You Know The Drill...also titled, When The Fuck Will I Wake Up?

Hello all, hope your holidays are going well. The Royal Family (which would be The Aforementioned Prince, My Queen and myself, The King of Huh, Did I Just Say The Wrong Thing?) spent Thanksiving with my relatives, and although I'm content to spend any off-work time with just my own family, I have to say it was a nice day. The Prince was a hit with my family, and I commisserated with my brother about our respective job-scouting affairs.

In fact, by the time I went to work the day after, the dreaded SuperFriday/Black Friday/Ninth Circle of Retail Hell, I was relaxed and feeling good about working. The home office has loosened some restrictions we had in dealing with customers, leading to less confrontations, and my responsibilities have changed somewhat to where I am doing some of the tasks that I was not privy to in the past, like screening and hiring candidates and the more sedate (if boring) process of HR paperwork. The holiday season is hectic and it will be January before I'm fully moved into the new responsibilities, but there's a novelty to the place I haven't had in a while.

Except...

[Activate Complain-o-Blog]

There's a reason some of the things I was saddled with for a long time stayed with me, and that's because I could actually do them. Generally speaking, most retail managers you'll encounter are exceptional at people motivation and planning and are not so great with technical gruntwork. My colleagues, each with their own talents, nonetheless fit this profile. If you handed them a hammer, they'd use it to hold down their stack of previous-year sales reports.

So, it follows that technical tasks fall to me. We've finally filled our last open management spot, and I'm happy to say that guy will capably take over these tasks, but there was one major task still niggling at me that I had to accomplish, one involving---cue the horrified gasps from handy husbands around the world---the use of my own power tools.

We wanted something done outside of what the company would normally do. One of the great things about my place is that we're trying to do the little things better, and this task would do just that, an organizational job that would save a lot of space in the backroom. I initially took on the responsibility of getting the company to do it, but when they punted back to me, I was forced to run with the ball. I've had to put the job off a bit, but the boss was getting itchy, so I brought my stuff down and went to work today. All was going well until my drill slipped off the ladder I was on and cracked.

Okay, no big deal, you're thinking, get a new drill.

It just so happens that right when the drill fell, I'd been on a train of thought, a train that started at my shoulder, the source of some pain over the last few weeks and especially that moment as I was trying to hoist a sheet of lumber up to the ceiling. The train led to my wallet, lighter from fronting the cost of renting a truck to haul the lumber to my job. From there, the train led to my brain, where the wee drunken men running my thought process were wondering why I hadn't insisted we hire a contractor to do the job.

The train screeched to a halt when my drill snapped on the linoleum, pulling into Indignation Station, the stop I frequently arrive at to go to work. Now I was pissed because I knew what my boss' response would be when I told him I wanted to know whether he thought I should ask the company to replace my personal property that was damaged while I was saving them $150 an hour in labor costs. As it turned out, I was right on the money. If nothing else, my boss is protective of his employer.

After a moment to ruminate on the situation, however, he did say he'd see what provision the company could make. After months of advising me to follow his lead on how to motivate those in my command but still sometimes blithely shutting me down or outright ignoring me, he still shot first, but then remembered to ask himself the question later, the question being how well he was setting an example. So he says he'll go to bat for me. I'm guarded...after all, this is the guy who told me the job I'd been trying to land for a year wasn't right for me, I'd be better off in the job I'd tolerated on the way...but I believe him.

It's a shame, my drill was a gift from good friends on my 40th birthday. It wasn't fancy or packed with superfluous accessories. Instead, it was well-balanced and had a light trigger, but in the end, I'll have to get myself a new drill.

And I'll never bring it to work again.