Saturday, December 23, 2006

ho-f***ing-ho

My burgeoning Christmas spirit died during the afternoon shift at work.

It started off ok, I slept in, wrapped all of one present, played with the dogs (I had to pretty much cut all the fur off Jesse's back legs and her stomach yesterday because it was so matted so I was spending some quality time with her). After lunch I helped my brother put up the tree. It was a little bit under duress, I'm not a big fan of pulling out all the decorations when nobody will be here on Christmas day, but it was quite fun. We also ended up chatting for quite a long time about photography ("Mr SLR" doesn't know the difference between aperture and shutter-speed) and honeymoon plans and stuff.

Work started off in a pretty hilarious mood. Someone returned the box for their Playstation game but instead of the "Brothers in arms" game it was a movie inside. Called (and I'm being serious) "Wet Cotton Panties" with an option to skip straight to whichever sex-scene you want. Joey had to call them and ask them for the game. Even the big tough-guys I work with were blushing!

After about an hour we had a big storm. And the power went out. We surived for about an hour writing everything down and doing the manual swipey-thing with credit cards and so on and then the power came on. So we rather stupidly put all 4 candles away (we should really be a bit better prepared!) and after ten minutes the lights went out again. it took about 45 minutes (the flashing Chritmas hat was rather useful in avoiding collisions with customers) before the power cae on again. Byt then I was really annoyed and frantically trying to enter all the transactions into the computer system when Luke and Dave came to drop off photos from the trip. I was not in the best mood, but it did make me feel a bit better to see some friendly (albeit giggly) faces rather than all the frustrated customers!

It was a long shift. Eventually when the power decided to stay on (we didn't blow out the candles and I think that ensured a bit of luck - I'm not superstitious at all!) we watched Hoodwinked - mainly for the crowd of about 10 kids who came and sat on the carpet in front of the TV and demanded a movie - and had chips with sweet-chilli dip. By the end of the shift the Christmas hats were in a pile under the counter and the Chritmas CDs were hidden behind the non-playstation game and we went for drinks.

The owner of the Thai restaurant got all Christmas spiritish (her staff all have Christmas hats with flashing green trees) and gave us free drinks. It turns out my friend Lara's got a lot of stuff going on so we sat there for a long time before we both claimed exhaustion and went home. My mom and I had a very long conversation about tomorrow NOT being Christmas (it's just Sunday) and I went and wrapped the rest of my presents.

It's not that I don't like Christmas, I just hate the fact that a time that we're supposed to be celebrating something amazing is turned into such a stressful occasion where we have to spend huge amounts of money and rush around like maniacs. And christmas carols...

And Blogger has decided to lift my spirits by not letting me post pictures! so I decided to upgrade to the new BLogger and it seems to like me more. Here you go, a pretty 'desert' sunset!


4 comments:

sarah said...

NO HELEN!

its christmas!!! ;)

yayayayaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!

suck it up and conform! ;)

Helen said...

I'm trying! I really am! if you'd seen me and Matt1 doing the 'Jingle Bell Rock' dance on friday you'd believe me. But no power and a thunderstorm and panicking coworkers and difficult customers...

I HATE CHRISTMAS!!!

No, not really. It's just always a lot harder than I expect it to be.

Luke said...

Don't fret Hels! You now have approximately 360 days until the next one so you have oodles of time to de-stress and relax (like you can actually do that! ;p)

Merry Christmas!

Anonymous said...

that wet cotton panties story had me in STITCHES!!!!!! thanks for the laugh. :)

ps.. i saw someone who i thought looked like you at midnight mass. :)