In which I tell you far more than you wanted to know about my job

I'm very nervous and edgy and anxious. I have a job interview tomorrow for a job that could prove a great chance. I'll tell you after the interview more details. I do realise I have promised photos from Hydra, but things have got on top of me and I left the job of arranging and fixing them up in the middle to be undertaken when I feel more relaxed. I even wanted to get a start at my own 100 things, but I just can't seem to find the energy and time. God, I'm the world's worst blogger! You see, my sister has returned from Argentina (where she went for two months with her boyfriend, supposedly to volunteer, but actually as an extended holiday). And now she's staying with me at our grandmother's and it's really cramped and difficult and stressful. She's trying hard with her boyfriend to find a flat, but with their budget, it's not easy in London. The whole business is stressing me too, because it's a constant reminder of what a total mess my life is at the moment. I am in a total limbo, without enough money and no way of making any sort of plans for the next month, let alone the future. Sometimes I think the only thing stopping me from going crazy is my crappy job. I was supposed to tell you about the crappy job I'm doing and the crazy interview I had to go through, but life got in the way and I never got round to it. Anyway, I'm working part time in retail. I wanted a simple easy no stress no responsibilities job to earn some money while searching for real work. But things never quite work out as you think they will. I applied for the position of sales assistant in Currys (a UK electrical appliance and electronic store). I didn't get the job. It seems like selling stuff is not easy in the UK, because I also got turned down by Boots, River Island, Next, John Lewis and a whole bunch of other shops. And all for part time temp sales jobs. They certainly are demanding! Anyway, I got a call out of the blue for an interview with Currys. So I dressed up as if I was going for an office job and went. It turned out they had decided to open a temporary clearance store over the Christmas holidays and needed a lot of people in a hurry. After the wackiest interview they ended up hiring almost everyone. They needed about 30 or so people at a short notice and minimum wage, which means they hired a lot of first timers and unexperienced youngsters. Which was great of them, because no one is hiring the unexperienced young any more. In the beginning we worked about a fortnight of 10 to 14 hour shifts with no days off, doing anything and everything to fix the shop up. At the same time we had managers and experienced people from other shops giving us some sort of minimal training all the while scoping out who would be best for which job. They needed mainly salespeople, but also warehouse people, merchandisers, people for the tills and some admins. I kind of stood out I guess because I was one of the oldest women they hired and I let it slip in the interview that am actually an architect (I peeked at the interviewer's notes and she had written it in capitals across the paper.) At one point one of the managers asked me what I would rather do, and I answered honestly that I like/am good at arranging and organising. I was hoping they would make me a merchandiser rather than a salesperson. They ended up making me a Product Inventory Counter. As in the person who counts the merchandise to find out what is missing (and what is extra) and then investigates it to find out why. It is obviously harder and more frustrating than it sounds, because the shop is rather big and we have loads of stock and everything is in such a mess you wouldn't believe. So yeah, so much for easy low stress job... I'm only working 20 hours a week, which means that to get what I have to done each week I am practically the only one in the whole shop who works non-stop with hardly any breaks. It's pretty exhausting. But on the other hand it looks better on my cv that a sales assistant position would. Obviously the job they gave me is far too hard and has far too high a level of responsibility for someone who has never done this sort of thing before and is only earning minimum wage (I am feeling decidedly fucked over by that aspect of the job.) Everyone who had ever visited from another store to help from time to time couldn't believe they had me all by myself. From the beginning I was told I would be an assistant PI counter and soon they would send round someone highly experienced to work with me. Only the weeks dragged on and this experienced person never showed up. I kept on asking and they kept on putting off the dates of his long expected arrival. I can only guess that they realised that this was only going to be a temporary store and I was doing a good enough job on my own and the experienced guy would cost too much. We ended up making record sales over the holidays so they put the closing date off till february. Then they put the date off till May. Now it's been put off again till July. In any case it might end up a permanent store. In which case they have to try and make it work like a proper shop. And a good first thing to do is do something about the ridiculous amount of stock loss we have - a very large amount of which is in-store theft. As the merchandise counter I know exactly how much stuff has been going missing from behind locked doors and locked cabinets, and I have pointed it out numerous times to the managers and the loss prevention officers that visit us. I also have repeatedly told co-workers who have tried to talk to me about it, that I don't care if they know who's stealing and how, I do not want to know. Since it's my job to find out what has gone missing, if I was to find out who had taken it, I could hardly keep quiet about it. So the less I know the better. To try and combat the whole messy business of making us work more smoothly, they have gotten rid of the old (rather useless) manager and sent a new guy, with good intentions and more organised, but also with a less flexible style. He has already fired a couple of people for no good reason (just because they asked for fixed hours and days rather than an ever changing schedule). They also finally send me another PI counter. Not the super experienced guy I was promised, but a guy my own age with a little bit of experience. He's a good guy and knows what he's doing, only he had a bit of heart attack when he saw what our shop is like (he used to work in a nice neat organised high street shop). Just yesterday when he was asked to count ipods (we had hundreds of them, half of which where mixed up and mislabeled as per usual), he had a total meltdown and I had to call the manager to talk to him and calm him down. Anyway, crappy as the job is, the good thing is that it gets me out the house and I get to talk to people (and I have stopped eating into my savings). I'm not too keen on the salespeople (mostly bitchy or dim) but I really do like the warehouse guys (I spend most of my down time hiding in the warehouse with them) and the some of the merchandisers and admins are cool too. All in all it's nice to work in a place with a lot of people. And it seems like I'm one of those people who gets on better with men than women. Who would have known? Most of my friends have always been women and gay men... It's also proving an interesting social experience. I had never done a minimum wage job before or hung out with working class people. Actually half my university friends always accused me of being too high-brow and having too intellectual interests. I'm talking to people I would never have met otherwise and that is quite interesting. I keep on thinking that the song that best describes this period of my life, could be nothing else but Pulp's britpop anthem from back when I was in my late teens: (tl;dr ?):