Holiday!

Its been morning shifts almost every shift this week at work (ie. 6.45am starts). This didn't bode well for todays shift since last nights meet up with Josh, James, Christian and Joe resulted in me getting to sleep sometime around 3 in the morning. I didn't feel too great when I had to wake up at 6. Strangely enough though once at work it wasn't too bad. I was tired but at the same time I was kept so busy that I didn't notice it. I don't even feel that tired now which is good since i've still got to pack (i'm going to Trinec in the Czech Republic for a friends wedding after a quick visit to Brno).

Oh and theres been some potentially positive news at work on the air conditioning front. They may actually come and fix it sometime later this week. So only 2 months late. Its weird, its been quite cool weather wise yet our Starbucks has still been ridiculously hot (and this is with all the fans on and the front and back doors open). So when I come back I may actually be able to work in a normal temperature Starbucks *GASP*

This weeks annoyance at work is the lack of a money counting machine (which just means manual money counting, not the worst thing in the world but unnecessarily time consuming and slightly tedious once you've counted the 200th 1p and realised you're only half way through them). However i'm not expecting Starbucks to get round to sending a new money counting machine anytime soon (I mean we're still waiting for the air con to be fixed).

Blah i'm going to stop talking about work now since its taken over this blog post as it is (a post which was actually meant to be about me going on holiday). Did I mention i'm going on holiday. 1 and a half weeks off! Can't wait!

Watermelons and cereal

Today a customer left some seeds. Another left a watermelon. A third customer left a half eaten box of cereal......................I found it in the toilet.

Whats Next

It looks like the craziness from last week is set to continue into this week. Today when I came into work I found out my Starbucks store had been burgled (they'd destroyed the back door to get in, ransacked the office and drilled through the safe and therefore had stolen the money contained in it). So, although we carried on working as usual, we had to work around the people who had come to fix everything. We also now have no computer which hinders quite a few of the important daily procedures and the closing shift (which I was on today) is made more challenging by the fact that before you can do any cleaning you have to actually find the cleaning materials (which lie somewhere amongst the remnants of the office).

Then, when we were leaving, the alarm which was supposed to have been fixed today decided not to work. So we waited, trying to get it to work............for quite a while. I was holding the door open (which you have to do when trying to set the alarm). My supervisor, who was trying to set the alarm, eventually joined me at the door saying that she'd spoken to the manager who had told her just to give up and leave. She also told me she'd just heard some loud knocking from the back door hence her hurry in following our manager's orders.

When I was walking home I checked if there was anyone on the back street that leads to the gate door which then leads to the stores back door but there was no one there so I guess my supervisor must have been hearing things.

Where are you from?

Whilst in Malaysia I had people asking if I was from:

Australia
Canada
South Africa
New Zealand
Italy (this one slightly confused me since I was conversing in english with the person at the time).

However I didn't think i'd still be having people wrongly guessing where i'm from in my own country. Yesterday one of my customers thought I was Danish. Strangely enough today another customer also asked if I was Danish. When I told him that I wasn't he decided I must be Swedish.

Work................again.

Tomorrow is my first day off work in 10 days. Woohoo! Its been a crazy week and a half. One by one the staff in my Starbucks have been becoming ill or injured. I'm not going to go into details but we've been dropping like flies. Now we're down to 3 people out of 8! Personally I think one of our crazy customers has placed some sort of curse on our store, and if you saw some of our customers you wouldn't think that was such a far fetched idea.

Also today a new person started. It was weird teaching someone how to do things and having them come to me for help. In fact its weird to think i've been working in Starbucks for almost 6 months now!

Then about half way through my shift today someone got run over right outside my store. Almost straight away one of my Starbucks partners was on the phone calling 999 and there were people around the person with first aid kits and blankets. The persons leg was bleeding quite badly and was probably broken but they were conscious. The ambulance didn't take long to arrive and hopefully the person will be ok.

So yeah, all in all a crazy week (and thats only so far, I only have tomorrow off and then i'm back at work). Hopefully i'm not next on the curse's list!

Driving

My driving teacher is away this week but she arranged for me to have a lesson with one of her friends (and yes, her friend is a driving instructor, it wasn't just some random woman asked if she wouldn't mind risking her life for a couple of hours to drive around London with me). It was quite strange initially to be driving in a different car but I quickly got used to it. The lesson went well. Although I didn't learn any new manoeuvres most of the lesson was spent refining what I had learnt so far (or as the driving instructor put it, making driving more relaxing and therefore less of a chore) and I definately learnt a lot during the two hours I had.

Its 3 weeks left till my test. Who knows if i'll be ready in time. I've still got quite a way to go and times running low. But I like a good challenge and i'm enjoying myself along the way (that and the fact that if i'm not ready I can always cancel my test). So its all good.