Very VERY Interesting Blog; Not Boring AT ALL, No.

I woke up at 8am this morning because I told myself last night that I would shave for work today. I can usually sleep in until 8:15 or :25 on the days I don't shave. Awake at 8:25, a six minute shower, 7 minutes to pick my outfit and get dressed, 5 to 10 minutes checking blogs, and a five minute bike ride to work. If I get out the door before, say, 8:48, I'll have time to stop at 7-11 and get a 16 oz coffee with 5 or 6 sugars and approximately 4 creams. If I didn't give myself enough time to eat breakfast before I left the house (which is almost every work day), I'll grab a pastry to go.
Today I woke up "early" with the intention of shaving. Mike Cooley, my boss, likes clean shaven employees. I like to please my boss. But at about 8:06 this morning, I just couldn't bring myself to shave. You see, I have good shaves and bad shaves. A lot of factors come together to determine whether or not I have a good or bad shave, but one factor is most important, and that's how sensitive my skin is. The funny thing is, I can usually sense when my skin is not ready for close contact with a razor. Sometimes I can't tell, and that's when I'll likely find out the hard way with the shedding of blood. I haven't sliced myself open while shaving for years now, but I get micro cuts all of the time. When my skin is especially sensitive, I might get 4 or 5 of these micro cuts on a square inch of flesh. Needless to say, this sucks. I try to avoid shaving too frequently, as this is the surest way to fuck up my skin. I shave very very slowly. And very deliberately. There's strategy involved. I start at the neck and move up towards the jaw line. I ALWAYS move the razor against the grain; otherwise I'll have a 5 o'clock shadow at 9am. I am ever so careful; holding the skin taught, being sure to reapply gel when its washed away, and IDing each hair for growth direction before I make my stroke. A shave takes 20 minutes or thereabouts.
This morning I had a strong sense that if I attempted shaving, I would regret it. So I made the decision to skip the shave. I got dressed. I wore a dark grey, decent-fitting cycling t-shirt; a red baseball cap; some preppy jeans; brown and red Pumas; and my scholarly looking glasses. The outfit was far from "homeless man"; a safe school-boy look, which succeeded in balancing out my potentially scruffy looking appearance.
I got to work with five minutes to spare and performed my morning routine of unlocking the doors, putting cash in the till, and straightening the counter area. Also, as part of the routine, I nursed my coffee and picked at my pastry. It wasn't long though before a began juggling customers and shop duties.
One might think that "bicycle salesman" is an easy going sort of an occupation. On the whole, they are right. Relatively speaking, they are right as well. But my job tends to be more difficult than the normal bicycle sales job. I think that its because I try. I really really try. I look for things to do when I get done with something. I'm constantly observing the shop for problem areas, and I'm always thinking of better ways to do things. I am obsessed about making sure every customer who walks in the door is greeted and helped. I'm all about keeping a perfect inventory of bikes. Every spot filled and every size of every model in stock or readily available. I'm a bit of a freak when it comes to my job. I'm not extremely social with my coworkers. I've noticed that some people have a minimum amount of B.S. that they purge from their systems before they can even think about working. One fellow employee Randy has admitted to this. I'm a freak because I can go the entire work day (10 hours) and not feel the need to B.S. once. I'm a worker bee and I'm cool with that. I'm also cool with the fact that others are not like me. Sometimes I fear that others may think I'm cold or bitter simply because I go about working all of the time instead of telling them about my weekend or something. Usually I get over that fear pretty quickly.
So today I cleaned the counter area thoroughly, installed a roof rack on a van in the heat, helped our cleaning kid move bikes so that he could mop, talked for nearly two hours to one particular customer who was interested in buying two bikes totaling $8,500, helped my girlfriend pick out some sexy/cute cycling clothes (can't wait to see them on the trail), took care of some special order issues, sold 2 or 3 bikes, and so on. But the greatest thing that I did today was get one of our owners to hold a couple of my fellow employees to task.
Both owners really really really don't like asking their employees to do things. I appreciated this when I first started working at Georges because I saw it as a sign that they trusted me to do the right thing and do it well. I didn't want to diminish that trust, so I've worked pretty hard over the years. Now I find this lack of oversight and direction to be a major fault. George's is a huge bike shop in 2005. Gone are the good-old days when our shop could have been considered quaint. In 1999, when I started working, the owners leased a space next to a bank on Broadway. That shop had approximately 1/8th the space the current store has. With more space and a dramatic increase in sales, we've taken on atleast twice the staff we once had. Unfortunately, we've hired a few sales people who, by anyone's standards, should not be selling bikes. Either they are not cyclists themselves and they don't know the product, or they're just plain rude to customers. Furthermore, every employee has a different work ethic. With so much being sold at Georges, there is so much to do. Stocking, ordering, straightening, keeping track of special orders, etc, etc. My point is; there is an overwhelming need for employee oversight to ensure that George's standards, whatever they may be, are met. Something was done several months ago to make it easy to hold each employee directly responsible for keeping certain products in the store in stock and straightened. Weirdly enough, things still go unattended while the owners and manager twiddle their thumbs.
So today I noticed that our tires hanging in the back were in complete disarray depite the fact that both employees responsible for the tire area were working, and had been working several days prior. Now this may be news to you, but there are a lot of different types of bike tires out there, and a shop such as Georges must be sure to have most of them in stock and organized, ready to sell. Mike Cooley, with a brilliant idea a few months ago, had me reorganize many of our best selling tires so that they were more readily accessible. This new area, today, was completely dissorganized even though I had originally labeled each tire hook clearly. Noticing this as a perfect situation for an owner to exercise some oversight over his employees, I went to Mike and told him about the tire area. I didn't care so much about the tires being out of order. I really just wanted to see one or more of the bosses begin to, um, do their jobs. So, like I said, I told Mike about the tire. And Mike said to me, "Oh, we can have Brian do that. He's should be able to figure it out." Brian is a 15-year old kid that we took on to do janitorial work for the summer. He was mopping a floor at the time I talked to Mike. My response to Mike was like, "er, Ok", and then I walked away. A minute or two later, I went to Tom, the other owner of Georges, and told him the same thing. I made sure Mike wasn't able to hear my short conversation with Tom. I explained to Tom that I thought it was a good opportunity to ask the two employees responsible for the area to take care of the area. (I'm a big fan of a boss simply asking an employee to do something. For example, "Hey Randy, would you mind straightening up that tire area today? Yeah, that would be great. Thanks.") To Tom's credit, he went straight to the manager, Sandy, about the issue; and between the two of them, they were able to gather up enough courage to pull the two employees aside and get them to straighten the tires. To lend support to the notion that I am not an anal freak about these things, the tire area was so dissorganized that Randy spent atleast 3 straight hours remedying the situation.
The great thing about the tire event was that I was able to go to a boss and get that boss to be a boss. So, in an indirect way, I acted as the boss. Of course, I'd have no interest in doing so if such action was not needed. Not being a manager, I am unable to ask anything of my fellow employees. Poor me.
Other than work being tough, a couple of things bummed me out a little and a lot today. What bummed me out a lot was that I realized I won't have a Saturday off for the next three weeks. I checked our calender and saw that I agreed to work for two different coworkers during the next two Saturdays. The third Saturday is the Saturday I am required to work in order to achieve a full 160 hour month. Like I said, this really bummed me out. In fact, I think I was distraught and upset. Last night Fern and I got ourselves all excited about traveling, and I looked forward to a mini vacation in about a week. I mistakenly thought that I would have a 3 day second weekend of July. I'm still holding onto hope that I can get someone to cover for that day, because I really need a mini vacation in the great outdoors with Fern.
The second thing that bummed me out was Fern's news that she didn't sleep at all last night. She had insomnia. I've stayed up all night trying desperately to fall asleep. I also enjoy sleep immensly. So, I understand that it sucks royally to have insomnia. I mean, it really really sucks. In fact, it can be torturous. And I HATE to think of Jennifer being tortured in any fashion whatsoever. She blogged about it and I commented, saying that we will take care of the problem. And I think we will. Its not like insomnia is a new or rare problem. There have got to be effective ways of remedying it. Its just a matter of finding those ways and trying them. Trying them all if necessary. Anyway, it was good to see her at the shop today and I'm pretty stoked that she found an outfit that fit and looked cool.
After work I went for a mountain bike ride by myself. I rode hard, as is usually the case when I ride by myself. It felt really good to charge up climbs and scream down descents. I picked a route that had a couple steep climbs in it. I felt especially fast and smooth on the down hills. I felt better and better as the ride progressed, but I ran out of water, so I decided it would be best to turn back. Oh, I did the ride shirtless in order to work on a tan. The temperature was a perfect. It was fully warm but not hot. I totally forgot that I wasn't wearing a jersey, because the air temperature was a lot like the temperature of the air that usually floats around the body when one puts a good effort in on the bike.
I'm still sitting in my biking shorts. I suppose I should change and eat something. Bye.