Decorate This

I always do my reading in the morning, which consists of the NYT, news websites and blogs.  This morning Sean, one of the bloggers I read, was talking about a current project he was working on, a very labor intensive update of his family room.  He had a line about meeting with a decorator which I found intriguing.  You see I manage the paint department for a high volume, home improvement store.  Last year my sales were over $2.2 million, that's a lot of paint.  As such I get to deal with a lot of "decorators," (notice the quotation marks.)  I will leave the decorator stories for him.  This is mostly my gripe about the shitty schedules I get, you'd think with that type of money coming in they cut me a break.  How crappy are they?  Yesterday I started an 8 day stretch, that's right, I get to work 8 days in a row before I get another day off.  And it's not as though the next 8 days are going to be a cakewalk.  Yesterday I was in a 5:30 AM, today I'm in a 2 in the afternoon staying until 10:30 PM, and then I get to back to work 11 hours later.  That's right, I get 11 hours off before going back for another 9 hours.

What makes this just a bit saltier is the fact that I'm supposed to be participating in a Health Challenge in order to maintain a $50 monthly deduction from my Health Insurance.  One of the questions you're supposed to answer daily is "did you get 7 hours of sleep last night?"  And the answer is... no.  I have dogs and their routine is to get up around 5:30 in the morning (I get them up at 3:30 when I need to be there by 5:30).  Rare are the nights I get a good 7 hours of sleep, mostly it's between 5 and 6.  On the 7th and 8th days of this stretch I have to be at the store by 5:30 in the morning, so those will be early days for the girls.

Of course, with this Health Challenge, you're also supposed to be working out on a regular basis.  Now that's a laugh.  Talk to any personal trainer and they'll tell you one of the most important thing you can do is to set up a routine:  Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays are weight training, Tuesdays and Thursdays are Cardio.  It doesn't need to be those specific days, but you need a routine to follow on a regular basis.  This is how we create habits.  My schedule precludes any such routine or any kind of regime.  In case you are wondering, I am not alone.  All full-time associates deal with this nightmare.  This is the horror of retail scheduling.  You have no idea how often I would like to call corporate and tell them to just Decorate This.