Work a Derk!

sidenote what a catchy title.

Okay moving on. Obviously this is about work. I work at a perfume store in the mall and I absolutely love it. The management is super understanding with my schedule of not being home for most of the school year and they are always willing to work around the whims of their employees.

The one thing that I'm starting to not be so crazy about however is the nature of the job. At the beginning of this summer, my close friend (and possibly the only reader of this blog :] -- hi joanna) told me that she oved her internship because it gave her regular hours with a regular schedule and she was able to plan her life around that on a weekly basis. Joanna has always been in my eyes an extremely organized person. She creates schedules and timetables and actually sticks to them. It's always been a quality that I have admired in her. When she told me that she was excited about her predictable work schedule, I wasn't shocked at the fact that she liked the consistency, but I wasn't convinced that the regularity of a work schedule was made for everyone either.

I thought that I would love getting a new schedule every 2 weeks because it would give me the chance to play around with everything else I had to do and basically keep me from falling into monotony. However now, I really wish that I knew exactly what my schedule would look like. Although I do enjoy getting to spend time at the mall both during the day when I can chat with the security guards and other employees and at night where I can really focus on my interactions with customers, I honestly would trade that just to pick up a shift where I work for a set time, a set number of days a week, for a set number of weeks out of the summer.

It's overwhelming, especially the last few days of a quarter, to have absolutely no idea what the next two weeks will look like. It makes it difficult for me to plan big events with friends in advance because anything I commit to is subject to drastic change, and it makes studying for summer school finals ridiculous because no matter how much planning I subject myself to, even one day switching from a 3 hour afternoon shift to a 6 hour morning shift makes me feel like I'm sinking.

I'm actually ready to go back to school and my predictable dining hall job with predictable classes where I can just focus on getting into a good routine with good habits. A monotonous schedule might seem boring on the surface, but it definitely helps you accomplish a lot more and leaves you feeling better at the end of it.

Love,

Ranjini