than Wednesdays at one pm. You can see how this might throw a person off.
I took today off because I will not be needed. I will not be needed because we have extra staff. We have extra staff because there has been an offer made on the cheese buyer's job, and the person to whom the job was offered is pussyfooting around about it now. Honestly, it is quite infuriating. I won't go into details, but suffice to say that this person applied for both the wine and the cheese buyer positions, and now has been offered a job and has decided that they want the other. Why apply for a job you don't want? I suppose to insure that you get one of them. But to demand to be given a job in which you have very little background after having been offered an equal position doing something you're actually qualified for is ridiculous. This is a person who did not know that Marlborough was a region, rather than a wine. Common knowledge? No, but if you expect to be handed a position that places you in charge of half a million dollars annual sales, and to grow those sales, you ought to at least have passing familiarity with the product.

Enter Oddfellows Local 151.

This person, the person who is the only other person who can possibly get what is very obviously supposed to be My Job, has worked in the LG for five years. As such, this person has seniority. Seniority is big with the OFL151. But according to the contract, the more senior person is only to be given a position unless the less senior person is more qualified. Ahem. So the person is taking it to the Union. I shall bore you no further, but suffice to say I am through with this person and have no desire to spend six hours standing next to them today doing my old job rather than the job I should rightly have been awarded by now. I have no idea when this will end, but I am taking three days off in hopes that when I return it will all be over. The one thing that would be nice about this person taking what is so obviously supposed to be My Job (are you getting a vibe here?) is that this person would no longer be working with the rest of us in the department, most of whom would rather stick forks in our eyes than be subjected to one more moment of this person's passive aggression or banal observations on the everyday activities of the LG.
But, since I am not talking about it, let's move on, shall we?
I have been reading A Damsel in Distress by Wodehouse, and last night I started Eastward to Tartary by Robert Kaplan. I have been going to sleep to The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes on audiobook, narrated by Derek Jacobi. After that I think I will resort to listening to the new Mark Twain autobiography, since the book is very large and very heavy and therefore going very slowly. I read The Arsonist's Guide to Writer's Homes in New England and was puzzled as to why it got such terrific press. I really disliked the narrator, and only kept reading it because I kept hoping it would get better. It didn't. I finished another Maisie Dobbs novel, and solicited ideas via faceb00k for my next audio adventure. I believe I have settled on Paul Theroux on the recommendation of my good friend A, but as I said, Mark Twain is likely next in line.
I have spend an inordinate amount of time reading about the current revolutions spreading through the Middle East. I can't help but feel that this is world changing stuff and that at some point, many years from now, I am going to look back at this time with total disbelief at how quickly it happened and how disconnected the people around me seemed to be while it was happening. Sometimes I hate the bubble here, though it is conveniently safe.
In other news, I was at the LG on Saturday and there were repeated announcements on the P.A. system asking that "the customer with the Ford somethingorother, license plate blah blah blah, please move your car. You are blocking the handicapped spaces and you will be towed." I remarked to Sven that the person was possibly deaf, because there were so many announcements and no response. It turns out that the police were called, and when they ran the plate they found out that the person who belonged to the vehicle was in fact deaf, and also 81 years old and nowhere to be found. Unfortunately, our crap local paper is now a pay site, so I haven't followed up on the story. I do hope she is okay.
My plan is to spend a couple hours cleaning house and then get outside somewhere with the dogs today. It will not be above fifteen degrees, so that rather limits our options, but there will be hiking. Since I have three days off in a row, the b.h. and I have decided to make a day trip this week, probably to New Hampshire, just to get out of town for a minute. I am still hoping for a phone call and a job offer in the meantime, but I am not holding my breath.