In a comment, I managed to make a comparison between constructive criticism and chicken noodle soup. Not sure where that one came from…..

Anyway, yesterday at the big blue retailer, I got certified to sell alcohol and tobacco, shadowed a cashier for a couple of hours, checked people out with bagging help from another cashier, and finally ended the day doing it all on my own. Quite stressful. Constant stream of impatient people. Had a customer while I was still being shadowed whose credit card got declined. Her reaction was identical to that of the angry customer in the training module. Freaking out, blaming us for it. Take it up with your cc company…. Had another one about an hour later, first their check got declined, then their credit card. She flips out on us, blaming the machines for the decline. “I just used them earlier today and they worked fine!” Hmm…maybe using them earlier today was when you maxed them out? Several naughty words later, she storms out, leaving about $200 worth of merch (mostly groceries) behind. Contrast those with the guy whose debit card was declined later in the evening. He politely asked if he could just get one bag of dog food instead of two and if we could hold the other until he got it worked out with his bank. We could and he came back about an hour later and finished his shopping without problems.

Had a history quiz this morning that I did almost no studying for, but luckily there were no questions from the lecture I missed Friday. Think I did pretty well, but my short answers weren’t my best short answers ever.

Daniel participated in a chess tournament at the University of Utah tonight. I hung out while he played and caught up on my political science reading. Afterwards, the various chessies decided to go to the roasting company to analyze the games they just played. Each player had 90 minutes on their clock, totaling three hours per game more or less. That’s a long time to spend staring at a chess board. And now they want to go spend several more hours analyzing everything they did, everything they did but shouldn’t have done, what they would’ve done if they would’ve done what they should have, everything they didn’t do, but wish they had or were glad they hadn’t, and various other combinations and variations thereof. Daniel asked if I wanted to come along. My response: Hell. no.

I’ll never be a good chess player because I don’t care enough about it to study it as deeply as most chessies do. I enjoy pwning the odd n00b online or at a coffee shop and maybe even reading a beginner chess book, but I lose interest if it gets more serious than that.