Dawn of the first day

Today was my first day at Canadian Tire.

I wake up at 6am, my alarm is yelling at me to get up, my body knows it's an important day so I wake up relatively fast and jump in the shower because I didn't have time last night and I figured being covered in a warm water blanket will wake me up. I stumble out of the shower, grab some comfy clothes, lace up my steel toes and go downstairs. My mom hands me a sandwich and a bottle of water as we head out the door into the cloudy dawn of early morning, I don't remember being up this early in awhile. The closer we get to the store the more I feel nervous. I dread this type of work. For those who don't know I'm there for renovations, which means I'm moving products from shelf to shelf and also breaking down and building shelves to spruce up the store. I'd rather be working a cash where I don't have to deal with anyone except customers.

I manage to guess my way through the code on the door and clock in, according to the computer I'm a minute early, hooray. I toss my lunch in the fridge and head downstairs, my feet already hurt from my unbroken in boots. I find James the floor manager as he shows me around (i.e stand in place while waiting for more people), eventually another newbie Cole shows up and James tells us what to do. Take all the crap from this shelf and bring it to this shelf across the store. We grab a couple carts and head out. I figure if I'm stuck working with this guy for the morning I might as well talk to him. Understanding that I'm in Napanee I try to scrape my mind for a decent conversation starter, he looks athletic, let's talk about sports.

"You play any sports?"
"Yeah."
"Which ones?"
"Hockey"
"Position?"
"Defence or Forward"
"So...everything but goalie?"
"Sometimes goalie."

End conversation. Sigh, this will be a long day. Eventually I try to talk more about hockey, he mentions he's gonna play for St. Lawrence when he goes. I mention St. Lawrence's team is in Cornwall not Kingston, he says its a tourney or something, I tried to pry some info to give to Calvin so maybe he can be a goalie but he doesn't give anything useful. A few minutes later I have my shelf almost done, I've been moving clothesline stuff and CT happened to be really overstocked on clothes pins so more than half of my shelf is clothes pins.

"Think I have enough clothes pins?"
"You've got a lot..."
*inner monologue* "...it...it was a joke?"

More silence. Eventually a chick shows up to help us do stuff we don't need help with and Cole fucks off somewhere for the rest of the day, her and I continue shelving and get to talking. She's one of those tom-girls who does man stuff. I tease her about stereotypical girl problems like breaking a nail or something and such and such. She's apparently moving to B.C. with her boyfriend in 4 days and her last day is Thursday. She shows me around the store and basically teaches me how to do everything even though I'm pretty sure I didn't retain any information.

We break for lunch, I get my delicious sandwich and watch my coworkers talk amongst themselves. One person there is obviously the son of another worker. He's badgering her to make him his lunch and get him a drink and typical dickhole child behaviour yet he looks older than me.

"Did you make potato salad mom?"
"No, just this, this, and this."
"Yeah well you should of made potato salad."

End of lunch/nap, I go downstairs and it's now time to over stuff an end shelf full of sale products. This process involves slowly taking off all the stuff off of a shelf, moving the shelf down one peg and then putting all the stuff back on so that we can have extra space. That took about an hour and a bit, during which time I was hassled by a couple customers looking for shit in places it wasn't anymore (because we're constantly flip flopping where the stuff is). I lead an old guy to the clotheslines I moved earlier and I pointed another old lady to some garbage bags which were LITERALLY IN FRONT OF HER.

After getting all the stuff from about 10 shelves squeezed onto 6 I was conscripted into a team that were building a shelf in the middle of the store. This was probably the best part of the day, the floor manager James is the best guy ever, super patient and actually knows how to tell people what to do. Sadly he's not the brightest person on the planet. What we were doing was putting stands on the shelves (so of like feet to keep them up right). The feet slide into place via an L shaped groove that is placed on these pegs in between the shelf pieces. Instead of shimmying the L groove into the pegs through James decides to wail on the feet with a mallet until it somehow sticks on. Somehow we get the shelf up and it's time to clean up. After cleaning up I go outside and jump in the car for the ride home.

Overall it was a pretty decent day, but my body aches especially my feet from the boots. Hopefully I'll feel better in the morning...oh speaking of morning, my hours got shifted. Instead of 7am to 3pm, its now 5am to 2pm except on Friday which is 5am to 11am (clocks out to an extra hour a week which I don't mind). Fuck mornings.