A little stress lately.

I've been stressing a little bit lately. I got a lot of stuff going on and I feel like I never catch up on any of it. It's round 2 of the Evaluations at work and so we are having to go to special meetings and we have a constant string of Manager's coming in our stores to rate us. Besides, that which is stressful enough, I had to go to a meeting last week because my store was one of the stores on a list of biggest drop in sales of the last 4 weeks. It's frustrating because we had 2 bad weeks. We usually do about 7-8k a week in sales and two weeks in a row we did 6500 and 6000. The frustrating part to me is that they want answers on why and they tell us to fix the problems, but yet we don't get marketing material from them. They want us to doorhang yet they give us no doorhangers. They want us to have great service yet, they are constantly on us about labor being too high. I don't know it just seems like they are so day to day, it's almost unbearable.

Part of the reason I didn't do much marketing in July was 1. no material and 2, i had a lot of employees out on vacation or requesting time off, so I wasn't staffed up very well. I have a lot of young girls that like to take every other weekend off it seems. I feel like if I had done a bunch of marketing and got sales up, then was understaffed for it, that we would've been killed in service and probably lost customers for it. One thing they talked about at the high performance gm class was getting your operations and staff ready before campaigning to raise sales. What good is bringing in customers if they become unhappy? So I had a plan, but bailed on it. That got me noticed, in a negative way.

So, the meeting wasn't that bad, but it was basically, "request materials, make a plan, get out their and do it. We're behind you 100%." Yet, over a week later and all I've gotten is some menus and a few flyers. I requested some stuff.. never got it. I asked my boss yesterday if I could just go out and get the stuff myself... no response. That's how it seems to work. We get the blame but we can't get full control. Working for the man is weak-sauce. I put together a little book to showcase what good I have done, I have no idea if they saw it or not. I gave it to my boss, but I'm guessing it found it's way to the bottom of someone's desk by now. Whatever.

I don't sweat it a lot. I mean I obviously want this job and I like the money it brings me and there's no reason for me to think my job is in jeopardy, but it's not the end of the world if I get transferred or they take the store from me. I want to do more with the job and I want to raise sales and really start popping, but if they aren't going to actually support it, then why sweat over it? It's like beating your head against a wall some days. I make sure I do what I can control and I figure that's the best I can do. They don't wanna be honest with themselves and realize that they are just talking out of their asses half the time, then so be it. Implement, implement, implement... planning is the easy part. They need to take their own advice.

Fantasy football drafts are over. I have my Keeper league team and my head to head league team. My studs for the keeper league include Adrian Peterson and Calvin Johnson and for the H2H I have Michael Turner and Reggie Wayne. My wr corps in both is a little sketchy. I drafted a few guys with some upside hoping to get at least 1 that pans out. In the H2H I had to take the same approach with 2nd runningbacks. I drafted R. brown, but also got Felix Jones and pierre thomas. Two guys that when they played looked pretty good last year, but aren't considered the #1 for either of their teams. Again, hopefully 1 pans out for me. I'm not as involved this year as I was last year. I kind of got burnt last year, because I put so much effort and no one seemed to care. Also, I work a lot now so I can't do as much. I have to focus on aforementioned things listed above. I love fantasy football though and would love to put my ideas into the internet world someday.

Waiting on September 1st to, hopefully, find out how much money we are getting for my wife's disability. The day never seems to get here. I like to sit and think about what to do with x amount of money if we get it, but I'm afraid I'm going to end up disappointed so I snap out of that pretty quickly. They want paycheck stubs from the last 2 years. "oh your husband made 19k that year.. that's ALOT so you get 100$ a month" lol, stupid shit like that would happen to us. 2 grown ass adults living on less than 20,000$ a year. I don't know how we did it honestly. self pity time. It's been awhile since I thought about how hard life has been. I wont bore you with it all.

I am a little excited. Ryan from Poker Dynasty is moving to St. Louis in a few months. He is wanting to move to Soulard, which is where I grew up and it's literally 8 minutes from my house. I'm sure that first week will be a blast, with me showing him around town. We've never met and we don't talk as much as we used to but, there was a time we were pretty good friends, well as good as you can be thousands of miles away and through a computer. I keep thinking it'll be ironic if we totally dislike each other when we finally do meet and hang out. I have no hang out friends right now, so it would be nice to have someone like that.. i think. What are friends? I'm not anti social I just don't like having the responsibilities that being a friend has. I don't like demands on my time or feeling like i have to do something because I've told someone NO the 18 times before. I don't know. I just live in my own world and it's always kind of worked for me. Maybe I'm selfish. Whatever.