October 2004 Archives

This past week was my first full week of working at Target. It went pretty well. The only complaint I have was that my feet hurt like crazy after every day, especially the last two. Luckily the pain went away quickly everytime. I can put up with sore feet to make money anyway.

With the exception of one night, I worked in the seasonal and hardware sections every time. The problem right now with seasonal is that its full of Halloween costumes and accessories, and they get thrown all over the place. People will rip open the bags which wigs are in to try them on and then throw them somewhere else. So as a result, not only did I have to match wigs with bags, but then there'd be the problem that the bags were ruined and I'd have to go to the back room and tape them up.

Target also considers itself an "upscale discounter" (some people even call it "Targˆ©t"), and hence all the aisles have to look great. All the boxes have to always be at the front of the shelf and generally it's attempted to spread things out so that the shelves look fuller. So there's a lot of neatness work involved as well (technically called "zoning").

This past day we started a 30-percent-off sale too, on most of the Halloween stuff. This caused a surge of guests (as we call them) to stampede my section.

I really can't complain about my job though, it's great. After only a few days if working there I already feel very comfortable. I know where things are in the store, met a lot of great other team members (as we call them) and I really couldn't be happier. Not to mention I'm earning a good amount of money, which is really helpful.

Tonight I have to study for my international relations midterm tomorrow. We got the questions in advance, but the problem is we got fifteen questions and only two of them are going to be on the test. Wonderful... I guess it's a method to get us to learn more.

This looks like it's going to be a great week. I already know of two great Halloween parties coming up this week. One's going to be on Thursday night, which kind of sucks because I won't be able to get there until around eleven at the earliest, but come to think about it, that's really only an hour or so into the main portion of the party. I have no work on Saturday, which is great because there's going to be a great party that night as well.

Once again I haven't posted anything in over a week, but I guess that's better than not posting anything in over a month. Anyway, the big news is still that I got a job at Target, even though I mentioned it in my last entry. Now I've actually already worked some hours there. I went through a four-hour training session, and then worked six hours this past Sunday. I got lucky because the store was horribly dead the hours I was there. All I did was re-shelve a few items and make sure the aisles I was responsible for looked alright.

That would be just about all that's new.

Once again I sort of neglected my weblog. But once again that's because nothing special happened until this week, when I finally became employed. That's right, after probably fifty applications and/or letters in the last three years, someone actually hired me, namely Target. I have an orientation session next Wednesday and will hopefully begin working soon after that.

My classes are going pretty good. Luckily most of them are essay-only classes, which I like a lot better than classes where I have to worry about a test for daily. I do have one class like that though, PSC 124: International Relations. My professor has some kind of fraction that he puts into a random number generator to find out if there will be a quiz that day. Seeing that I have that class three times a week, either in lecture or recitation form, I have to worry about a quiz three out of the four class days a week, which is pretty stressful.

Two of my classes this semester are for my German major. One compares Zen Buddhism with German literature, and the other is a film class.

I guess that would be all for now.