I forgot to mention that the newspaper article came out for the local NaNo group finally. I haven't read it. I'm not sure what day it was- Tuesday or Wednesday, I guess, because Jess got copies and our (freaking huge) pic was in the paper. Enough for both my boss and another coworker to go, "Hey, I know that chick!", anyway. Kind of embarrassing- I wasn't expecting anyone to actually like, NOTICE. Heh.

I've been eating fortune cookies, and I've got two really strange fortunes.
One is just this: "You will have many friends," Hm. Someone didn't finish that.
And then there's this obscure one: "Too many by far, especially love adventures." I don't even know what to make of that or what it's getting at.

If I've already mentioned the beginnings of this on the journal, forgive me, but new folks may not know, so what the hell. To give some background on this, I volunteer at the craft center on campus one night a week (this term, Wednesdays), and have been doing so since last spring. Most of the time, I've had a blast doing it- there's nice people there, it's lots of craft yakking, what have you.

But this term, it's been frustrating. I was the only "old-timer" on my shift, and the other three were newbies. All of them are nice, don't get me wrong, but all they ever did was sit and study for hours on end. No talking, nothing but catatonic staring at books most of the time, unless our shift manager tried to get people to talk. This made five hours of shift that is normally pretty fun really, really dull. I'm not against people having study time by any means, but dead silence for an entire five hours makes the baby Jen cry. When I was in the CC for classes other nights, I'd find myself hanging around the front desk, talking to people I used to be on shift with because I was starving for interesting conversation.

Another incredibly annoying thing about the newbies was they all tended to flake out on showing up for shifts, 2-3 times apiece. Now if you miss shifts, they ask you to make the time up, by helping clean during breaks or before classes start, or to work a shift where someone else is skipping a shift, or something like that.

One of the three originally had only one night to make up, and she was all freaked out about it. "I have a job, I don't have time to make up the hours!", she'd complain to me. The same night she was wigging about this, about 3 weeks ago, was when she found out that we were going to be open during finals week. "But I can't come!," she said, "I have three finals that day!" Did she have finals that NIGHT, I asked? Oh, no, not at all- she just had no intention of showing up after three finals, which are soooooooo haaaaaaard.

Call me crazy, but if you're going to have such a hard time making up missing 5 hours, you're going to have a LOT harder time making up 10, correct? And it's not like you have to do a whole lot for most of the last night shift- there's about 8 people who come in, and all you'd really have to do is sit there catatonic until cleaning time. It'd be a lot easier to show up after finals than to make up the time. But did she listen to that? Oh no, plus she decided not to show up for the last two weeks of the quarter, period. Naturally, another girl had to bail out for finals, too. Well, I assume it was finals, she never said why she wasn't showing per se. The third girl, however, I am ticked off at because she said she WOULD show- that she only had one final and it was Saturday and it was no big deal to her to come. But she just flaked out.

Fifty bucks says none of them are returning next quarter, or if they wanted to, the head manager would laugh at them. I am at a loss as to why you'd sign up to do this in the first place if you plan on bailing out and flaking a bunch of times. I have to say that I agree with my shift manager that the CC would be better off screening their applicants than drawing numbers out of a hat. He and another volunteer were telling me that a good chunk of the weekend volunteers stop showing up after a week or two- well, I guess that's not a surprise given that it's the weekend, but still- and one girl on Thursday nights just disappeared last time. They probably get at least 30 people wanting on staff during each school term. And when 5 or 6 of the 8 who get their numbers drawn stop showing up for shifts out of the blue, that's just not right when we could have had more responsible people, except for luck of the draw.
I also do think they need some kind of punitive policy for this. If you volunteer, you get major discounts on what the CC offers and free classes- but since you pay for classes and such at the start of the quarter, you can stop showing up whenever you want, but you've gotten your benefits anyway. My manager suggested that we get volunteers's credit card numbers (this is something that's done anyway if you're checking out the Really Expensive Shit at the CC, just in case you destroy it or something) and if they don't make up their hours, charge their cards for the free classes/other halves of the classes they wouldn't have normally had to pay for. Wouldn't really help for anyone who only used the CC for lab fees, but I think the punitive factor would be a great motivator for broke flaky-ass student types.

Anyway, what this boils down to is that the only ones on shift that night were me and the student manager, and you can imagine how long it took for the two of us to clean the entire building, especially when we were still shooing people out the door at 10 p.m. (closing time) and only one of us could leave the front desk to do cleaning of 12 craft areas while there were still people with tools in the building. Thanks, jerks!

They seem to have changed policy there, as I came in last time to find a listing of those who had signed up for what shifts next quarter posted publicly. After the joys of this shift being dull and/or slacker, I decided to pick a shift with people I know who will actually show up and do their jobs and SPEAK. It's on a night that isn't the most convenient for me and prior to showing up that night, was my third choice (I wanted to take a class then, but it's also offered on Tuesdays and I can miss a month of beading classes if I have to, I suppose), but at least I won't have any newbie slackers to deal with.

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