Mere Bitching

When is the longest hour of the day? Answer: The hour just before my shift ends: 4.30 to 5.29. It must be that I anticipate getting out of the place and heading home to unwind. Amazing that Wolf is also being told to get a job. He, however, doesn’t seem to be likely to end up in the mart, or if he does, he’s not likely to wind up in my department (the counters). Maybe he’s been reading my blog and decided that anything that could get me to bitch like that wasn’t good. [Edit: Wolf is now doing a charity job somewhere. I think it is an old folks’ home or something like that. /edit] Of course I am getting to know my co-workers, and their little idiosyncrasies; in fact they are remarkably like normal people, which means that they’re all quite different from myself. There’s only one other guy in the place my age--he got employed a day after I did--and he’s, of course, local, and very unlike yours truly. For example, he smokes. Not in the shop, of course, but outside it, during the lunch hour. And then there’s all their...temperament types, I call it; a kind of pigeonholing each species of person. I got this out of Christie; a character in one of her books divides humanity in general into several subspecies, then into genus, then type, and so on. Likewise for myself. In fact Quizilla.com does this all the time. The other employees are also getting to know me; given time I think they might even learn how to spell my name correctly--a feat that few of my teachers have ever managed to perform consistently. Ask anybody who’s known me for more than a few years, or check a few editions of my school yearbook; hardly a month goes by where my name doesn’t mutate into some unrecognisable version of its former self. Maybe that’s the reason why I accumulate nicknames like a magnet gets iron fillings: nobody can spell or pronounce my name well enough, so they make up new ones. So far I’ve been called Si Jon, Liang Tchai [handsome boy--!] and Ah Tchai. I answer to all of them; as the only Chinese sales assistant there I suppose I have an obligation to. At least I’m getting used to it; heavy loads don’t tire me so much as they used to, I find myself standing for hours without much effort, and speed walking ot and from work has become almost a habit--out of necessity, of course. I’m often almost late for work, due to the fact that I live so near it. I usually delay departure until the last possible minute--and then find myself muttering, ‘Mustn’t be late, mustn’t be late’ all the way to work while half-running.