Long Day

I had a long work day yesterday. I was scheduled to work at the Post Office on rural route 7. I was looking forward to route 7 as it is one of my favorite routes. I always seem to do well on it. Shortly after I arrived at the Post Office, the Postmaster walked up to me and asked if I could help with the city routes after I was finished doing route 7. I wasn't keen on helping but I knew they were probably in a big bind. I offered to do 1 hour on city routes as I was pretty certain I could finish route 7 by 5 p.m. The Postmaster accepted my offer and left. I was now in a bind. I had to finish route 7 by 5 p.m., help deliver mail on the city side for 1 hour, do a mystery shop at a local Weis supermarket and work a show at Medieval Times. It was going to be a long day.

Route 7 went as expected. I had no problems and made few mistakes to my relief. When I returned to the Post Office, they had the mail ready for me to deliver on the city side. They had me walk a short loop called Snowden Loop in Laurel. All totalled, I delivered mail to maybe 20 homes. I found it kinda neat.

After finishing with that, I drove back to the Post Office to wrap everything up. Once I was clear at the Post Office, I had to rush to a nearby Weis supermarket where I had to do a mystery shop. I was hoping the store wouldn't be that busy. I wasn't so lucky. I guess a bunch of people were doing their last minute shopping. I picked up the store's weekly ads at the entrance so I could find out what was on special. One thing I have to do during my mystery shops at Weis is buy at least one item that is on sale. The point of that is to see if the cashier tells me how much I saved with my Weis discount card. They're supposed to but I've seen in a number of cases where they haven't.

The store was nice and the people working there were enthusiastic. There were only two things I could ding them on: a number of sale items were missing on the shelves and there was some water on the floor in one of the aisles that should've been mopped up. The store also ended up providing me something to eat prior to the show I had to work at Medieval Times. I bought a pound of bologna and munched on that when I arrived at Arundel Mills Mall.

After finishing the bologna I bought, I walked into the mall and decided to treat myself to a Dairy Queen blizzard. These are ice cream treats where they mix in various things like Heath toffee bar or Butterfinger bits with vanilla ice cream. They're really good and I enjoyed the one I bought. Unfortunately, I also got in slight trouble with the castle over it. I walked into the arena and continued to eat the thing. Employees aren't supposed to eat anything in the arena. I forgot this and got caught by the Operations Manager who in turn got on my supervisor's case about it. Mike, my supervisor at the castle, was having another tough day. Batteries for the radios the departments use to communicate were running out of charge making extremely hard for everyone to communicate. Also, the castle was doing three shows and after the third show, one group was going to have an awards ceremony. The last thing Mike needed was the Ops Manager getting on his case about something I did. Damn!

The show itself went fine. It has become seriously old hat to work the spotlight at the shows. I know the cues by heart now. The only thing I work on now is promptly opening and closing the shutter on the spotlight during the cue. It looks more professional if you open and close the shutter crisply vice having it linger. Ideally, you want all four people to open and close their spotlights at the same time but there is always going to be slight variances between the operators. In my case, at times I was smack on and other times I was little slow. It didn't help things that I was tired.

My work day wasn't over when I finished the show at Medieval Times. When you do a mystery shop for ICCDS, you have 12 hours to fill out the survey you have to do after the shop. The survey asks all kinds of questions on customer service, sale items being available and store cleanliness. Once you finish the survey, the website software will prepare an invoice so you can be paid for your shop. You can mail, fax or email the the invoice and receipt (from your shop) to ICCDS. ICCDS's website will tell you when they've received your paperwork (which is pretty nice). The survey took me approximately 10 minutes to finish. I printed the invoice and planned on sending it in the next day.

My work day was finally over and I blissfully crashed. Today, I get to work at the castle again. I look forward to it as I enjoy playing one of the castle guards. Tomorrow, I'll get to do rural route 10 which I hate. The only good thing is I'm scheduled to work 4 days this week and should get my 40 hours in so I'll get paid for all the hours I'll work at the Post Office. I'm supposed to have Tuesday completely off i.e. I won't be working at the Post Office or the castle. I hope to do my quarterly recycling trip to the Anne Arundel County recycling depot. I also hope to visit the Baltimore Aquarium. If I get to do the trip to the Aquarium, I plan to post a blog on here about it. Stay tuned. Cheers!