Start off good, get progressively worse = Easter
Adam Traum (from class and from work) invited me to his apartment to have Easter dinner. His mom was up from Florida, and she was preparing an Easter Ham and scalloped potatoes... so Adam had me a three other people over (Chip, Dave, and Liza respectively). And, even though it wasn't my house... with my parents... like every other Easter in my life (yeah... I was thinking about it and I've been home with my parents or relatives), it was still really good to be a part of something on Easter. And Adam's friends are pretty cool, too. Even his mom was cool... in a mom way.
But then I had to go to work... which started off well enough. The Big Boss Man showed up and wanted to know how to do "start of day" on the computers; so I showed him. It's always nice when the owner wants to know how to do something and you actually know how to do it... it makes you look smart, or at least competent. Then the Big Boss Lady showed up... she had her mother drop her off (apparently she had been up at her mother's place, just north of Chicago, for Easter). Well... there was an argument between Andrea and her dad about opening on Easter. It had been on-going, but finally came to a head at her mom's place this morning. Andrea said that if she was going to make her employees work on Easter, then she was going to be there with them... and her mom (apparently) cried because there was going to be no one to eat her Easter dinner... and her dad stormed out (I didn't get the full reason why). So when he showed up at the store before opening... it was probably out of guilt. But he left before Andrea got there. She took me out back and wondered if she should stay or go back with her mom... and I asked her what had changed since she made the "make my employees work, I'm going to be there too" thing. That, apparently, was all she needed to make her decision. Unfortunately... it was also the only thing I needed to make me feel guilty for her being there all day. Especially when she told me that her mom had cried. >sigh< So much guilt... I must still be a Catholic.
So I started to feel kind of crappy. We needed ice cream made, but we also needed to clean the blast freezer... and I had just made 8 boxes of ice cream yesterday, so I really wasn't into doing that again. Plus... Cherise comes in on Mondays to make ice cream... so I would be doing her job for her a day early. How crappy is that? I don't know... anyway, I felt all crappy and I was trying to find something to do because I wanted to stay there as long as I was making Andrea stay there. She and I spent some time talking about what we needed to get the cakes done. Then I tried to fix the registers (the void keys don't work... so if someone makes a mistake when they punch something in, they have to get really creative about how to fix it)... but I couldn't figure out how to make the software downstairs on the computer fix the void key on the register upstairs... and I started feeling pretty useless. And I started getting depressed... like really depressed... like the old John used to get depressed... and Andrea was all "what's wrong?" and I couldn't really point my finger to something that was 'wrong'... it just got really shitty to be in my head... so I pretty much blew it off as me being "fine". But I know that I had soaked in Andrea's bad mood from when she arrived and made it my own. As I get older, I'm realizing just how much I really empathize with people... which is good for them, but shitty for me (case in point: today). I felt guilty and crappy about that... and pretty useless in general, so I decided to leave. On my way out, I started talking to Abby about what to do should the credit card machine stop working... and Abby was like "are you okay?"... and I blew that off too.
And I'm going to grab something to eat... and go to sleep... because I'm hungry and tired in that order. Happy Easter everyone...