Pixie's Chronicle: La Vida Loca

Long time no see. Just when I think things are going to be settled for a while, I just had to tempt fate by feeling relaxed. I mean, I knew that I would be busy at work this week since my manager is away, meaning that I have to cover a lot of her shifts and step in as manager on a few days, but damn. It was literally like everything that could go wrong went wrong. I really couldn't believe it. It was like someone up there hated me. Hated me and my supervisor. There seems to be a curse in the company I work for that anyone standing in as manager has a load of bad luck and things always go wrong. Apparently it's a running gag in the company.

I wouldn't mind, but I'm not even being paid extra to deal with all this crap. I get paid for the extra hours, but not the extra responsibility. Doesn't help that I still haven't heard anything about that promotion I was supposed to be getting, so when my manager gets back, I'm gonna ask about it, because it's really unfair for me to be treated this way at this point. My colleague gets paid more than me, and has a higher rank in the business, yet I'm the one in charge but get paid less for it? Yeah. Figure that one out. So yeah, this blog entry is probably going to be pretty ranty, and unfortunately I don't have much writing news as a result. Feel free to laugh at my string of bad luck by the way. I do. It's the only way I haven't had a mental breakdown... yet.

Last week, everything was fine. I had managed to update Immortal Bonds, and a lot of people seemed to enjoy the first chapter which made me really happy. I felt like I had created a much better set-up, and this was something that someone pointed out in the reviews, so I'm glad that my readers think that as well. I knew that I probably wouldn't be able to get much work done the following week since, as I'd already explained, my manager was away on holiday, so I've been having to cover a lot of her shifts.

However, the major problem was she had booked her time off during promotion change week. That's basically the week where we change sales if that makes sense? The manager has a lot of responsibility in that period to ensure that there is a smooth transition in store, that appropriate posters are where they should be, and that everything in stock has the correct price and offer. It's really stressful work, and despite being manager qualified, the supervisor and I have no idea what we're doing when it comes to promotion changes. We're only freshly qualified, and have never had to deal with it too much before. It doesn't help that we got into huge trouble last time because we hadn't changed things over in time. So y'know, no pressure there at all.

Needless to say, the supervisor and I were bricking it, but at the same time, the both of us have a really strong teamwork mentality, so we made a pact that we would be there for each other, and that we would face the stressful ordeal together. The upper crust weren't too happy with my manager taking time off that week, and they kept making a point about being passive aggressive about the whole thing. I understand it was stupid for her to book time off during that time, but A) it was an accident, B) it was too late to change it by the time she noticed, and C) the upper crust would have had to approve it! So they approved it, but then proceeded to make our lives hell as if it was our fault. Sheesh.

But as we entered Sunday (the start of the new business week), we were feeling confident that as long as we had each other's back, we would be okay. I mean, what exactly could go wrong? The manager was only away for a week. Just how much could go wrong in that time?

Everything.

Everything went wrong.

I was scheduled to manage the place on Sunday which I was pretty okay with. There was a storm forecast, but it didn't sound like it was going to be a big deal. The media didn't even hype it up like they normally do, so there was no way it could be that big of a deal. Mind you, this is the same media that failed to tell the UK there was a hurricane on the way once. The next day they were like, oops yeah, we forgot to tell you all about the hurricane, sorry lol. Yet when they hype up these 'storms' that are supposed to head our way, they turn out to be nothing. It'll just be a bit of rain and that's it.

I'm sure at this point you can guess where this is going.

I wake up in the morning to chaos. The rain and wind had not stopped throughout the entire night, but luckily I live on top of a hill, so nothing seemed out of the ordinary so far. But for some reason, I had a gut feeling that something was wrong, so I decided to head into work early just in case. And it was a bloody good job that I did so.

The shop had flooded.

The damage from the storm (that was still raging) began to become obvious on my way to work. There was a few branches in the road and some trees had been knocked onto their side, but I still wasn't seeing much damage from the rain. When walking down the street to the store, I noticed that the store next to us had sustained some pretty bad damage. Their shop was flooded, and it looked like part of their ceiling had caved in. This made me even more nervous, and sure enough, our store had flooded too. It was mainly behind the tills for some reason. The water came up to my ankles, and was still raining through the ceiling and windows.

I couldn't see much at first, I just knew I was standing in a puddle of water, so I (stupidly) went to switch the lights on, and saw just how much damage had occured. The walls were soaked, the floor was a lake, as were the window displays, and a bunch of our stock had been ruined. I panicked for a few moments while my brain tried to get over the shock, but then the lights started scarily flickering, so I yelped and dashed to the fuse box to switch them off. I knew that the sensible thing would be to call the covering regional manager for that weekend, only I couldn't find his number. Normally, we print the numbers off in case of an emergency, but our manager got mad at us for wasting paper, so for that weekend, my supervisor decided not to print them off. Which just so happened to be the one weekend that we needed them.

To make matters worse, the number had been deleted off most of the online platforms for some reason. I was literally on the verge of crying at that point because I was that stressed and scared. The water kept coming in, and there was no way that I could clear up all the damage on my own. Not to mention it was unsafe to open the store, and I had no idea if it was even safe for me to stay there. The storm just kept getting worse. I'm just glad that all of my obsessions with meteorology over the years had my back that day. I knew it was a serious situation and that I needed help.

The next best thing I thought would be to call my supervisor. It was her day off, and I had no clue how things were where she lived, but I just didn't know what else to do. I needed that number, and I wondered if she possibly knew where it was. I called her up and she was in the middle of battling the flood waters that were currently rising in her house. Despite all that, she said she would brave the journey to me and help out since she wasn't comfortable with the idea of me being on my own in this situation. She managed to get her kids to safety and then rushed over to me. In the meantime, I was calling other stores (many of which had been flooded as well) and I finally managed to get hold of the regional manager's number. He seemed more concerned with whether the store would be open than with my safety, but I guess that's big business for you. It's kinda gonna be hard to help and serve customers with no lights and rising flood water.

I was told to hang in there and take pictures of the damage while he looked around for a number for me to call to have someone come over and assess everything. My supervisor arrived and then we were both essentially just sitting ducks. An engineer would be on his way, but he was in high demand thanks to the storm, so we had no idea when that would be. All we could do was stay put and try and battle the elements.

That's when the storm got even worse. I've never seen anything like it. I'm not exaggerating when I say that it was almost biblical. The rain was heavier than anything I had ever seen. It was like being directly under a large waterfall, and again, there's no exaggeration there. There was a sudden huge flash flood, with water raging down the street, and the wind was practically shaking the whole building. There was a lightning strike directly next to us that scared us to death, and we were both absolutely terrified. We couldn't see a thing, and all we knew was that the water was rising fast and that things were almost apocolypic outside. We tried to keep ourselves as distracted as possible so that we wouldn't both freak out. I joked that there was worse places to be trapped. I mean, we had plenty of food and medicine to last us for years. The benefits of working in the health business I guess.

Finally, the eye of the storm arrived, giving us a much needed period of calm where we could clear up some of the damage, and the engineer finally arrived. He did his thing while I had to resist the urge to reach through the phone and strangle my regional manager for her stupidity, and I had a little picnic in the office while fighting with the CBD stock. Yeah, the regional manager in all her wisdom was convinced that it was just a burst water pipe and was nothing to do with the terrifying storm outside. I'm convinced that she lives under a rock.

One of my other colleagues rang in to see if everything was alright, and that's when I was informed of exactly how much damage the storm had already caused. She was trapped in her village as the entirety of the valley had flooded. There had been flash flooding on the tops of hills, which made me worry about my family, and that there were poilice everywhere ordering people to stay in their homes. Public services had come to a standstill, the river had burst its banks, and water was even rising out of people's sinks and toilets. Thankfully, I never heard of any deaths in my area, but I know that a few people were swept out to sea not too far from me. We had no flood defences since the government decided that we shouldn't have any, and so many people lost their homes and businesses. Heading home afterwards was terrifying and sad. Yet the rain just kept on coming. The firebrigade was at full stretch trying to drain the water out of the valley, which worked enough to connect all of the villages back to each other again.

Wild weather was pretty much the trend for the rest of the week. Tuesday was another bad day. I was already stressed due to having a busy day of doctor appointments, dentist appointments and work, so being trapped outside in a blizzard really was the cherry on top of an amazing day. I didn't even have a hat or gloves, because again, I had no idea that things were supposed to get that wild. I was told that things would be settling down and that we might still get a bit of rain. I didn't realise I could almost potentially get hypothermia. The doctor appointment went okay, but ugh, I hate going to the dentist. It's not that I'm squeamish, I just find it really invasive. I have a really sensitive gag reflex as well which doesn't help. Especially when they're making me hold a giant metal rod in my mouth so they can take an x-ray. So of course, I kept nearly choking.

Afterwards, I had a shift at work to help with the promotional change. It was super stressful, more so that I had mentally prepared myself for. We ended up doing over an hour of unpaid overtime just to try and get it all finished, and even then, we were still behind. I ended up falling down the stairs while carrying a heavy crate, since the supervisor can't do any heavy lifting due to a hernia. The last thing we want is her intestines spilling out everywhere. Then I ended up trapping my finger in a clamp. Yeah. No clue how I managed to stop myself from screaming on that one. My supervisor felt super guilty since it was technically her fault, but I just played it off like it was nothing, not wanting to worry her while I screamed and cried on the inside. I didn't get home until late, at which point I proceeded to collapse in bed, only to have to do it all over again the next day.

On Wednesday, I wasn't too worried about the promotional change not being 100% finished, since I heard that our regional manager would be in a meeting, meaning that she wouldn't be dropping by to inspect us and get us into trouble like last time. The buses were running late thanks to the weather again, so when I made it into work, I was already behind schedule. However, my heart dropped when I noticed an email saying how the regional manager was sending someone round to do the inspections in her place.

I then proceeded to have a panic attack.

Once I'd somewhat calmed down, I rushed around trying to get everything done, almost in tears again because of how stressed and scared I was. The last thing I could face right then was being shouted at. To make things worse, pest control arrived early for a surprise inspection. Our regional manager had warned us that he would be dropping by in a few days, and that everyone in another region had failed (not that they had vermin, just that they weren't cleaning things properly), and that she expected everyone in this region to pass... or else. Cue another heart attack since the place looked like a bomb had hit it thanks to the promotional change, and that fact that we had no time to do any cleaning the night before due to said promotion change. Although he informed us we had no vermin, we're all willing to bet that we've failed. Lord only knows what the regional manager is gonna do with us.

They never ended up doing a promotional inspection in the end, which once again nearly made me cry as it meant that I had been rushing around all morning and panicking for no reason. It meant that I could have got some cleaning done! Ugh! Then our safe started playing up again and kept thinking that it either had more or less money than it actually had. Our regional manager had called us to demand to know what was going on, and we were like, "it's not our fault! The bloody thing keeps glitching!" So we were made to feel like criminals, even though we weren't. I had to stay behind late (unpaid again) because of the stupid thing. That and the printer broke, so I was having to wrestle with that as well.

I don't even remember much of Thursday. Apart from having to have a mental health assessment, I pretty much slept all day and night. I was so exhausted. At least I had Valentine's Day off, so naturally I spent the whole day with my boyfriend, trying to finally relax. It was a fun day, and I had almost forgotten what spending proper time with another human felt like. All I've known this week is work, work, work and more work.

Speaking of which, yesterday I had to work again. I was feeling a bit more hopeful since all of the promotional stuff was over and that it should hopefully just be a normal work day. Lol, you can bet that it wasn't. It started out normal enough, but then he arrived.

A customer came in who was suffering from scabies.

And I didn't realise until it was too late.

He'd asked for my help to find some tea tree oil, and I noticed that his skin was a bit red, raw and covered in scabs, but I thought nothing of it at first. It's just something that happens sometimes. Then he proudly announced to me that he had scabies, finding the whole thing hilarious as he touched things and kept trying to lean in close to me. I then rushed him out as quickly as I could before my colleague and I began panicking, not knowing what to do. For those of you who don't know, scabies is a highly infectious disease, so this guy shouldn't have been out and about in public, and he should have been getting proper treatment for it.

I then dashed upstairs and grabbed every single cleaning product I could lay my hands on, hands that I proceeded to wash about twenty times before my colleague and I poured hand sanitizer all over ourselves, not even caring how ridiculous we looked. We were downright ready to burn the whole shop to the ground with us in it. I scrubbed the place as best as I could while other customers gave me weird looks until they too were reaching for our hand sanitizer when they found out why I was acting like a germaphobe on steroids.

At that point, I wasn't sure what to do. Did I close the store? I grabbed the health and safety handbook, but there was no policy at all for incidents like this, though you'd think there would be given that we're a health business. I called other stores, and they had no idea what to do either. In the end, I ended up having to call the covering regional manager for the weekend, and he had no idea what to do either. He said to email what happened to me and he would be back in touch with some information. But he said I did the right thing immediately disinfecting the whole area.

But I was still paranoid. I was nearly ready to ring the medical helpline, especially when no one was getting back to me on what I should do. This was potentially really serious. Not only was there me and my colleague, but there were the customers to consider as well. Although the area had been disinfected, was it enough? Had I managed to clean everything that he had touched? Had I managed to kill all of the mites that cause the disease? Because all it takes is just for one to survive. My skin was burning from the amount of times I washed myself, only for the company to then ring me back and be like, "not much you can do, just disinfect the area lol good luck bye." I was fuming.

Then, my manager called to let me know that she was taking a few more extra days off because her grandmother was seriously ill, and she was travelling to the other side of the country to be with her. I felt so sorry for her, especially since it sounded like she was already in enough trouble for the time off she had already taken. I know how heartless this company could be, and I tried to keep as much of the disasters going on from her as possible, not wanting to worry her even more than she already was. She could sense through my voice that stuff wasn't quite right, but I just told her that we were handling everything and that she should focus on her grandmother. She wasn't convinced, and ended up begrudgingly agreeing, all the while I had to chase a kid around the store who thought it was a good idea to ride his scooter through the ailes.

That then brings me up to now. Right now I'm still stressed and exhausted, and I haven't even had time to think about writing. I haven't had time to properly talk to or catch up with any of my friends, and LycoRogue has some new work out that I'm desperate to read, but just haven't had the time to properly sit back and enjoy yet. I'm reaching the end of my tether.

I really feel like this week has brought a whole new meaning to living la vida loca.