Long Gaps

I've been slack, I apologize. I'll explain why - Saturday evening, unexpectedly, I got a knock at the door. Standing on my stoop, surprisingly steadily for someone who'd just driven twelve hours with nary a stop, was my lovely ex-neighbor, carrying with him an external hard drive and a long hug, two things I was very in need of. Anyway, between the difficult task of keeping him entertained for three days and working another couple of shifts at Naidre's, I've stayed pretty busy. Also, although I could blog to my heart's content about workplace drama (which I can smell from miles away, according to Sinclair) and frustrations with bosses, none of these things are really what I'm guessing you're interested in reading - for the moment at least, my Big City New York Adventures are on hold. Which obviously I'm fine with. So be prepared for lots of boring, mundane things that you'd hear me talk about in Columbia.

Funny story - I'm not sure if I mentioned that I got turned down for the Journeyman grant. I don't think I did, because it would have ended up being a four-page rant on what Sarah very accurately (although more often tongue-in-cheek) calls the "effing honors college." Basically, the decision whether to give grant money depends on a board, and the board took a look at the two names - mine and Simon's - and decided not to even look at the grant since the two of us were already getting money for the Magellan. Despite the fact that the Magellan was an entirely separate project, and had nothing to do with what I applied to the Journeyman for. Simon - God love him - took the initiative and called them on it,telling them to look again, although we were told that the budget for that year was probably already fully spoken for. This morning I got an e-mail saying that we would be given the grant money after all, and apologizing for the mess involved in getting it. That's another 2900 dollars coming my way - it feels great to know that I will be able to get an apartment when I get home, that a steady job this summer is necessary for my sanity but not so necessary for my survival. That was a really unexpected development, to say the least - I hadn't expected to hear back from the Honors College at all on that front.

Monday was a strange day. Less than half an hour after getting to work, in walks the health inspector. I've been through inspections before, but things are different up here, and the laws are legitimately really odd. For example, in Columbia, if you carried a bucket of ice from one room to another without a lid on it, there's an automatic letter off. Apparently that's not a thing here, because I've carried buckets of ice from the basement up the stairs, outside, around the corner, and to the cooler in the rain with no lid on them. Kind of weird. Anyway, Abby let Janice know, and next thing we know, she's running around like a crazy person shoving hats on our heads, whispering things to us while the inspector's back is turned, and generally being what we refer to in the industry as Annoying Small Business Owner.

Long story short, milk in NYC has two dates printed on it - the regular expiration date, and the NYC expiration date, which is usually five or six days earlier. I know this, I've been told this. I brought up 4 skim milks that morning, checking the dates beforehand, but apparently the two that were brought up the night before were expired. We got fined 250 dollars for it, and for lack of any better explanation - or anyone asking me - I got blamed. It wasn't a big deal, and because I'm new I don't mind taking the fall for some things, but what sucked is that Drew, the manager, got in some trouble for it. And even though I'm 99% sure that none of it was my fault, and that he was in fact the one who'd brought up the expired milk, I still feel bad - Janice knows how to deliver a tongue-lashing. So much so that one of the regular customers came up after Janice left and asked if we could leave an anonymous comment about her yelling at the staff and making customers uncomfortable. Apparently that comment has been on Yelp! for a while, though, so it seems kind of unnecessary.

The comparison between Cool Beans and Naidre's is an odd one. Each have their pluses and minuses, and although the staff as a whole seems more talented at Naidre's, I think there are a lot of things about Cool Beans that make it the better work environment. I really enjoy working with Sarah and Sinclair, and the rest seem like fairly honest, hard-working folk, but if nothing else, I miss not being the new girl, not being ignorant and confused all the time. The differences between the forms of elitism taken in Columbia and New York means that I can make drinks quickly and efficiently in Columbia where I can't do the same up here. People complain about the slow service but then get angry if their latte isn't a work of art every time. But I'm learning, and although I'll never use both wands at once to make drinks up here, I assume eventually I'll get faster.

I mentioned something to Sinclair yesterday about his distaste for one of our other coworkers. He stopped suddenly, clammed up for a minute and said, "you know, I don't like how you pay so much attention to me. You should stop doing that. I think you must watch how people interact. That makes me nervous." Made me chuckle. Then I quoted back to him something he'd said to me one of the first days: "once you've been somewhere long enough, you realize there's not much else to do but watch how people interact, right?"