It's official, I'm insane

I work three days a week. Some weeks it's Wed-Fri, as this week is; others it's Wednesday then Saturday and Sunday, like last week.

The scheduled week runs Wednesday through Tuesday, just so you're not confused.

When I work a Wednesday then Saturday and Sunday week, I often feel a bit like a fish out of water on Saturday mornings. In retail, things change on a very fast pace; endstands and side panels and even shelves are always sporting different product than they were several days before or even just a day or so before.

Right now, it's annual reset time, meaning whole sections of aisle are getting shuffled around. I worked on Wednesday and then not again until Saturday and I was more than a little baffled when a customer asked me to help her find the toilet paper and I took her to where I thought it was but it wasn't there. However, fear not, if you glanced across the center aisle, you noticed that indeed all is not lost, we absolutely still have toilet paper at our store, it just moved to the front of aisle eight instead of being at the back.

We started joking on Sunday night that maybe we just needed to have a door greeter like our competitor does and he, or she, could hand out updated maps every day. Sort of like a "YOU ARE HERE" map at the mall.

When I've made comments in the past about being a little lost, my EXA's reply is "Well, you could always work more hours." Typically, I work a 22 hour work week for half the pay period and then a 25 hour week for the other half. And when he commented last, I told him that I'd been thinking about it, but I needed to talk to Jon first and that he (my EXA) would be "the third to know".

The insane part? That comes in when I took the plunge to ask for more hours without really telling my husband that it was what I decided to do. I just told him that it was what I'd done on Sunday evening when I arrived home.

More hours mean more money, of course. And it'd be on a two week trial basis, if I don't think it's right for me, then EXA is more than happy to drop me back down to where I was to begin. And if I am happy with the extra hours, he said we could talk about what day I wanted that to be. Right now, my schedule revolves around when K, the senior beauty advisor, needs a day off, and that works fine for me. And I'm not wanting to upset the apple cart and take any of K's hours, but as it stands right now, we aren't fully staffed and there are hours to spare.

My concern is first, my family. The extra day at work will probably mean the extra school night where I don't get home until nearly bedtime for Caleb. They manage just fine, and Jon is home an hour earlier these days, but that's not the point. And I don't want the extra hours to mean that I work three out of four weekends either. It's hard enough to juggle church responsibilities on Sundays that I work the late afternoon and evening without adding an extra one.

And secondly, my physical capabilities. Bending and lifting are not my friends and neither is walking the concrete floors for hours on end, so I'm not really sure how my body will hold up.

But I'm willing to give it a try. Just call first if you're gonna come by so we can get rid of the cat hair, disinfect the bathroom and shove things into closets. Deal?