I was told recently to journal more. Things have been stressful, I picked
up more hours at work (a long-deserved promotion!) and in the meantime
all of our other part-timers left, losing us about a third of our total
worker-hours. Meanwhile covid restrictions lifted and we saw a large
increase in customers and work to process. Other stressors too vaguely
defined in my mind to describe here.

Here's some things I saw today at work:

a woman needed help creating an account to apply for a job. she struggled
with remembing to type the '@'s and '.'s in her e-mail address.
Consistently across 10 or 20 tries, as she wondered why it wouldn't let her
do it. Life is frustrating as fuck and expecting people to have digital
literacies they were never offered in order to have a crummy job at walmart
is a shame.

But anyway, the password she made needed to be 8-11 characters, at least
one uppercase, one lowercase, one number. Her password was Qqqqqqq1

I don't think she wrote it down so I hope that it was as easy to remember
as she intended it to be.


At the end of my shift a shitty grandma came in with no mask. People come
in with no mask all the time because we're one of the few places that still
requires it. We always have masks to offer, and only towards the beginning
of each time a restriction has been lifted to we have to deal with shitty
beligerent people, then they're few and far between.

Our mask requirement is over a week from now anyway. All of us workers have
been vaccinated for months, it's been for the good of the public who are
still far from 50% vaxxed. I hardly care when I see people now, the state's
mandate has been gone for over a month, for the Right Wing the pandemic's
been "over" since last July or August, for many more it's been over for
several months.

I don't care when people say dumb shit like "how come [your bosses] don't
believe science...? (that vaccinated people don't need to wear masks and
that you are legally obligated to trust that I'm vaccinated without even
asking me)". most people are either thinking that in their head anyway,
you just have to live with it. I just pretend to commiserate and hand them
their mask.

But the folks who think they can wear me down into letting them walk around
maskless make me shake. This woman mutters something about being vaccinated
with a snarl and I feed back our line that it's a city policy. Yes, really.
She gives in an pulls out some flimsy clear sheet from her purse and I
wonder "what the heck is this thing, this is her mask?" She unfurls it
and I see that it's a removable face shield to be placed around a pair of
glasses... and I also see that it's only about two or three inches tall,
starting at the --Top-- of the glasses. That isn't even gonna cover your
nose dude, I'd seen the elderly republicans who tried to get away with
face-shields-and-no-mask months ago until they all discovered that no one
would accept that, and sometimes it barely came down over their mouths but
I never saw one so dang measly. To be fair I didn't see it on the glasses.
But I immediately blurted out "no, sorry, it has to be an actual mask"
(don't you know this? You clearly don't believe in the pandemic so I know
you've been out and about every day for a long time.)

I hope to remember from this past year when I am old, that the older you
are the more bullshit you can get away with by feigning a combination of
obliviousness and ineptitude. But that everyone knows what you are doing,
and hates you in spite of their awkward hesitancy to stop you. I hope to
grow into kindness and humility.

The weather's cooled down a few degrees now, it will be pleasant in about
thirty minutes and I'll go on a walk before I have my supper.