Monday 27th January 2003
I think I hurt myself. I went from midnight to six at night drinking coffee. And I forgot to eat anything. Going eighteen hours swallowing coffee at least once a minute is not a good idea.
Spam of the Day
More Later....
I had to stay awake. Which has nothing to do with coffee, actually; I tend to get sleepy drinking coffee. But I've got things do to today, starting in an hour; and then I've got things to do tomorrow from noon to six. And that's hard to pull off when you've been going to sleep around dawn for a few weeks.
Of course, it helps that, once I got home again where I could sleep, I discovered that the hot water pipes had ruptured and were leaking through my living room ceiling. So I got to stay up for an extra couple of hours waiting for the guy to stop watching the StoopidBowl long enough to come over and start to fix that. Not that he finished. Which means that now the hot water is turned off for the whole building until he can get back here today to finish fixing it. Which, in a way, is fine with me: perhaps the imbeciles parking in my spot will give up and go park someplace with hot water instead. Fine by me.
I can go a day without taking a bath. It's an English thing.
Anyway: I found out something interesting while I was staying awake. Or, more accurately, I confirmed something interesting.
A few years ago, Swyndle was working at 7Eleven. Which is always a good thing, since the Frapuccino is hidden behind the camera, where no one will see you taking it out of the cooler to drink it and throw it away without actually paying for it. But that led to an interesting issue.
According to 7Eleven policy: in the event that someone walks in and steals something, you, as an employee, are supposed to let them do it. Which is to say that: not only are you not allowed to stop them, call the cops, or even look closely enough at them to identify them later; you're supposed to thank the shoplifter for coming in, and encourage them to come back soon. Otherwise, you're not handling customer relations very well.
Neat to know, isn't it.
Anyway: I confirmed this one yesterday. A friend of mine just got fired from Sev for...this is just dumb. Lemee go over a couple of other policies first.
Policy One: you, as a 7Eleven employee, cannot stop shoplifters from shoplifting, and must encourage them to come back soon. We know that.
Policy Two: in order to better maintain customer loyalty [since people are known worldwide to go to 7Eleven on purpose, and all], you're expected to give out free stuff to regular customers. Which is to say that, in reality, I wasn't stealing Frapuccino after all; I was just being a regular customer who never actually bothered to buy anything.
Policy Three: once something like coffee or those horrid 7Eleven hotdogs are old enough--or once it's time to clean off the equipment making them hot--you have to write them off as destroyed and throw them away. In that order.
So. This guy got fired for giving out free food.
Because: instead of letting people shoplift the hotdogs, or giving them to regulars, he wrote them off as destroyed, prepared to throw them away, and got asked by various homeless guys whether they could have them.
I don't get that.
Granting that there was technically nothing wrong with them, except that there was no good place to put them while cleaning off the grill thingy, he broke the one policy by failing to adhere to the letter of either of the other two. So he got fired.
He wasn't the only one. Three other people got sacked for the same thing at the same time; everyone else there got to stay on, even though they did the same thing on a nightly basis; the people still there are in management; that's the only discernible difference.
So that's interesting. Isn't it.
Just something to bear in mind. If you're hungry enough to eat anything at 7Eleven, just go in and steal it; if you try to get it in any other way, you risk getting the clerk into trouble.
There was some other neat stuff. But the four people who got sacked over this are setting up a ClassAction over it; if and when Sev settle out of court to keep the newspapers from telling their stockholders about this bullshit, I'll cover it over at NewsoftheStoopid.com.
In other news, Deadache progresses. Or, at least, gets more complex. Character development. The danger inherent in doing something like this is that you end up creating an entire universe, just to follow a few characters through a single town. Because everyone knows someone. And everyone has some sort of backstory. Granted: I could write characters who have no notable reason to be alive; but I'm not Dean Koontz.
So I'm building up the lesser characters here, to give them reasons to appear in the show at all. I could probably compare that to starting the S97S back in 1990, except that I didn't really know what I was doing back then; these days, I'm a little better at this deity thing you have to master to write this shit in the first place.
Ugh. I'd probably go into more detail on that, but I've got to get Hunter off to the doctor in a few minutes. I could probably explain how pleased I am about having to drive her across town at eight in the morning, but that would take even longer.
This is one of the weirdest spams I've ever seen. Granting that I never signed up to subscribe to this, it's a bit odd to see If you don't feel like smiling today, click here to unsubscribe
--Gremlin