gotta get myself right outta here

saturdays are starting to become something i dread.

I usually have to work on saturdays and let me tell you, people that come in on saturdays are the worst. Okay, to be perfectly fair 50% of the people who walk in the door are perfectly reasonable decent human beings, and don't give me a speck of trouble. But if that were the only types i dealt with all day, i would not be writing this post, now would i?

With all of these less than savory incidents in mind that ruin Saturday after saturday for me, here are my suggestions for appropriate consumer behavior on weekends.
Of course no one who actually needs this information will be enlightened enough to come across it, but it's worth a try just the same:

1. Congratulations! You are today's lucky winner. You have managed to situate yourself in one of the few remaining 9-5 M-F gigs left in our economy. You are so lucky. go give yourself a cookie. Now realize that at least half of the workforce is not as lucky as you. Go lightly with the talk about your fabulous upcoming weekend itinerary. It may not have occurred to you that I'm stuck here working while you are recreating happily, doing whatever it is people do when they have two days off back to back. Share your tales of beachside frolicking with a more suitable audience.

2. On the opposite note, directed at the overachievers, learn to relax. If you treat your weekends like another workday full of deadlines, you probably already have ulcers and no doubt will probably die before you are old enough to start recieving AARP literature in the mail. Your sense of urgency may not be shared by the world around you. Showing up at the store 15 minutes before I lock the gate is the sort of behavior you should save for getting highly covetted concert tickets...not mailing out your bills when you should be relaxing at home. If you need some relaxation tips, feel free to ask. I have some pretty good ones.

3. For the caffeine addicts: don't bother coming in before you've had your daily dose. Your crabbiness is not appreciated. For your information, there are no less than 3 locations within walking distance that you can caffeinate at, before you darken my doorstep with your cranky withdrawal symptoms.

4. Preparation: It's okay not to have your shit together. After all it's Saturday, for god's sake, no one is expecting much. I don't mind if you need a moment to get things together. But if you want to return something to QVC or HSN or whatever, it would be a major help if you at least had the item in a box or something. If everyone came in like they just fell outta bed, it would take forever to get things squared away and I'd have a line going out to the highway.

5. Authority. It's fine if you want to ask me detailed questions about things I don't have any knowledge about. In the same sense it's fine to ask your building janitor about the finer points of your employee health plan. Just don't expect to get a useful answer at times like this. Sometimes it's important to realize that us low level employees are not the final authority on much of anything, and that it would be vastly more appropriate to take your concerns to a more suitable party for resolution.
As you may have already suspected, these more appropriate parties tend to work on weekdays like you and are not sitting behind the counter on a saturday morning. surprising, i know.

6. In the world of logistics, very little occurs over the weekend. No matter how stressed out and angry you are, the package isn't going to move an inch until Monday afternoon. This is especially true if you insist on missing the pickup time. Learn to accept this with a zen-like calm befitting higher life forms. If not, consider it a learning moment about why it's important not procrastinate in the first place. If you are in situation where you need to get something there tomorrow, clearly you have waited too long to do it in the first place.

7. Misers. I can appreciate that you want to save money. But there's cheap and then there's inadequate. If you are too cheap to spend the money necessary to properly send a gift to someone, you would really be better off sending money or a gift certificate. For example, if you are sending someone a $50 glass vase and you've got it shoved into a shoe box with 2 pieces of newspaper and some scotch tape, you obviously were planning on sending someone a crappy box full of newspaper and broken glass with which to make terrazzo or a mozaic or something. If you are going to go to the trouble to send something at all, at least send it in a fashion that it will arrive intact. Yes it will cost extra, get over it.

These are just a few helpful hints that should make saturday shopping more enjoyable, not just for you, but also for the legions of underpaid store clerks who have the misfortune of working on Saturdays. By doing me a favor, you are doing yourself a favor...