W: Items and feelings

before you read this post, note that it is the second part of a likely triple post, so keep scrolling until you see something you don't recognize.

Thursday night I was walking home from work thinking about January; this past January. I remember the first Sunday I worked after all the other temps had left the store, and I was suddenly aware of myself as a permanent employee. It being Sunday, it was early in the morning before the store was open, and I was in there with Gus and Matt (or maybe Alan) doing price changes.

The funny feeling came over me, and I found myself sitting in the aisle between A-Z DVD and TV DVD, looking at the barcode stickers in my hand, not really paying attention to which DVD I was looking for. And all this weight crashed down on me at once, best summed up by the phrase, "This is how it's going to be."

No more Cait. No more margin of error or forgiveness over being just a temp. No more deadly Christmas rush or boxing-week chaos. Hell, Chantelle had even gone for three months, as had Alex, another girl I liked seeing. Everyone who was working in the store was, for all practical purposes, my permanent co-worker. What I had known to be the status quo - albeit a chaotic one - was gone, and I was getting an immediate sense of the new one.

After a moment to feel the weight of this, I stood up, and said "Well, that's that," and got on with it. And over the next several months, things stayed the same and gradually changed. Jamie was the first to leave, although I hadn't worked with him since Christmas. His replacement, Sarah, only stayed around for the semester, and Chantelle returned and Andy left and we got Jess.

Around the time Andy left, just shortly after the staff evaluations, the changes started to happen rapidly. Alan transferred over to Dorval, Adam went on paternity leave, the two were replaced by Andrea and Jeff respectively. Then a while after that, after spending a lot of the summer working full-time at Bell while keeping one shift at HMV, Taylor left Bell and transferred to Dorval. And Andrea apparently made such an impression on our regional manager that she's being farmed around to help out with stuff. She'll probably be back someday... but I've heard potentially otherwise.

Matt, I've known was going for months, ever since he started talking to me about U of T, where he'd applied (UTM actually.) This is one I have not generally looked forward to. I wasn't close to Matt initially -- he and Alan were always buddy-buddy to the point where I felt left out when they were around, and I didn't generally know what to make of Matt, since he tends to run to the extreme of sarcastic. But over time, especially after Alan left, we bonded, joked around a lot, found some common ground (although there was a lot we disagreed on, or more accurately, he didn't get about me.) The first night Dana was in was basically a long joke session between me and him, including some header stickers being stuck to him for an hour and a half.

So Thursday night was the first time I'd worked since he left (the day before) and the new guy, Kern, just happened to be in. And I had one of those "Well, this is how it's gonna be" moments at the end of it. Not exciting, and maybe not too depressing, but just... deal with it. The new guy is nice, but I hate having the responsibility of imparting my knowledge to someone. When it was me and the other temps, I could often write it off as being "Oh, I got this, you don't need to know, you'll be gone soon." You'd think I'd be more patient, too, since when I first started at HMV in 2006 for Temping round 1, I was bloody awful. So I should get it, and I'm trying to be accommodating, but it doesn't help that more and more people who know what the shit they're doing are leaving us in short order.

I don't even know who is going to be working during the day at the store during the school year, since that guy has a high school-type schedule, Dana's in school, I'm in school, Jess is in school, Chantelle's gone soon and will also be in school. The benefit to having Matt and Alan around was that they were not in school and so made ideal full-timers. One other guy's been hired and I don't know what his deal is.

So even though this isn't really my problem, I worry about it. I do this sometimes. Saturday morning I woke up alarmingly early, from a dream in which I was lecturing some reporter on journalistic integrity -- which is ironic since that's not something I was known for.

This summer has, yes, seen its share of partings, not the least of which is the current absence in my life of Taylor, my young ward from Pennsylvania, a teenage girl I met on Chatroulette, who is far sharper than she ought to be for her age. We had accumulated a massive quantity of stupid in-jokes and shorthand phrases and then just like that her parents found her Facebook profile and "banned" her from the internet (I know this only through a brief online cameo she made from a handheld device.) I'm sure she'll be back, but I have definitely been missing our talks, which are completely pointless and nonsensical, which is the point.

Derp.

I'm tired tonight, and in fact it's already tomorrow (I delayed finishing this entry overnight) so I'll finish up the story of this past weekend and any other notable blanks of August tomorrow, I think.

Keep on rockin'
-Scotto