study break

I don't feel like studying for my educational psychology class anymore so I'll take a break.

Work on Saturday was pretty bad. One girl from South Albert wanted more hours so she was working with me on Saturday at Northgate. She's been with Dairy Queen for seven or eight years, and had worked at Northgate about five years ago (about a year before I started there). I knew having someone so experienced coming to work with me was going to be a bit of a struggle. When someone has been doing something so long it's often difficult for them to not be in a controlling role. On Saturdays, I run the show. People do what I say, and things run smoothly.

The one thing that really bothered me was girl, Nikki, insisting that I do the day book. To preface this, there's a little book that we write in everyday that lists who's working during the day, who's working at night, what their responsibilities are, that kind of thing. Our manager is pretty lazy and hasn't put new pages in the book for a while. For Saturday, I just wrote out all of the info on a scrap piece of paper.

Well, Nikki was downright appalled that people had't been using the day book. She rummaged through the office and found found new pages. She then babied me into filling it out "Ok, take the old pages out. Put the new pages in. Now fill out what everyone's job is"... She's pointing at where to fill out certain info as she's describing this to me.

I'm generally not an angry person, but babying me gets me pretty angry. I realize that at Northgate I'm fortunate enough to have a lot more autonomy than workers at other stores. At South Albert, for example, a supervisor supervises. That's it, that's all. At Northgate as a supervisor I manage, change garbages, do dishes, cook, make ice cream, work on the till, write on cakes, and so whatver else is required of me. I know that's not what a supervisor should have to do, but if I'm going to be telling people to do things I feel they'll respond a lot more positively to my requests if they know I'm working aboout 200% harder than every other employee on staff.

Now that I have that out of my system...

I really need to stop spending money. Seriously. I bought a center speaker for my home theatre a few days ago. The day after I saw a nice deal on some tower speakers (buy one get one free). To me it seemed a sign God, so I bought them. The problem: Where the hell am I going to put these massive things? After a good cleaning out the room, I got to work playing Tetris with pieces of furniture. My dad was nice enough to help me out, so he did speaker mounting and positioning while I redid all of the speaker and electrical wiring. Fun stuff. I'll do a little diagram of how it's set up...

The crude red lines show how the speakers are facing. The sub is down-firing, meaning it actually fires the sound frequencies into the floor. This means that it doesn't really matter where in the room I put it, though having it closer to the couch makes you "feel" the deep sounds like explosions a bit more. Having it further away from the listener makes the bass sound nicer but you don't feel it as much.

The setup was relatively smooth, except the left side speaker failed to work on the first try. Just a bad connection.